To Hell and Back: Escape from Snowmageddon (Or, The World’s Longest Valor Review, part 1)featured

I meant to start this last week when we got home…and then I ended up in the emergency room the day after we got home (with a suspected blood clot nonetheless, which thankfully ended up being nothing but complications from a double ear infection and sinus infection, but was a nice wakeup call that when we’re on long drives, I have to keep myself constantly moving and shifting). I start new!job on Monday, so I can’t promise that I’ll update this more than once or twice a week after then, but I promise I’ll try. I’ll start a thread on Cruise Critic when I get to the cruise portion of this review because we did have a pretty extended pre-vacation.

(And on one last aside before I start…our annual May trip has been pushed to the fall because of said new!job, but I am taking a long weekend in NorCal with my best friend to visit one of my old friends before she moves this summer. So if any of you have been to San Francisco/Napa/Sonoma/etc and have recommendations on things I absolutely need to see, please send them my way!)

And with that…our Valor cruise!

(You’ll understand the title if you’ve ever been to Grand Cayman)

We’d been planning on taking a cruise this winter since fall, but we didn’t give it too much thought until December. Mom wanted to go on the Miracle, Stephanie wanted to go on the Dream, grandma just wanted to go to Florida and I wanted to go on a ship that would allow me to see some Mayan ruins. We knew we’d be staying with Carnival this time because it was our 10th Carnival cruise and we were dying to use our new Platinum status. We narrowed it down to the Dream, the Valor and the Liberty and ended up on the Valor because it was less expensive than the Dream (especially because I would have insisted on a few days in Disney World if we were anywhere near Orlando) and we’d already been on the Liberty. And we were getting set to book when I got called for an interview for a job I’d applied for months earlier and had given up on. And a day after my interview, I had a job offer. So we waited for me to iron everything out with new!job (which I am SO excited to start) before booking our cruise. And we ended up booking three weeks before we left, something I do *not* recommend because we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off to get everything in place.

First we booked the cruise and much to my upset, there were no ocean view rooms on higher decks available. Stephanie and I were booked to sail in an interior room for the first time in all our cruises. Mom and grandma were booked in an interior room down the hall, but a week later, Carnival called and said that they had accidentally been booked by our PVP in a handicap modified room instead of a handicap accessible room. Since grandma is in a wheelchair and really can’t take more than a step on her own, a modified room wouldn’t cut it. Carnival’s special needs department is quite wonderful though, and when they called to tell us that they reviewed our paperwork and saw the cabin wouldn’t work for grandma, they cleared out a room for Mom and grandma (someone got bumped). And this is really why you don’t book accessible cabins when you’re able bodied- if you don’t have paperwork on file with the special needs department and someone needs that room, you will be bumped and you will have no recourse. So grandma got the room she needed (it ended up being an upgrade for them- they were upgraded to an oceanview room from the interior they booked) and they kept Mom and grandma just down the hallway from us.

With the cruise booked, we set on booking our rental car. Rental car prices were through the roof. SUV’s have been re-categorized by nearly every rental car company and are too small for us with grandma’s wheelchair, so now we need a mini van. And I can usually find us a good code or last-minute rate with Alamo, but they weren’t offering last-minute rates on mini vans because of the holiday our trip fell across. Stephanie was tasked with finding us a good car rate and the best we did was through Thrifty and after taxes (which added on, like, $200- thanks, City of Chicago), it came out to just under $700. I think it’s time we start flying again.

Car down, I had to set my sights on hotels. Here’s my process for hotels: I’ll rarely book hotels through the actual hotel. I’ll only do this if I have my sights set on a certain hotel or if we’re going to Disney World (because you can’t stay on Disney property through Priceline). Every other time, I’ll use Priceline because it’ll get me the best hotel for the lowest cost. So first, I go on Bidding For Travel and Better Bidding (both message boards for people using Priceline and Hotwire) and see what people are bidding and what they’re getting. Then, I’ll go on Trip Advisor and research the hotels to make sure every possible hotel we could get is satisfactory. If even one of them has a really bad rating that would make us not want to stay there, I’ll book through the hotel we want directly. And if everything checks out, I’ll go to Priceline and start bidding. I always start low and then increase my bids by $5 or $10, but this takes some time since you can only bid once a day (unless you’re willing to change your star rating or area, which I’m usually not). We decided to spend an extra day in Florida, and even though we were sailing out of Miami, we really like staying in Plantation because it’s located pretty centrally to the things we like to do (and it’s only a half-hour from the Port of Miami). We’ve stayed at the Renaissance Plantation for every Fort Lauderdale trip we’ve taken for the past four years and we love it there. It’s one of two four star hotels in the Fort Lauderdale/Plantation area on Priceline (the other is a Hyatt, I believe) and we always get the Renaissance. This was no different- I got us in for $65/night (plus taxes and fees). Then I set my sights on Atlanta for a stop on the way there and on the way home. I quickly booked us in the Grand Hyatt in Buckhead for our return stay ($80 plus taxes and fees), but I was having trouble finding us a room in a four star for our trip down. I bid up to $120 a night and gave up because at that point, it wasn’t worth it for one night. I bid down to a 3.5 star and quickly won a room at the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center for $80 (plus taxes and fees).

In between all of this, Snowmageddon hit and we got pelted with two feet of snow (with drifts of five to six feet…we had a good four feet or so in front of our front steps). I’ve never seen so much snow in my life. Lake Shore Drive got shut down with hundreds of motorists still on it. We were stuck in our house for two or three days. It was…an experience.

With a possibility of more snow to come, we decided to split our drive up and stop in Nashville, too. I was really hoping to get us into the newly-reopened Gaylord Opryland (I *love* the Gaylord Resorts. They’re an experience unlike any other) but I just couldn’t find us a code and it wasn’t worth it to spend $250 for what would amount to just a sleep. So I hit up Priceline and we ended up in Courtyard by Marriott Opryland for $60 (plus taxes and fees).

Between the travel plans, the packing, Snowmageddon and getting things in place to start new!job when I got home, we had a busy three weeks leading up to the trip. I researched shore excursion. Stephanie got familiar with our platinum perks. And before we knew it, we were leaving.

Stephanie went to work the day we left (well, she worked until 10:00 am). Mom and I got up at 6:45 am to go get the car at Thrifty. Unlike Alamo, you don’t get to choose your car. They gave us a Dodge Grand Caravan, which was pretty clean, very big, but already had 30,000 miles on it (most rental cars we’ve driven have had less than 10,000). We went home, packed it up, prepped the house and when Stephanie got home from work, we left our snow-kissed neighborhood and hit the road to less snowy landscapes.

It would take us around nine hours to hit Nashville. I’m pretty sure I slept for a good portion of it. I guess I’m lucky like that, though. For some people, motion makes them sick. Me? I fall asleep. I get it from grandma- she slept for most of the ride, too. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was taking pictures out the window and playing with my iPhone. Between all of that, the ride went by pretty quickly. Our passage through Indiana (which is never fun because there’s never anything to look at) went by quickly and uneventfully and the drive through Kentucky is really quite lovely.

We made really good time and we hit Nashville around 7:00 pm and checked into the Courtyard by Marriott Opryland. Mom and I went in to check in and they gave us a room with a king bed (which we learned when we got to the room and saw one bed). That wouldn’t work for the four of us. Not to worry, though. They gave us a king room because they only saw two of us check in and quickly changed our keys for a room with two beds and a pull-out couch. I haven’t stayed in a Courtyard in years (I think the last time was in 2004 in Miami, and that was a Courtyard that was recently converted from a 4-star hotel on the beach), but this one was nice for one night. The room was large and clean (albeit a bit dim) and we had free wi-fi, which is always, always a major plus.

Mom and I were hungry, Stephanie and grandma just wanted to get to bed, so Mom and I set out to find a place to eat. We knew there was a TGIFridays near the Opryland Mills from when we were here last year, so we went looking for that, but the Opryland Mills area is still shut down from the big flood last year. They’ve pumped millions of dollars into repairing the mall (which is huge but so, so nice) and just ran out of money so they stopped until they can get new funding. It’s so sad to see an area that was so lively and nice last year just desolate and shut down. We drove back towards the hotel because there was a Cracker Barrel not far away and we grabbed some dinner there. We’ve had Cracker Barrel to go when we’ve driven through Kentucky a few times, but we only have one near us (and it’s a half-hour away), so we’ve never eaten in a Cracker Barrel before. It’s a fun experience. It’s so homey and…different. Comforting in a way. It’s fun. And the food is filling and tasty. Mom and I dined in and brought meals back to the hotel for Stephanie and grandma.

We got back to the hotel and watched some TV. I downloaded the Glee episode I missed and played around on my computer until midnight before I went to sleep. I figured vacation was a good way of resetting my sleep schedule because I’d turned myself into a total night owl the past few months, with my bedtime often after 3:00 am (and sometimes not until 5:00 am…being a freelance writer was good to me like that). So I went to bed “early” because I was so excited to get to Atlanta the next day.