Sorry I’ve been so quiet on the blog the last month or so. As you might remember, I mentioned that I was going on a trip with my husband for our anniversary.
This trip was more than just a “get out-of-town to celebrate” kind of thing. You see, I have loved the idea of seeing the world ever since I was a very young girl, flipping through the pages of an oversized world atlas (for you youngsters who don’t see maps very often, here’s an idea of the different types of atlases). But I grew up in a pretty poor working class family; and as I covered in another post, my family very rarely left the house. We just couldn’t afford it.
But places that no one had ever heard of, let alone visited, had always held an allure for me. And the Maldives had long-held a fascination in my mind, even before the rise of luxury tourism there. The notion of traveling there became like a touchstone for me. I daydreamed about turquoise waters, swaying palms trees, and white beaches for years.
And then I got melanoma… specifically amelanotic nodular melanoma. And then I wasn’t too sure that I would have enough time left to be able to experience any of the daydream travel I had kept putting off until “someday”. Someday when I had enough money, someday when I had enough vacation time, someday when I reached a certain milestone – whether it was an anniversary, or a weight, or an age. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure I was going to have more somedays. I mourned the missed opportunities for experiences that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to have. I mourned the missing passport stamps that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to collect.
Fortunately, the excision seemed to have gotten all of the cancer cells floating around in my leg. I have needed to get random bits of my skin removed for biopsy along the way; but so far (knock wood) I haven’t had another lesion come back malignant. I’m very, very lucky that my pink melanoma was caught and removed early enough to give me two years to look back and marvel how lucky I am.
So when the airfare sale on Emirates came up, I didn’t hesitate. No, this anniversary wasn’t one of the “big” ones. Twelve does seem like a random number for such a celebration. But I don’t care. I’m not about to wait any longer for the mythical “someday”. And in the end, it really worked out because we were able to use hotel points I had been hoarding for years on an amazing redemption at the St. Regis Vommuli in the Maldives, as well as the Al Maha in the Dubai Desert Conservation Area. Both are luxury resorts that have paid rates that would be out of my financial reach. But I had been sitting on a stash of points that covered the cost of our 12 night trip.
I was thinking that I do that a lot, sit on airline miles or hotel points – waiting for that mythical someday. And it’s a little jarring to realize that if I had had a worse outcome with my pink melanoma that all of those carefully hoarded points would have gone to waste. (Plus, as much as those award charts get devalued, I’ve already lost a ton of potential trips I could have taken…)
So this trip was really a promise I made to myself when I got the call from the surgeon with the pathology report that said the margins were clear. I don’t want to wait for the mythical someday to start experiencing places I have dreamt about for years. I guess getting the reality check that you aren’t immortal after all will do that for you.
And the Maldives were just as heavenly as I anticipated. I can’t put into words how beautiful the place is and how lovely the people are (most of the staff in the resort were from the southern islands in the country). When I say I found my happy place, I mean that. It’s a literal place on earth that if I knew the end of the world (or at least the end of my time on it) was coming, I would hightail it there and live out the rest of my days. Very, very rarely do I say to myself that I would go back to a place I’ve been. I mean, there’s still so much left of the planet I haven’t seen yet. But I would go back to the Maldives in a heartbeat.
So now I have a new daydream… if I ever won the lottery, I would spend a month a year somewhere in the Maldives. The only question is whether I would try different resorts or if I would just make a beeline for the St. Regis again 😉
St. Regis Vommuli Maldives… my happy place beach (Feb 2017)
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