Only a few of us have been fortunate enough to have successfully planned and gone on vacation without anything going wrong. Maybe you missed your flight and had to reschedule. Or maybe, your flight was canceled and there were no available flights until the day you were supposed to return, so you had to completely scrap your trip altogether. The latter just happened to me (and about 20 more of us) because of a wild mid-March blizzard that ravaged the Northeast coast.

I had just gotten back from the store. I was buying deodorant for the trip, as my old deodorant was almost gone and I don’t want to go around New York smelling atrociously. I was excitedly listening to a few select songs that I picked out specifically for the trip, and then I checked my phone.

“…I had to cancel the trip…”

My first instinct was to be skeptical. I wanted to think that she was just kidding. At this point, most people had already found out the flight was canceled. Not me. So naturally, I was expecting a quick ‘haha just kidding! April Fool’s’ kind of text (even though April Fool’s isn’t for another two weeks). But as I dug deeper and talked to people, it became clear that we weren’t going to New York. This highly anticipated trip just dissipated in a matter of mere seconds. But what can you do?

Out of every misfortune comes an opportunity, as I like to think. So I searched frantically on Google Flights for something decent and reasonable. All domestic flights out of Houston were over $1,000 dollars round trip. I wanted to go to California, as tickets to LA were only $500 if you went on a certain day.

My dreams of California were never realized, but other opportunities did spring up. The Tuesday that we were supposed to leave, I went hiking with a friend and rediscovered the old abandoned house that I would frequent whenever I lived in Cy Creek’s territory. I hadn’t visited that thing since I got chased out of it by a homeless man. The next day, a group of friends and I went to Kemah for the day. And it was my birthday. Riding the Bullet roller coaster, throwing up everywhere and then riding it again made me forget all about the fact that we really should be in New York.

If your trip gets canceled, never just sit around and mope about it being canceled. Go make your own fun, however, that might be. Because trust me, once you start doing something fun, the disappointment from not going where you had been anticipating going will wane.