iCal on macbook pro won't sync iCal events from iPhone 5

I've synced/backed up my iPhone 5 with iTunes within the past hour.

After it finished, I went onto iCal on my macbook pro and saw that it didn't have events my iPhone 5 had.

So then I went to settings and changed the iCloud settings so that it would back up iCal.

But even after that, it took too long to back up and it failed at backing it up.

So I googled how long iCloud takes to back up and realized that the more I had for it to back up, the longer it takes.

Now I'm down to 500-something mb for iCloud to back up. It's still taking a long time.

THEN I googled to see if anyone else has had any problems with syncing iCal.

There was one person who deleted iTunes 11.0.1 and downgraded to the 10 version.

Is there any way for me to sync/backup my iCal on my macbook pro with iCal events from my iPhone 5, vice versa?

(Other than downgrading, if there is one)