To Hell and Back: Escape from Snowmageddon (Or, The World’s Longest Valor Review, part 13)featured

I don’t remember what time I woke up. We weren’t docked yet, but my phone data senses were tingling. Lo and behold…

It wasn’t long after that that Mom came to get us up and going. I hate debarkation days. They’re hectic, they’re frazzled and they’re downright depressing. Lets get up, run around to make sure we’re not leaving anything on this ship, haul armloads of crap off the ship and wait in long lines to do so. Then, lets play the FIND THE LUGGAGE game before waiting in yet another line to get interrogated by a customs officer. Yeah, debark blows and if it weren’t for the return of my 3G data line, I would have been ridiculously pissy. That said, I was way too distracted catching up on my emails and celebrity gossip that I couldn’t be bothered to care. We all grabbed a quick breakfast up on Lido (a quick light breakfast…no one wants heavy food when they have an 11-hour drive ahead of them) and then Stephanie and I went to the kids club to collect our booze that we had purchased in Grand Cayman.

The last breakfast

The Booze Collection Space (aka the kids club)

YAY OUR BOOZE IS SAFE!

After we had our breakfast and our booze, we collected all our stuffs from the rooms and headed down to the platinum lounge for debarkation. Debarking was a fairly smooth process and before I knew it, we were off the ship, reunited with our luggage and through customs, and trying to repack the car with an almost embarrassingly huge mass of luggage.

I’d be lying if I said this was all of it

Parking at the Port of Miami was gratis (free) because we had a handicap placard for grandma, and it was barely past 9:00 am when we hit the open road, driving towards Miami and waving goodbye to the Valor.

We knew from experience it’d take at least 11 hours to get from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta, and we were an hour further south of Fort Lauderdale to begin with, so we tried to minimize our stops and get to A-town as fast as we could. I spent most of it on my cell phone (which is why it came of no surprise to anyone in this family that AT&T has placed me in its top 5% of data users and constantly slows down my speeds) and sleeping.

Mom and Stephanie made really awesome time (I hate driving. I’d only do it if they were about to fall asleep before, but I’m under doctors orders not to drive for extended periods of time now after the whole blood clot scare) and we were in Atlanta while it was still light out. We checked into the Grand Hyatt Buckhead (scored off Priceline for ~$90), which was really quite lovely and regal, with a lobby with a huge vaulted ceiling and gorgeous crystal chandeliers and large, well-appointed rooms.

We got some takeout from Maggianos and watched the Oscars and settled in for an early night. I started feeling sniffly and my throat started getting scratchy, but I just chalked it up to change in weather and started taking some Sudafed (Stephanie always brings some when we travel because one of us invariably ends up stuffed up).

The next morning, we wanted to get an early start for the 12+ hour drive back home to Chicago. We stopped at Walgreens so I could get some stronger Sudafed and to get some drinks, grabbed a quick breakfast and were on our way in the fog and rain.

We made the obligatory stop at the Bowling Green Cracker Barrel to get some quick takeout for lunch, but minimized our stops from there because the weather was crap and we didn’t know if we’d hit snow coming home.

Once again, Mom made rockin’ timing and we were sailing through Kentucky and into Indiana. I felt like crap and alternated between sleeping and taking random pictures of the quiet places we’d pass.

And we were in Chicago by late afternoon and home well before sunset.

The rest is history. I took too much Sudafed. The next day, my ear clogged up and when I went to get some ear drops at a drop in clinic, they discovered my heart beat was up in the 160s and sent me straight to the ER, where they were convinced two days in a car gave me a pulmonary embolism (hence the directions to not do long distance driving…I’m at an elevated risk for blood clots on a good day where I’m not in the car for 12 hours at a time). A blood test told them there was a clot somewhere in my body, a chest x-ray and a CT scan discovered it was a false positive and a blood culture told them I did not pick up some weird disease in the ocean in Honduras. I had a sinus infection and a double ear infection, not a blood clot, and I’ve developed a sensitivity to maximum strength Sudafed and was released from the hospital six hours later. And that ends our trip on the Valor. Fin.