We had booked a cruise on the Disney Magic, it was supposed to be the first cruise after she had been refurbed, booked it a year in advance. About 3 months before the cruise, husband starts to look for a new job. Ends up that the job he wants is in FL, they do Skype interview etc. about a month before our vacation and then want to do a face to face. Perfect, we can just piggy back the interview onto our trip. So instead of flying out on Sunday for our cruise and going to FLL, we instead fly to TPA on Thursday. As we are boarding the plane I start to see messages on the DIS that the cruise has been canceled. Get the email from my TA while we are in flight. We land in TPA, and drive to the city with the interview in the dark, while trying to talk to our TA and see if we can get on another crusie that week. Of course we can't. So then we talk to the people that husband is interviewing with and they are super and arrange housing for us for the week that we should have been on the cruise.
The interview on Friday/Saturday goes well, we break the news to the kids on Sunday that we are moving across the country and put a positive spin on the "no cruise" by saying that it gives us an entire week to get to know our new home. We arrange for a rental car and plan on driving the 4 hours to FLL at the end of the week to catch our originally planned flight home. On Monday late afternoon we get a phone call from husband's brother that their mother is not doing well and we need to get home immediately. We contact Southwest who managed to change our Friday AM flight to the Tuesday AM flight for no charge, except we had to still go out of FLL. Mother in law passed away as we were driving to airport Tuesday morning.
I would say missing the cruise was a disaster, except that if we had been on the cruise, hearing the news about MIL on the second day of the cruise would have been bad, so in the end we were kind of glad the cruise had been canceled.