Cancellation Anxiety – Part Deux

My cancellation anxiety is rising again.

Yes, we are all checked in to our cruise. We have scheduled our shore excursions and picked all the restaurants we want to experience. We are 33 days out and closer to cruising than we have been in almost two years. Test cruises have been successful as have been the initial sailings from Carnival and Royal. The health protocols that the CDC and the cruise lines implemented are working. There have been no reported outbreaks from these preliminary sailings. Where there have been Covid-19 cases, protocols kicked in and potential spread, contained.

Yes, the protocols keep changing and vary from line to line and ship to ship. Our upcoming cruise with Royal Caribbean will not meet the 95% vaccinated threshold, mainly because they are allowing children on board. While their expectation is that guests will be vaccinated, ours will be a mixed sailing with vaccinated and unvaccinated passengers. We will have to mask up indoors and social distance outdoors. Our granddaughters are under twelve so they will have to wear a mask, pretty much everywhere, except our suite. The protocols can be changed at any time, in order to keep passengers as safe as possible.

My anxiety stems from my news hound, background. I have always been one who likes to be in the know. I follow national news, local news and cruise news. By the way, if you want to stay up to date on everything in the cruise news, I suggest you subscribe to Tony Barnett’s channel at La Lido Loca https://www.youtube.com/c/LaLidoLoca. He will keep you up to date. It isn’t the cruise news that is at the heart of my new cancellation anxiety, it is the news news. Covid-19 numbers are rising across the country. Some counties, like ours, have a low vaccination rate and rapidly rising Covid rate. Florida’s numbers don’t look too good either.

As Covid numbers rise across the country, so does my level of cancellation anxiety. This Delta variant, not to be confused with the Delta Quadrant on Star Trek Voyager, is really doing a number on global efforts to reign in the pandemic. Now, we aren’t here to argue politics or ideologies, we just want to be able to cruise safely with our children and our grandchildren. Actually, we just want people to stop dying of a mostly preventable disease.

So, to quote Royal Caribbean’s CEO Richard Fain, “Wash your hands and get vaccinated.”

See you shipside.