Laughter is the Best Medicine

As we come into the new year there is no doubt in my mind that there will be new problems or interesting situations and hurdles that will come up through out the new year.

It is Jan 19, 2010 and my mother has only made one trip to the doctor and that was for a recheck. So far the year has been good!

With the changes in the weather pattern and the the allergy count rising everyday could be a new challenge. My mother did mention that she would like to go on another cruise. I took her on one in Dec. 2003 and it was quite memorable.

My mother is not able to walk to far before having to sit down so I borrowed a wheelchair for this trip. Now I have pushed a wheelchair many times before but never on some of the surfaces that I was about to push her on.

We drove from Oklahoma City to New Orleans and had reserved our room with Carnival Cruise Lines. I never realized how many floors a cruise ship had, this one had 9 floors. Thank goodness our room was above the water line. I would have been having visions of the Titanic sinking through out the trip and Leanardo DeCaprio was not booked on this trip to save us.

The halls on a cruise ship are not that wide, so the first obsticle was getting down this long hall without running over everybody in my path with this wheelchair. Now if you are claustrophobic you might want to look at a more expensive room, like a suite with a balcony, you know the ones you see on the Love Boat Show on TV. You step up into your bathroom and have just enough room in the shower to turn around like a turkey on a rotisserie.

After we managed to get somewhat adjusted into our room, we decided to explore the ship, I soon found out that the halls were not the only obsticles. Considering that there were thousands of people on this cruise and the elevators were in constant demand, the elevators were big enough to get about 6 people in at a time and if you had a wheelchair maybe 3 people.

Bless my mothers heart, I was an awful driver of that wheelchair on that boat, I think I must have hit or bumped into just about every wall on every floor we went. This trip was to Puerto Vallarta, Cazumel one other place that I do not remember at the moment.

There was this beautiful resort that we stopped at in Cazumel that had beautiful white sand, I realized very fast that wheelchairs don’t roll too well on sand. The harder I pushed the deeper the wheelchair went into the sand, my mother gave me this look of , I thought this was suppose to be a relaxing trip. To make a long story short, we ended up having 4 strangers help me get the wheelchair up on a hard surface again with my mother in it.

We got back to the ship and she was sea sick, I let her lay down for awhile and went out on the deck to people watch. I met alot of new friends and throughly enjoyed the visit. Our next stop was at this Puerto Vallarta and it was time to go shopping! I pushed the wheelchair down the ramp and was met by 3 Mexican police carring machine guns. We were told that this was just for security reasons, we just smiled and went on by. The first store we came to, wsa passing out jiggers of free tequila to everybody who came inside. My mother had never drank and she took a hit of straight tequila, my eyes were stuck on the worm in the bottom of that tequila bottle. None for me Thank You!

We shopped and I quickly learned how to barter and get the best deals I could get. But you really have to watch the checkers when they wrap your packages to make sure that they put the items that you purchased, into the bags and not back on the shelf, a stewardess gave us this information.

We were back on the ocean heading back home when the captain of the ship came over the loud speaker and informed us the President of the United States had just raised our security to Yellow Alert for terrorist attacks. The next thing he said was that the President of the United States is aware that their are 4 cruise liners on the ocean at this time. Now if that doesn’t put a shock wave through you I don’t know what does.

I spent the rest of the cruise watching people and making sure that where ever we were I had a pretty easy exit planned. Its funny how you start watching out for anything unusual on the ship like, I saw some panels unscrewed with wires hanging out, your imagination can really get carried away.

We took the Christmas Cruise so there were special shows for the season in the evenings. One night this entertainer was on stage and he needed a volunteer from the audiance, and he saw my mother and tried to get her to come onstage, now my mother is from a small town and usually very quite and reserved, but her voice echoed through out that auditorium when she yelled No Thank You. All I could do was stare at her and wonder how that big voice came out of that little body.

It seemed after that night everywhere we went on the ship he was there and winking at my mother. I thought it was halarious, but she was ready to roll him over with the wheelchair. He even waved goodbye to us as we left the ship the last time, before we made our journey back home to good old Oklahoma.

We ended up having a wonderful time, and alot of laughs and Great Memories.

Remember to laugh, humor is the best medecine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 10:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.