I have always purchased travel insurance. There have been many vacations where we had to save every last penny we had just to pay for it…. I still found the extra money for insurance. More than once I tried to talk myself out of it. We are young. We are healthy. We have approved vacations. Deep down, I always felt some sense of guilt if I didn’t do it. Like, how mad am I going to be if the unimaginable happens and I’m not covered? Not to mention, if I had to scrounge up the money just to pay for the insurance… I dang sure didn’t have the resources to cover an emergency.
This year all my obsessive insurance tendencies paid off.
The year carried on as well and uneventful as any other right up until we hit September. Somehow, Trenton accidentally kicked me in the mouth. What became of that little accident was a clogged salivary gland in my lip. Ever heard of that? Yeah, me neither. $900 dollars later… and that was after my insurance paid their part, it was surgically removed. Take care of your salivary glands peeps…they are expensive!
At the same time, our renter of a year and a half decided she would start moving drug dealers into our rent house and that their “other” activities, including buying a brand new car, were more important than paying rent. Thus began the eviction process. Let me just tell you… I don’t belong in court. Walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth and hanging out in courthouses really isn’t my thing. I only like walking through metal detectors if it means I am getting on a cruise ship!
Not to mention… I am a dreamer. I always have vivid dreams and paying the mortgage on a house for a whole pot load of free loaders and drug dealers to live in rent free really set me off! I kept dreaming I was inviting everyone I knew over to that house and cooking dinner in their kitchen because if I was paying for it…. By George, I was going to use it! Anyone that knows me knows... I don't cook! ... It was exhausting!
During this 60 day process they also began destroying our house and there was essentially nothing we could do. Even after they were officially evicted… they still didn’t leave and I was forced to go back to court again to pay more money to have the Constables forcefully remove them. Thankfully that worked… only they left half their crap in the house that I had to physically move to the front yard and then pay for someone to haul off before I got a code enforcement ticket. $8000 in damages later the house was fixed.
I began to panic because this was seriously starting to cut into my cruise fund money. Thank goodness during this time Mark received one of the coveted “free cruise certificates” in the mail. I have no idea why he gets all the good stuff… I plan and book all the cruises… I write the blog… he gets all the perks.
So I checked out this free cruise flyer and none of the dates matched what we could do with our schedules. I was booking a cruise for a friend of mine and thought … just for the heck of it I would plug in Mark’s voucher and see if it worked on any other cruises. The only cruise we could take that fit our schedules was leaving Christmas Eve… and it worked! We could get an inside cabin for $100 with $100 OBC. I added Trenton to the room and upgraded us to a balcony. As so it began :)
We put our newly remodeled rent house up for sale and received a contract for full asking price on day 2. This seemed perfect… except it was a VA loan and hence the VA Bull$h!t began :) Such an important organization and it is run in such a horrible manner… so is the VA medical... Don't get me started on that! I just don’t get it. Aaanyway…. We are still going round and round and closing dates are still delayed and rescheduled. I suppose we’ll pick up where we left off when we get back from our cruise.
During this time a girl from our Facebook Cruise Group wrote that the “upgrade fairy” had just called her offering them a suite, but they turned it down. So I wrote her and said… you don’t happen to have a call back number for them do you? Well, she did! So I called the guy back and
said “Hey.. you just offered my friend an upgrade to a Suite and she declined… can I have it?”
He said… "Well, you aren’t on the list."
So I replied “OK, what do I need to do for you to put me on the list?” ha ha
When it was all said and done, I upgraded our balcony room to our very first Ocean Suite. All 3 of us are now cruising in a suite for less than what we normally pay for 1 person!! Score!!
THEN:
16 days before our cruise the heater went out at our house we actually live in. Just perfect! Thanks to the 2 companies we dealt with, I am inclined to believe that all Heating/AC people are crooks. We were convinced we needed a whole new inside unit… which caused thousands of dollars more to flow out of my cruise account and come to find out now… all they really had to do was replace a $25 breaker. I have tried to take a Christian approach to this and think… perhaps they needed the money more than I did… but clearly they don’t know that some of these cruises are actually a NEED for mental stability and not so much of a WANT. I have a feeling they are about to find out.
So before the heater was actually replaced… the first crook that came out to look at our heater would NOT leave our house. We were going on over 2 hours and the dude was still there… camped out in my living room. He didn’t fix shit. It was just T and I at home because Mark was working in Arkansas. He quoted me $9-11,000 to replace my heater and I finally told him to just get the hell out.
By this time it was late and Trenton was starving. I had worked all day and I was tired. So we jumped in the car and drove down the road to Subway to get something to eat. On our way back home… less than a mile from our house a kid with no driver’s license and no insurance “tried to avoid something in the road”… jerked his wheel too hard to the left which careened his car over 3 lanes of traffic where he took the bumper off of a mini van … which then propelled him across the turn lane and head on directly in front of my car traveling 50 mph. No chance to swerve… no chance to hit the break. Just airbags and glass … and Subway sodas flying everywhere. At some point I opened my eyes and took in a breath and thought “Dear Lord, I am alive.” … which led to frantic screaming for Trenton who was perfectly fine. I learned that day… I drive with Angels. How cool is that? Trenton didn’t have a scratch on him. He wasn’t even injured from the air bag. At the hospital as I lay on that little table sliding back and forth through the cat scan machine I thought… This is why I purchase travel insurance!
However… the end of this year sucked so bad… I am going on that damn cruise! I also found out why I have always insisted we have full coverage insurance on our cars… including Un-Insured Motorist and Personal Injury Protection. Medical bills are paid… Car has been replaced… and you still have a blogger :)
So seriously folks…. Don’t take insurance lightly.
