Girl, you trippin'!

If you know us, you know that we are shakers and movers.  Before the "Great Cancer Uprising of 2017" we already had our entire summer planned with vacations almost every single weekend.  These trips included: Disneyland for Penny's first time, Moab, Vegas with Nin's high school girlfriends, Uintas, St George, Great Basin, Flaming Gorge, Bear Lake 3x, and the mothership of our summer adventures ICELAND. 

Between all of my work flights and our personal flights, 14 in total, we were able to get 12 of them fully refunded or credited back to our accounts without issue. The two flights we couldn't get refunds for were, of course, the most expensive tickets we'd purchased to Iceland. With everything else going on, missing a trip of a lifetime AND having to eat a couple thousand dollars just stung something awful.

I spent almost six weeks trying to find a solution.  I didn't have the heart to tell Nicole.  She just assumed I'd cancelled the tickets and gotten a refund.  It made me feel sick to my stomach that they wouldn't refund our money, let us transfer the tickets to someone else, or even let us give them away. Zero options. Even more frustrating was had we just paid the extra $27 per ticket for medical specific flight insurance, we could have gotten full refunds.  Even then, you'd think the airline would have a heart and give us a reasonable option for a young, attractive cancer patient.

I thought all was lost and our hearts would be extra broken for those 8 days of adventure we were going to miss. Then something magical happened. The stars aligned. The ducks got in a row. The britches were no longer in a twist. 

We were sitting in Bear Lake a couple weekends ago and Nin said, "I wish we hadn't cancelled those tickets, I feel like I'd be healthy enough to go to Iceland."  When I told her that I'd been unable to get refunds, she cried tears of joy.  A lot still needed to fall into place to make the trip happen but this was the first good news about a trip since the diagnosis.  Every other news was "We're sorry, you can't go. Because, you know, cancer."

I immediately got on the phone and called our Dr to see if she thought it was a good idea. We had to wait until Monday before we heard back.  It was an anxious couple days waiting for the call. The response was an astounding, "Yes, if she is feeling this well she absolutely should go."  This was just 10 days before the trip.

Nin did so well with her first dose of chemo and the trip (originally) just happened to line up perfectly in between chemo doses 2 and 3. Unfortunately Nin's white blood cell count was too low for her to get her second dose of chemo. They had to move it back a few days. Had they not moved it, Iceland would have been about eight days after her infusion. Now it will only be about four.  If everything goes like last time, she'll be pretty tired during the first two days in Iceland but fortunately those days are basically all driving.  Like 7 hours each day driving.  Good thing it'll probably look like this.

So we're going to Iceland. We didn't tell many people because we wanted to make it a surprise.  You're probably asking yourself, "Who is it a surprise for?"  Good question.  We have no idea.  We just never do anything like this because we're over sharers, which we're not ashamed of.  I guess it's just a surprise for our friends we are going with that still thought we couldn't go.  We also didn't want to tell many people because we felt like something would happen where we couldn't go and we didn't want to amp ourselves up too much until we were actually in Iceland being awesome.

On a somewhat related note, while in Bear Lake last week we were determining "house mottos" for each of us. We concluded that my house motto is "Sharing is Caring".  The puppies explain it perfectly.

We're super excited to get out of dodge for a few days and enjoy God's beautiful and majestic creations in Iceland. Prepare yourself for an overload of Instagram and maybe blog posts if we have service and/or energy.  Sorry not sorry.