Ok, so I'm cheating a little here. I can't be bothered to set up a new blog to detail my recent trip to Florida, so I'm hijacking this one. To be honest there's very little to say on the gymnastics front at the moment, I haven't managed to get to the gym for about six weeks now, so no news on that front really.
So, let me tell you about my holiday, and why I'm blogging it. About 18 months ago we started talking to my dad about what he might like to do for his 70th birthday (June this year). My Mum had died of early-onset Alzheimers about 18 months before that, which obviously had been a terrible time for us all, but Dad obviously particularly. I wanted give Dad the 70th birthday he deserved! He'd spent so long looking after Mum's needs and not doing what he wanted to do, I wanted to make sure he got what he wanted to do for his special birthday.
Dad mentioned that one of the things on his "bucket list" was to go back to Florida, but this time to go to the Everglades, do an airboat tour and see the alligators. (We'd been as a family in 1988 (a long time ago!) but we'd just done the Disney thing (Universal Studios wasn't even built then!).
It's not something he would want to do on his own, and my husband and I have two children of pretty much perfect Disney/Universal age (two boys, age 9 and 10), so we started to talk about a family holiday to Florida.
It's at this point that I need to tell you about my husband (I'm pretty sure he won't mind as he's very open about this). In 2001 Dan had a nervous breakdown. I don't think we'll ever really know what caused it, but the trigger was most definitely September 11th. Obviously an awful day for many many people, and one with far more serious and sad consequences for many more people than us. It's a day I'm sure none of us will forget, and my heart goes out to the people who died and their friends and families as much now as it did then. But on a personal level, it was the start of a difficult time for Dan/us too. There's no technical way I can think to describe it, but he basically heard the news and just flipped. He'd always be a very nervous flyer, we'd flown to Singapore/The Maldives for our honeymoon in 1998 and he was very nervous then. But in 2000 he was supposed to fly to Sydney for work, had a massive panic attack on the plane before it took off and in the end he got off before it flew.
So, of course, you can see how September 11th was a trigger. I won't go into the details of the breakdown, I still find it a difficult time to really think about too much, but I need to mention it because it's important to know how far Dan has come in the last 10 years or so that the idea of going to Florida was even up for discussion.
Up until a few years ago it wouldn't have been. Both because of the flying and because through the breakdown Dan had come to see America as the principal target for terrorism, and therefore an extremely dangerous place to visit. However, through years of medication, counselling, CBT and sheer hard work and determination, I am the proudest wife in the world to be able to say he has come out of the other side :) Of course, he still has his bad days, and it has all affected him, changed him as a person even, but now he is a million times better than he was! And therefore, a family holiday to Florida was indeed a possibility!
So we talked and talked, discussed what each of us wanted, ummed and ahhed, and finally decided to go for it! We decided on Easter this year due to school holiday and weather considerations mainly. March 2013 came and I started to look at flights. I was literally about to book them when Dad was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Obviously thoughts of going on holiday went out of the window and we concentrated on getting Dad well. Thoughts of Florida were in the background, I wanted to have something for Dad to look forward to and work towards, but obviously we couldn't book anything.
Dad had his chemo and in January was given the fab fab news that he was in remission! After all the trauma he'd been through I was even more determined to give him a holiday to remember! We booked flights, and after looking at pretty much every villa in Orlando still available, we booked that too. We were going for nearly three weeks. The first week in a villa in Orlando doing Disney parks, then a little road trip down to the Everglades to see the alligators, then back up to Orlando and a different villa for a week to do the Universal parks, Kennedy Space Center and Daytona Racetrack (Dad is a car enthusiast).
So, that is pretty much why I want to blog it all. This was a BIG holiday for all of us. It was way out of Dan and my comfort zone (up until last year a few days in Center Parcs and a week in Devon was all we were comfortable with lol). It was obviously massively exciting for the kids, and hopefully a big celebration for Dad.
Of course, nothing ever goes properly to plan, and two weeks before we were due to leave, Dad broke his foot! He phoned me from the hospital (where he'd driven himself!) to tell me, first of all joking that he'd been playing football with some old friends! He sure knows how to test me! Anyway, after a bit of ringing around etc., and checking details, we got sorted for this extra little issue! Luckily Dad didn't need a plaster cast on his foot, so we could still go (if he did need one he wouldn't have been able to fly!), and we already had a wheelchair, so we were sorted!
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