Friday open thread: travel mishaps

[dolorosa_12]

I have spent most of this week exhausted out of my mind: either travelling, working in Cambridge (much more frequently and with much more teaching of much larger groups of students than is typical), or suffering the ghastly effects of food poisoning. Today is the first day I finally felt able to catch my breath; I only worked in the morning and took the afternoon off as time in lieu for working two partial Saturdays at workshops/conferences. I taught my class, wandered around Cambridge market doing my grocery shopping, and then caught the train back home at lunch time. I spent the afternoon thoroughly cleaning both bathrooms, doing an hour-and-a-half-long yoga class, and taking a very long shower, and I finally feel relaxed.

Because of all the above, I wasn't going to do any open thread prompt this week (my Dreamwidth-ing has suffered in general and there are several people's posts on which I want to offer commiserations and/or congratulations to various life events — take this as a general expression of such sentiments if you have posted about things which warrant them). But then I saw someone in my Dreamwidth circle using a great prompt in another context, and felt compelled to borrow it:

What are your most memorable or notable travel-related mishaps?

I have many, and every single one of them was caused by my mother.



There was the time we got pickpocketed while travelling in a share taxi/minibus in Bali when I was six years old, which resulted in the loss of our travel documents and travellers' cheques, and Mum had to spend an entire afternoon arguing with staff in a bank in order to sort things out; the consulate gave us emergency passports without much hassle though.

There was the time we arrived at the crack of dawn in Rome after a twenty-four-hour flight from Australia, and Mum (who hadn't been to Italy for more than twenty years) was carrying out-of-date currency which no one would accept, and we were so groggy and confused from lack of sleep that we forgot that the guy from whom we'd be renting an apartment would not be there to meet us at 7.30am, but of course at 9am as arranged. This was after about an hour attempting to use a payphone in a panic, enlisting the help of all the bemused waitstaff and elderly Italian customers in the nearby cafe.

There was the time we walked over a kilometre in the wrong direction on the wrong side of the Seine to get to the apartment we'd be renting, having arrived by train from Milan. By the time we'd rectified our mistake and arrived at the apartment block, my mum and sister were too tired to carry their bags up the requisite four flights of stairs, so I carried every single item of luggage up myself (as a fourteen-year-old gymnast, I definitely had the best upper body strength at that time). This trip was the same European holiday as the trip to Rome in the previous paragraph. (Other memorable things about this particular visit to Paris: the apartment block was a building site covered in scaffolding and we seemed to be the only people staying there; my sister fixated on a collection of plastic miniature model horses which she saw in a toyshop near the Eiffel Tower, she then bought them, and used up almost every single photo on her thirty-photo disposable camera roll of film taking photos of each individual model horse; my sister and I wrote a truly dreadful musical — complete with songs — based on the Genpei War by way of Katherine Paterson.)

There was the time when Mum spectacularly miscalculated what our flight itinerary was saying and assumed that our connecting flight from Hong Kong to Amsterdam would take place at midnight thirty-six hours after our original flight from Sydney to Hong Kong landed (as opposed to midnight twelve hours after the original flight). She therefore made a huge song and dance about booking us into a hotel, enlisted advice from the parents of my then boyfriend (who had lived in Hong Kong previously) about places to stay, visit, eat, etc — and then she woke me in a panic at 9am in the hotel saying, 'Ronni, our connecting flight left nine hours ago!'

There was the time when Mum got pickpocketed in Rome, which resulted in the loss of her driver's license and two credit cards, (although thankfully not the full envelope of cashed travellers' cheques, which she had literally just cashed in order to pay for our rented apartment and which were sitting in a separate part of her bag), and literally multiple hours spent on hold with the Visa office in Milan trying to get the card cancelled (because there was no office in Rome); someone told us later that the reason we were unable to get through whenever we called was because the staff in the call centre spent all their time using the phones there to make personal calls, although I have no idea how true that was. This was the same trip as the Hong Kong blunder above.

There were the multiple attempts Mum and I made to walk the 18km hike between Cambridge and Ely. Each time we got lost; the first time we ended up in Soham, the second time we ended up lost in a 'vole sanctuary' and then trying to ask for help from a very dubious-looking local farmer who a) tried to sell us eggs and b) had his fly open the whole time he was talking to us. I refused to try the walk again, although she and my sister did it when they both visited for my PhD graduation. On that hike, Mum fell backwards off a footbridge and hurt her hand, the pair of them ended up thigh-high in a bog, they were constantly stung by stinging nettles, and chased by a bull. I think the fact that my sister (who doesn't drink alcohol) showed up to meet me and Matthias for dinner after they got back and immediately ordered a pint of apple cider sums up her thoughts on the matter.

But the absolute peak travel-related debacle involving me and my mum happened last (northern) summer. We have a project in which we try to walk every leg of the Thames Path, and last year were were going to do another two sections: Teddington to Putney, and Putney to Tower Bridge. We caught the train to Teddington, got out, read the route description, noted that this stretch of the walk could be done on either side of the river, crossed over the Thames ... and immediately turned in the wrong direction. We passed through Kingston (if you're looking at a map, you will already be able to spot the error), and it was only when we got to an incredibly ugly stretch of road in a place called Seething Wells that we realised our mistake. We had Google Maps! We were looking at our location and still couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong! We confused a guy immensely who saw us peering at our phones and offered help: 'We're trying to walk towards London,' we said, while walking in the opposite direction to London.

This was on a named, constantly signposted track that literally follows alongside a major river for its entire duration.

The whole thing is hilarious in hindsight, as are all the other mishaps. My mother is generally a very organised, detail-oriented person, but her supreme self-confidence is what lets her down in all these situations: she looks at a map briefly (or doesn't look at a map at all), assumes she knows exactly where she needs to go or that her memory of a city she last visited twenty years ago is flawless, and blithely strides off in the wrong direction, taking a very long time to notice any massive errors. After thirty-plus years of this, I've learnt when travelling with her to take control of all navigation choices, so I only have myself to blame for the spectacular catastrophe that was our Thames Path walk last year!

I'd love to hear your answers!

Comments

[raven]

Oh, my god, what a catalogue of horrors!!

I've had no shortage of horrible travel mishaps (to the point that I actively enjoy travelling within the UK these days just because it might mean fewer mishaps) but some of the classics, hmm. Lots of awful journeys when I was young to the northeast of India, which is no fun to travel to at the best of times. I remember as a kid being stranded by missed flights in Guwahati airport with my my mother and uncle's family, and my uncle deciding that he remembered some relation we had in the city and we should go and stay with them rather than just take our chances in the airport overnight. 2am wandering through town in a pedal rickshaw because it was cheaper (I really hated this uncle) trying to decide what colour the front door had been when he'd seen it twenty years earlier or whenever it had been. Supreme self-confidence was exactly the word for it.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, that sounds absolutely miserable! I would be infuriated with that uncle of yours as well — what a debacle!

[olivermoss]

Considering my travel planning involves things like 'and then I snowshoe into the park' or 'chances of getting stranded are pretty slim', I haven't had a ton.

The worst was when I went to the other Portland and the hotel claimed I didn't have a booking there, and outside of a $1k+ a night AB&B every room in the city was taken. I'd booked through hotels.com and both them and the hotel said the other was at fault. I wound up just having to stay awake the first night then book the one open room for the rest of my trip at an insane rate, because it was a day-of booking in a booked-out city. I will never use them or their parent company expedia again, no amount of savings will make up for how much money I was out. If I'd booked directly, I'd have had proof they had my funds and I'd have a reservation number directly from them. I am sure if I'd booked directly they would have found a room. Hotels often hold back rooms for situations like, well, that.

But, that was an annoying mishap. Here is a more amusing one that is on my mind because I found a CD-r with some of my old photos on it yesterday.

The first time I went to Japan, I was there with someone who refused to accept that I was better traveled than she was or that my Japanese was better. She is one of those people who has a burning desire to be the One In Charge and Who Knows Things. This lead to a bunch of problems, but here's the funny one. When we went to Hakone, I was dead set against us booking a specific ryokan (traditional inn) because the reviews said it was far from the the train station and also difficult to get to. My friend, let's call her G, was dead set on booking that specific ryokan because on the map it looked like it was right by the train station. G hates taking a single step more than she has to. She thought I couldn't possibly be reading the Japanese language reviews on the website and was trying to trick her into booking my pick instead of hers.

So, how can a ryokan be both near and far at the same time?



Six staircases. Note that the stairs in the upper and lower photo are different. It was on a cliff and there wasn't a road to it, it was stairs or nothing. I admit I may have laughed my ass off, but I'd seen that kind of thing as a plot twist in anime. There is a reason for that trope in onsen (hot springs) episodes and we ran right into it.

On that trip I found out that G is impossible to travel with unless you let her be in charge of everything and are grateful about it. On one day of the trip she wanted to just stay at the hostel and rest, but flipped out when I was like 'okay, gunna go do stuff you'd find boring' She didn't think I could survive a day in Tokyo without her guiding me, even though I was the one who explained to her how Japanese maps work. I told her I was going to the The Go Center and if she really wanted to follow me she could. Next time I went to Japan, I went solo.

[dolorosa_12]

I've heard horror stories similar to yours from people who booked accommodation via aggregators/price comparison websites, and for this reason I never do so, because, as you experienced, it becomes no one's responsibility if something goes wrong. (Same with flights — if the flight is cancelled and you've booked through an aggregator, you don't get put on the next flight or refunded, you just lose the money.) Those sites can be useful as search engines, and I sometimes use them in that way, then go to book directly from the hotel/airline etc — as you say, any money saved is not worth the potential hassle later on.

That trip to Japan with your friend sounds absolutely infuriating. I guess at least you were vindicated when it came to that ryokan, but in the worst possible way! I've only ever travelled with alone, with family or with my husband (other than a slim handful of times for work trips with colleagues to and from conferences/training etc), but I know so many people who have massively fallen out with friends after the experience of travelling with them. It seems to reveal something about the friend's personality or your friendship that isn't visible in everyday life, and I'm sorry you had to experience that.

[olivermoss]

If my money goes from a bank directly to a company, they've got a legal responsibility. I use hotels.com as a search engine, but even if I had no more problems ever it would not make up for just the monetary cost, never mind the stress.

Yeah, sadly being controlling and self-obsessed was G's entire personality as I'd realize later. I stupidly assumed she was dealing with the stress of travel by acting a certain way and mostly tried to roll with it. But it was nuts to have someone who'd barely been out of the timezone she was born into acting like she was the expert. But, as mishaps go, that is a classic and also hilarious. When it comes to travel, you just gotta take all the silver linings and make as much lemonade as possible. What else can you do?

Also, shortly after these pictures were taken she bought a roller bag similar to mine and dumped that 'travel system' bag with many compartments on top of a garbage can on a street corner. Meanwhile, my Timbuk2 shoulder bag in that picture is literally within arm's reach right now.

I also travel alone these days. For some trips, I really wish I had someone to share them with. For others, yeah, I know my itineraries seem like some bizarre self-inflicted torture to most people. But, I like what I like.

[corvidology]

I've had some general travel mishaps but none caused by me or the people I was travelling with so I don't think they count in this context probably?

It was things like coaches that didn't arrive, etc.

[dolorosa_12]

I mean, you can list them, but you're right that that's not really what I was thinking of. I've experienced lots of travel mishaps relating to late trains, trains being cancelled (due to, among other things 'leaves on the line,' 'horses on the track,' 'cows on the track', and, on one memorable occasion which caused an entire summer school group of Italian teenagers to photograph the departure information screen with much laughter and incredulity, 'swans on the line,' — ah, life in East Anglia!), but as you say it wasn't my fault nor the fault of my travelling companions so I left them out.

[tellshannon815]

I've heard of swans on the line incidents around here as well, so not an East Anglia thing. It usually results in jokes on social media about Hot Fuzz and whether it was called in by Peter Ian Staker.

[tellshannon815]

They sound like things my mother might do - she won't make any attempt to find directions herself and I end up with control of navigation whether I want it or not. I can remember one time on the way into Brighton city centre from a Travelodge on the outskirts of town, and she convinced herself that we must have missed a turning somewhere along the line because she was swearing blind that she didn't recognise the route we were taking and it seemed to be taking far too long to get to the city centre. I wasn't concerned - we'd done this route once, three years earlier, and I wouldn't expect to recognise a lot of the road in this situation - but she was adamant and kept insisting on trying to find this magical turn off for a quicker route. Cue humouring her and taking a silly route before she'd accept she'd been mistaken.

A lot of my travel mishaps have been things like the time the bus broke down in Berkshire last year.

[dolorosa_12]

It's not quite the same thing with my mother. She does make an attempt to find directions, but she looks them up once (often not on the day of travel), doesn't take in all the information, but assumes she's now got comprehensive understanding of the entire route and won't need to look up directions again. Or she assumes she'll remember exactly how to get somewhere in a city we last visited in 1999 or whatever. The situation with your mother in Brighton sounds infuriating!

[tellshannon815]

I think a factor in that was, when we'd arrived at that Travelodge on the previous occasion three years earlier, Mum had asked my cousin's husband the best way into the city centre, he'd given the wrong way, and we'd walked quite a way in that wrong direction trying to get to the city centre looking for somewhere to eat. So after that, just about anything would have seemed quick in comparison. On the second time of staying there, three years later, she didn't think of it like that, kept insisting it should have been a shorter route and that we must have turned off somewhere (I couldn't remember doing, but couldn't say with any certainty about a route taken once three years previously!)

[lyr]

I have learned just not to go on family vacations with my extended family. They are cursed. There never was a family vacation that did not involve at least two hospital visits and one or more conflicts with police. This is, of course, to say nothing of the feuds and drama. I have much more relaxing vacations now.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, that sounds cursed indeed! I can well imagine that you'd much prefer to travel alone.

[nerakrose]

I was about to ask if your mother is cursed 😂

we don't have a ton of travel mishaps in my family history, though the time my mum, her then husband (well, they were in the middle of a divorce) and two of my sisters were in Iceland for a few weeks that summer and missed a flight will stay golden in my memory forever. mum's family is from the east and so they meant to fly home with first a domestic flight from Egilsstaðir to Reykjavík and then an international flight from Keflavík to Copenhagen. mum had somehow got the time of their domestic flight wrong so they arrived at the airport like...half an hour after the plane took off. the other flight was in 12 hours so they were like, well, if we drive, we can...maybe...make it? (the drive is 14 hours.)

they did not make it.

what I remember is that mum called me, explained how they'd missed the flight, at which point I cracked up laughing because how do you fuck up that badly, and asked me to look up a particular cousin on facebook for her phone number because mum didn't have internet service on the road and couldn't contact her herself. this was because they'd realised they weren't going to make the second flight and would need a place to crash in Reykjavík. they wound up paying an astronomical sum for new flights home.


my own travel mishap story is ten years old this month! in April 2014 I went to the UK for about ten days of holidaying. I can't remember which day I went, but I was flying back on Thursday April 17 on an early morning flight from Gatwick - like 7am early, I got up SO early to get the train from Victoria because I was still young and spry enough that early mornings for cheap flights didn't faze me. only, when I tried to check in at the airport through the machine, it wouldn't let me...so I go to the counter and present my booking and ask for help and the guy behind the counter takes one look at the piece of paper I'd printed out with my booking details on it, snorts, and says 'your return flight is in July.' jaw dropping etc I take the paper back to look at it, and yes, it does indeed say July...17th...which is also a Thursday. I had the dawning realisation that when I booked the flights and was clicking back and forth between dates in the price calendar to find the best options, the calendar must at one point have flipped to July for the return flight and I didn't notice because both dates were Thursday 17th.

needless to say i never made that mistake again.

guy at the counter tells me to book a new ticket and points in the general direction of travel bureau counters just a few metres away, so I go to the first one and say 'well, I fucked up my booking and I need a ticket to Copenhagen, today, what do you have?'
'flight from Heathrow in two hours for 400 pounds'
'...we are literally in Gatwick right now. what else?'
'flight from here at 13:15 for for 250 pounds?'
'yes fine i'll take it'.

(note at the time i was a broke student and that 250 pounds cleared out my account and put my account in minus. my account did have a credit of the equivalent of about 500 pounds, what that means is that i didn't go into overdraft (for which the interest rate was about 27%) but credit (with a more reasonable interest rate of 6%) so long as i didn't owe more than 500 pounds. still not great though)

i get my ticket and go wait and then check in as soon as i can and wait more and get lunch and wait more and go to the gate, whereupon the check-in person takes my ticket, frowns at her screen, then calls her colleague over, who also frowns at both the ticket and the screen, and says 'there's no record of there ever having been a seat there'. which is not a reassuring sentence to hear as you're about to board a flight, ever.

on the inside i'm going, oh, here we go again. wonder what delights i'm about to experience this time? remembering the time three years earlier i meant to travel to edinburgh for a long weekend and never made it onto the plane because after an hour delay at the airport a person in a yellow high vis coverall came through the doors, looked at the check-in staff and just shrugged sheepishly. flight was cancelled and i opted to cancel the entire trip and get my money back instead of rebooking because i'd had a bad feeling about it since i booked the flight in the first place. truly, i was prepared for anything. ghost seats? wings falling off the plane? elephants trampling the airport?

they spend some time at the computer and eventually it transpires that the plane is overbooked. 'if you're lucky somebody else doesn't show up and then you can get that seat. do you have checked luggage?' i did have checked luggage. they are very apologetic and ask me to wait in this here seat, and they'll try to get me on the flight. passengers board. i joke with the staff in between waves of people boarding. eventually nobody is left to board and it's just me and the two check-in people so we continue to chat and joke and they're all cheerful, oh, maybe it's your lucky day, there's one person hasn't shown up yet, and on the inside i'm like, hm. i'll believe it when i see it. gate closing time is approaching. i'm having fun actually, i'm in 'whatever happens will happen' mode. i don't care. the staff is great. it's a beautiful day. i have work the following day but i am 1000% relaxed.

at the very last minute a guy in a grey business suit and black briefcase comes running and the first check-in person i spoke to gives me this 'oh no i'm so sorry look' and i just start laughing, because i was expecting this. they make some calls and a luggage handler comes up to the gate because they need to know what my suitcase looks like to take it off the plane because they can't fly with unaccompanied luggage.
'what does your suitcase look like'
'it's black -'
'AHAHAHA of course' (note he was not mad, just amused)
'i wasn't finished!' (i whine) 'i know what i'm doing! it's black, about this size, the top handle has a wide red satin ribbon tied to it though the bow's probably come undone it always does, and the zippers have bright yellow cords tied to them in knots so there's a knotty string this long on each zipper'
'all right ma'am! you do know what you're doing!' (look of respect) 'i'll go right ahead and grab that off the plane for you'
yes, i was smug.

the check-in person was very apologetic (she and the other person genuinely looked worried that I'd be angry/start yelling/whatever and that alone was enough to make me vow that I would never lose my cool at staff for just doing their jobs, jesus) and rebooked me (free of charge) on their next flight and gave me all the upgrades she possibly could (for free) as well as detailed instructions on how to claim compensation because the next flight was some 4-5 hours later so it was definitely past the cut-off time for compensation (250EUR, which covered a substantial portion of the ticket I'd had to purchase that morning). i actually had a great time chatting to those three people for the time it took to sort me out, jokes and all, and i had the sense that not only were they relieved i hadn't turned out a bitch customer but also genuinely happy (me, on the inside, i'm so sorry people treat you like shit! may you have a lovely rest of the month!), and for my part i was still in the 'wonder what will happen next' mode just, like, i will get home one way or another, let's find out how! genuinely would not have been surprised if it'd been on the back of a tortoise racing across the English channel, or whatever.

i wasn't allowed to leave the secure area by myself so had to be escorted out and to where i could pick up my suitcase (not luggage claims) because i would have to check in again, which i could only do on the other side of security, and then go through security again.

there was so much waiting. i read an entire novel in between all of this, in various places in the airport. red seas skies whatever it was called by scott lynch. secondhand paperback. hated the ending.

after i went through security for the second time i bought a bottle of bailey's chocolate deluxe liquor because i'd just had some for the first time a few days earlier and really liked it, and i thought, despite the fact i couldn't really afford it, that i really deserved a nice thing after all of that, even if it had been entirely my own fault. funny thing was i wanted to buy it earlier but decided against it because i'd had a bad feeling, turns out that was a good thing i didn't because i wouldn't have been able to get it through security the second time even in one of those sealed bags they give you when you have connecting flights (i asked, the second time, because i was curious, and they said no) and i was broke enough it would've really upset me to lose not just the 18 quid or so i paid for it, but also the thing itself.

got home without a hitch after that. there weren't even delays at luggage claims in Copenhagen airport iirc.

i think i spent about 12 hours in Gatwick that day. (there are worse airports to spend 12 hours in. Gatwick was small, but not crowded, and i was able to both feed myself without compromising my allergies and find seats to wait in.) i was very tired when i made it home. i got my 250EUR compensation promptly and on the weekend i made homemade ice cream with regular baileys and i poured the chocolate deluxe on top like a sauce and i devoured it. the bottle lasted me all summer. delicious on ice cream.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, I was reading your Gatwick debacle almost between my fingers in horror. I'm in awe at your composure throughout the whole thing (although well done to you for remaining friendly and polite to the airline staff — to be honest I think they were primed to be more helpful to you because you didn't degenerate into a tantrum-y meltdown; air travel seems to bring out the worst in people. I love that you ended up basically not much worse off financially than you started, and with some delicious Baileys to boot!

i think i spent about 12 hours in Gatwick that day. (there are worse airports to spend 12 hours in.

Okay, this really made me laugh, because one anecdote that I didn't include was from the same trip that involved missing the flight in Hong Kong and getting pickpocketted in Rome (the whole trip was: Sydney to Amsterdam via Hong Kong, immediate Thalys train to Paris, back to Amsterdam after Paris, then Dublin and the west of Ireland, then Rome via Gatwick, then London, then home to Sydney). As you can see from that itinerary, we had a stopover in Gatwick between Dublin and Rome. It was going to last about twelve hours, and our original plan was to go into London for the day, have lunch, then go back out to Gatwick for our second flight.

However, this was in December, something like ten flakes of snow fell in the UK, and the entire rail network ground to a halt and no trains were leaving Gatwick, so we had to stay in the airport. We loathe air travel and airports, and spent most of the day wandering around endlessly (my mother hates sitting down), growing increasingly bored and grumpy. At one point we got so distracted that we left the plastic sleeve envelope with all our printed itinerary, booking confirmations, receipts etc on the shelf of a W H Smith we'd been browsing and had to run back in a panic. And then after all that our flight to Rome was massively delayed by the weather and we got there after midnight instead of at 8 or 9pm as planned. So 'twelve hours in Gatwick' has become a sort of family short-hand for 'a hellish situation.'

As to your family's missed flight in Iceland, I can only look on in horror. How incredibly stressful! I've never had a mishap like that (misreading times/dates), and other than the thing in Hong Kong, the worst of that that's ever happened to a member of my family is my sister somehow misreading a flight booking written in 24-hour time and showing up to the airport two hours late (it said something like 1630 and she somehow translated that in her head to '6.30pm'), but it was just a domestic flight within Australia and they put her on the next flight, which left within the hour.

[nerakrose]

I'm inclined to agree! in general I find that asking 'okay, what are my options?' rather than getting mad gets me what I need faster and with the least amounts of fuss. and also...I don't know, things will be okay? they might suck for a while, but I've not yet (and luckily) been in a situation that was truly, life-endingly awful.


hahaha!! that's fair! I do stand by it though, there are far worse airports out there. I will never set foot in Manchester Airport ever again if I can avoid it.

[monksandbones]

A number of my most notable travel mishaps involved forgetting my US student visa paperwork, which happened with increasing frequency as my PhD progressed. As a Canadian student in the US, I didn't have an actual visa, only an 8.5x11 paper document that required an up-to-date signature at all times that proved my student status. The first time I forgot it was during my research year in France, when I realized as my train was passing Laval, one hour into a three-hour train trip to Paris where I was scheduled to fly out of de Gaulle that afternoon, en route to Kalamazoo, that I'd forgotten it in my room in Rennes. I was able to email the international student office at my university in the US from the airport, who provided me with a scan of the document that I printed off and used to get back into the US. The same thing happened again a couple of years later when I went to a conference at the University of Prince Edward Island, and again, I was able to use a scanned copy to re-enter the US. The third time was when I back at my parents' place for Christmas the final year of my postdoc, and that time I had to actually rebook my flights and wait for a new copy to arrive.

I also nearly missed a flight in 2019 because I stupidly booked a trip into the US as two one-way flights, and in combination with my history of multiple US student visas, that came up as a red flag and sent me straight to a lengthy visit to second-step US customs!

[dolorosa_12]

As a former international student, I just did a full body shudder in horror about your forgotten student visa paperwork! I'm glad you were easily able to sort it out — it's so easy to forget when it's a separate physical document.

My student visa when I was an MPhil student was printed inside my passport, but the year after that the UK transitioned to little physical plastic biometric cards (the same size as a bank/credit card), which is what I had for my PhD. You were meant to carry them in your wallet all the time, but I never did in case I lost it, which meant having to remember to add it to the wallet every time I travelled out of the UK. I only forgot it once, and, thankfully, this was on a trip to Ireland. The UK and Ireland have a common travel area which means that the UK treats people entering the country from Ireland as if they've just been travelling domestically within the UK, so there is no passport control and no document checks at the airport (although Ireland does make UK passengers go through passport control, and theoretically the UK authorities can come in and do random checks, but they never do). I spent the whole trip in an absolute panic that border guards would be there at the airport, and only relaxed once I finally got out of the airport.

I never forgot that student visa card again!

[goodbyebird]

Oof so sorry to hear about the food poisoning. Always an awful time.

my sister fixated on a collection of plastic miniature model horses which she saw in a toyshop near the Eiffel Tower, she then bought them, and used up almost every single photo on her thirty-photo disposable camera roll of film taking photos of each individual model horse; my sister and I wrote a truly dreadful musical — complete with songs

I really really love this.

I've avoided any actual travel mishaps, but I did call my mom in the middle of the night before we were supposed to be on a plane to Paris, having to tell her I'd booked the whole rest of the trip a week later 😬 Bought new plane tickets and lost some money, but boy how'd am I glad I didn't discover it once we were abroad!

[dolorosa_12]

Oh no, that booking mishap for Paris! I'm glad you realised before you left on the trip!

Thanks for your well wishes about the food poisoning. I'm all better now.

[chestnut_pod]

Oh my goddddddd. I almost had to read this through my fingers! May you never have such a travel mishap again!

The Chestnut_pod family motto is "there is no such thing as adventure, only poor planning." So I can say, with pride, that I have never CAUSED an adventure, but I have sure experienced them nonetheless! I think the most notable has to be the time I was out on a backpacking trip with my first serious SO. We'd done a big loop, resupplied and spent a night in a hotel, then headed back out on the trail. We arrived at our campsite exactly on time, put up our tent, and had a nice little nap, and it was only when I stuck my head outside of the tent that I realized that the sunset light was… coming from the wrong direction. And two hours early. And that the light itself was red, not just the sky. And was that the scent of smoke?

So we packed back up and walked 8 miles at record speed back to the trailhead, fully laden, and thankfully made it up to town where we discovered that the fire was actually safely distant and we had thankfully not been in true danger… but it was a good thing we had fled, because late that night, in our emergency hotel room, my SO woke up with intense nausea, abdominal cramping, and a fever. It was super scary, so much so that I ended up calling an ambulance. And lo, it was giardiasis! To this day I have no idea how that happened, since we were religious about filtering our water with a .1 micron filter, and I was totally fine. But my poor SO needed the horse antibiotics and IV fluids and the kind of anti-nausea meds they give chemo patients. So thanks, Yosemite Rim Fire of 2013, I genuinely don't know what I would have done if that had happened out on the trail. And then U.S. insurance mandated that because my SO was technically out of danger and thus the ER, we had to leave or pay something like 13,000 dollars to stay another day, so I packed my better-but-still-unwell SO into the car and drove us all the way back home through the mountains in one seven-hour shot to check into our hospital that took the right insurance.

I also once practically carried this SO's mother up and then down the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S., but that is a different story.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh no, what a disaster of a trip! Your poor SO! That is incredibly scary, and I'm glad at least you ended up somewhere close to professional medical care, because, as you say, dealing with all that on a hiking trail would have been very dangerous.

he Chestnut_pod family motto is "there is no such thing as adventure, only poor planning."

I can safely say that this is very much not my family's approach. The only thing that gets planned in meticulous detail is where/what to eat. Over the years, I have learnt to prepare and plan other elements in greater detail, due to all the debacles in this post, but if it weren't for me, any trip involving my family would be a lot more chaotic.

[thawrecka]

Probably my biggest travel mishap was getting lost in Tokyo. It was my first time outside Australia, and I'd travelled alone. Previously my biggest fear about travelling had been getting lost in a country where I didn't speak (or speak much of) the language! And so after taking a wrong turn in an attempt to walk from Tokyo station to my hotel in Nihonbashi, I got lost for an hour and a half in the dark and the rain. This was pre-ubiquitous GPS, too. Anyway, thankfully the guy working in a conbini I walked into was able to decipher what the hysterical crying foreigner was saying and told me I was only one subway stop from my hotel 🤣 I don't think I've ever said thank you so many times in my life!

After that, I can't say I've worried much when travelling. The thing I was afraid of happened and it wasn't the end of the world.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh no! Poor you — it would have been so stressful on your first international solo trip, and bless that helpful guy in the conbini! It sounds as if the whole experience left you with exactly the right kind of attitude to handle these types of situations.