Christmas Fun
December 26, 2008
Well, another Christmas has come and gone, though it joyfully continues to linger in the household. Mr Papa’s World celebrated another great Christmas.
It started a bit more than a week ago when Suzanne’s parents came to town for a visit. They timed the visit so they could be home for Christmas, but more importantly so they could see a couple of performances by Suzanne and the kids. Unfortunately, except for the weekend, I was working most of the time having just taken three weeks off for our recent Transatlantic cruise.
They got to see several Christmas programs of the kids at school, the kids’ Holiday Dance Recital at their dance studio, and Suzanne’s holiday show at a retirement community in Tucson. In addition, on Saturday, I cooked up an early Christmas meal (Turkey and the trimmings) for the group as we celebrated an early Christmas with gift exchanges. It was a wonderful visit.
On Christmas eve we spent some family time watching a couple of movies and getting ready for the big day. I cooked our traditional Prime Rib Dinner for Christmas eve. We usually attend Christmas mass on Christmas Eve. In the past, Christmas Eve mass has been at 6:00 pm which has made scheduling a bit difficult. With a new priest this year, mass moved to 7:00 pm which is actually better for us. We were able to enjoy our Christmas Eve dinner (the Prime Rib turned out perfect once again) around 5:00, go to mass, and return home about 8:30 for our traditional exchange of family gifts, minus the ones we did early with Suzanne’s parents.
My big gift I received this year was a smoker. I am anxious to try it out and will be doing so today as I smoke some ribs, chicken and a pork roast. I will update everyone in another post on how that comes out. I am excited to try a new area of cooking that I haven’t dabbled much except an occasional effort on the grill with some wood chips. Yesterday, I started the curing/marinading process of the meat.
It was after midnight before we got to bed on Christmas Eve as we enjoyed our glasses of champagne. Luckily for us, the kids have not traditionally been early risers on Christmas morning. I remember bugging my parents to get up quite early some years. It was a bit after 7:30 when we finally were awakened in the morning by Savannah.
Its also been a family tradition that the kids sleep in our room with us on Christmas Eve. It was a lot easier when they were smaller! The tradition started because of how our house is laid out with the kids rooms on the opposite side of the house from our room. We didn’t want them coming to our room in the morning and passing by the Christmas tree where they could see if Santa came or not. That was always Mr Papa’s job in the morning to go take a look and get the answer and fire up the Christmas lights. So, the family sleeping together tradition continues except now we tend to bring in a couple of extra mattresses.
Christmas morning, as our family tradition goes, is spent opening the gifts for the kids from Santa. It remains a great family experience. The latter part of the morning is spent doing any assembly required work on the gifts. We also watched It’s a Wonderful Life together.
I had planned to do my smoking on Christmas day as another big feast, but my smoker had been scheduled to arrive on the 23rd, but didn’t arrive until Christmas Eve. So, I instead did my smoker assembly and seasoning on Christmas day and we had left overs to eat. The big feast will be tonight as mentioned previously.
Today will be spent playing with the new games and enjoying some of the new Blu Ray movies the kids received.
Barcelona and Transatlantic Cruise 2008 – Day 20 – Flight Home
December 16, 2008
Today, the vacation really came to an end as we flew home from San Juan, Puerto Rico ending a wonderful cruise and overall vacation. We had a lot of great family fun on this trip and had many chances to increase our bond as a family. Cruising has been really wonderful for us. Of course, the trip home was not without some events.
We arose from our sleep at the Old San Juan Sheraton about 6 AM in order to head to the airport around 7. Our flight was at 9:45 but we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time. The day before Suzanne had run out to a local Marshalls and bought an additional suitcase to make sure we had plenty of room and that all luggage made the weight requirement. We didn’t want any extra airlines fees coming home.
After getting up, we noticed that the Carnival Victory was already docked across from the hotel. They hadn’t yet begun letting passengers off so getting a taxi for the ride to the airport was a snap – all of about 10 seconds. A brief 15 minute ride and we were at the airport.
While checking in on those wonderful (sarcasm intended) electronic check in machines, the machine tried to tell us that we owed $100 for luggage fees. The machine and then two agents tried to tell us that only 1 bag per passenger was free and the it was $25 per bag after the first. Well, that’s certainly true today, but since we booked our tickets long ago, we were supposed to be exempt from the policy change. In fact, we did not pay any fees in Tucson for luggage when we departed.
It appeared that the system was thinking our date of booking was incorrect. After booking our tickets, Continental canceled our original flight out of San Juan and moved us to another flight. It appears that the system thought our date of booking was the date that Continental made those changes to our tickets. Anyways, Suzanne couldn’t convince the agents they were wrong and it didn’t help that they really didn’t speak English well either. Hello! We were in the United States!!! Your representatives should at least have working ability in the National language!
I wasn’t in a mood to spend much time arguing about $100 and potentially darken a wonderful vacation especially since it was obvious we would have more luck with the travel agent and Continental directly after getting home, so I paid the $100 and we moved through.
Chalk it up to another bad experience with Continental Airlines though. I really miss it when I don’t get to fly American Airlines. I have so much better luck with them and the extra leg room on their flights compared to other airlines makes a big difference too.
The flight to Houston was uneventful and we settled in for a long lay over. Continental had again canceled our original flight after booking and moved us to a later flight. We now had a five hour layover instead of the planned 90 minutes when we booked. Thanks again Continental.
The layover did give us a chance to grab some lunch and for the kids to finish some of the school work they had not done on the cruise ship. Mainly, they had to update their pre-cruise presentations and reports with actual accounts of what they had done.
The flight out of Houston back to Tucson was also uneventful and we landed on Sunday about 8 PM. Originally, we had planned to be back around 2:30 which would give us some time on Sunday to rest before I had to go back to work on Monday and the kids back to school. Now, it was after 9 pm before we arrived home. With the flight times, layover and time changes, it made for an exhausting day.
Still, we count the overall vacation as a wonderful time. I hope to do a wrapup post in a day or so.
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