Comments on: Travel Disasters

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:36:35 +0000

That vespa key story reminds me of the time Boris lost his wedding ring while swimming in the Mediterranean in Italy. He had a great stroke of luck too and found it after borrowing some goggles from the nearby restaurant.

By: Christine Gilbert

Christine Gilbert — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:04:46 +0000

My almost biggest travel disaster was swimming off the coast of bermuda. My husband and I had shared a vespa to get there, and while the island is small, we were well on the other side of it. With no cash. Just bathing suits under our clothes.

So we head into the water, my husband ties the vespa key to his swimming trunks and we swim around for a while. When we’re ready to go, I start pulling on my shorts when I notice the look on my husband’s face. Dead panic. He had lost the key… somewhere.

He started combing the beach, but I just had a feeling it was out in the ocean… so I swam out to where we were and sure enouh, eight feet below me, sat this little silver key. Had we been swimming most other places in the world, we would have never had found it.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:53:13 +0000

Gosh, I’ll have to think about this. We had a few travel disasters while in Europe…most of which involved trains or accomodations.

Oh, and you are not the only one who has locked yourself out of a car with the keys in the ignition and the car running. I did the same thing in college. My roommate had borrowed my car one night, and she forgot to lock the car doors when she got home. The next morning I found that someone had stolen my stereo. We reported it to the police, who pretty much laugh and said “oh well.” My roommate felt bad about it and offered to pay for half of a new stereo. We headed to Best Buy that afternoon, got out of the car, locked the doors (manual locks, not automatic), and then I realized I’d left the car on. We waited in the store parking lot for an hour while we waited for AAA to come, and we laughed about what a crappy day it had been.

By: Ruth

Ruth — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:58:46 +0000

I had two:
1. We were taking a night train from Tolouse back to Madrid and thought we had to switch trains in Hendaya, where we had switched on our way to France. We were supposed to stay on the train for one more stop…whoops. We were stuck in Hendaya where there was only one hotel that made really strange noises and was very creepy. Needless to say, we didn’t sleep much and missed classes the next day.
2. We had spent the weekend in Barcelona thinking our flight back to Madrid was at 9 pm that Sunday. It had taken off at 9 am and we had to return that night for classes the next day. We found a flight back but it wasn’t cheap.

By: Laura

Laura — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:57:05 +0000

Well, I was actually with Theresa… and there were a few mix ups on that trip… we were traveling to Rome from Germany for the four-day All Saints Day Weekend. There had been some confusion when we were buying our train tickets about what day we were to leave, but we finally got it figured out with the travel agent who was selling them to us. Five minutes after the train departed the station I realized I’d forgotten my passport–normally not a problem in the EU, but we were going through Switzerland. I spent about 20 minutes hiding in the train bathroom when they announced they would be checking passports. It was stinky, but it actually worked! We arrived in Milan late and looked for the overnight train to Rome, but it was nowhere to be found. It turned out our tickets were for the next night so we spent the night in the train station. Also, I had no money on that trip and kept having to borrow money from people and was hungry a lot. (Isn’t it nice to be an adult with a job!) Even so, it was a great trip–one of the best of that whole study abroad experience.

There was another time when Boris and I almost missed an overnight train from Vienna to Munich… I don’t seem to have much luck with overnight trains.