Our 15th Anniversary Cruise: A Comedy of Errors at Sea

My wife Sarah and I had been planning our 15th anniversary cruise on the Carnival Vista for six months. Six months! We'd circled the dates on the calendar, we'd talked about it during boring work meetings, and we'd even—I'm slightly embarrassed to admit—looked up the thread count on the bedding in the stateroom upgrades. This was supposed to be our moment. The moment where we'd remember why we fell in love instead of why we wanted to kill each other over whose turn it was to take out the recycling. Then everything went sideways approximately four minutes after we boarded. The boarding process itself was chaos—and I say this as someone who's stood in line at the DMV on a Saturday. The Carnival Vista is massive, so I expected crowds. What I didn't expect was for my wife to get completely separated from me while I was figuring out our room key situation. One minute she's standing next to me in the atrium, and the next minute she's disappeared into what felt like a sea of humanity, dragged away by an overzealous photographer offering "special anniversary packages." I found her twenty minutes later in some photo gallery at the back of the promenade, having somehow agreed to purchase th…