What Was Your Worst Travel Mishap?

I'll tell you my blunders if you tell me yours

A water buffalo blocking our Jeep in Kruger Park, South Africa.

Sometimes trips just don’t go our way. Crucial information gets lost in translation despite many aggressive gesticulations, or the bus drivers happen to go on strike the week you’re in town, or a bird poops on your last clean shirt. Other times, it’s operator error—like when I booked my flight home from South Africa for a month later than I’d intended and had to call my boss to tell her I wouldn’t make it back to New York by Monday (that day/month format will get us Americans every time).

But where would the fun be if everything always went right? As a mid-week bonus post, I’m asking other writers about their most legendary travel snafus, as well as sharing some of my biggest goofs.

Because Caravanserai is a community for the curious and adventuresome, I know you all have entertaining stories from your own terrible, horrible, no good, very bad travel days…and I want to hear all about them in the comments. Don’t hold out on me, friends! 

I’ll be back on Thursday with a big post on my philosophy of travel. It’ll be full of tips for how to avoid these sorts of bloopers and plan your best adventure yet.

Brenna

is the author of Kiss Me On Tulips, a newsletter about starting over and living an authentic, creative, and mindful life. She writes from Napoli, Italy, where she uses travel to stay inspired.   

My biggest travel mishap occurred when I was twenty-two years old and living in rural Verdun, France in 2011. I was working as a teacher and scraping by to travel locally on the weekends. My friend and I planned to visit Strasbourg, France to see the Christmas markets. Our mutual friend recommended we Couchsurf with three male French teachers who we heard were great hosts, although their place was “a little messy”.

When we arrived at the apartment, I stepped back in horror. Boxes, dirt, and books covered the entire floor, including three Christmas trees from the year before. With each foot I cautiously stepped further into the home, the stronger my sense of urgency was to bolt out the door. What was wrong with these people? It was already late and we didn’t have a backup plan. I convened with my friend briefly in the hallway: what should we do? We agreed that if anything got weird, we would bolt together. 

The hosts served us raclette, a local specialty, and we had great conversation and lots of wine, as I decided the only way I could sleep on this floor was if I was inebriated. I woke up, hungover but alive, my head lodged on a pillow tucked in between piles of crap.

Tom Fish

is the author of

Not That You Asked

, a travel diary consisting mostly of awkward urinal encounters and disappointing celebrity sightings. He lives in London, England, but is usually out of town.

When I was 18 some friends and I visited Italy on a two-week interrail pass. Our last stop was Rome, sort of. Sort of because we were cheap and so stayed in a camping resort on the very outskirts of the city. It was so far out you needed to take a bus and then the metro to get to the centre.

One night on our way home, we, of course, got on the wrong bus. Smarter people than us would, after a few stops and having realised their mistake, get off the bus. We didn’t. For some reason we decided the only option was to sit on the bus for its entire route, right until it reached the stop where we got on. This took over two hours, during which we had time to make friends with the other resort guests who had followed us onto the bus, seeing our wristbands and assuming we knew the way better than they did.

This included a German man who was travelling with two much younger women who didn’t talk much to us or to him, and instead just shrugged every time we made eye contact.

Our dreams of a lovely Italian meal back at the resort were dashed when we finally arrived back there at 11pm. Dinner had stopped being served, and our only option was to walk down the hard shoulder of a dual carriageway to a McDonald’s, where we sheepishly ate cheeseburgers and vowed never to take the bus in Italy ever again.

Lastly, here’s one from yours truly: My mom came to visit me in France at the end of my study abroad semester. I had been living in Lyon, but we decided to spend a few days in Paris, so she booked a random hotel on Expedia. It seemed OK at first, if perhaps not the absolute cleanest.

On day 3 of our trip, my mom woke me up at 6am, saying, “Sam, I need you to get out of bed, put everything in your suitcase, and zip it up. Quickly.” She used her gentlest, most soothing voice—a dead giveaway that something was horribly wrong. I did as I was told, shuffling bleary-eyed to the bathroom to gather up my toiletries. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something small and dark and fast dart under the door. A cockroach, my biggest phobia, was skittering around at my feet. If I hadn’t been fully awake before, I sure as hell was now. The only thing I could think of in my blind panic was to get to the high ground. Smash cut to me standing on top of the toilet, screaming bloody murder and waking up the entire neighborhood as my mom runs Charlie Chaplin-style circles around the room, arms flailing. I have no memory of how we got out of that jam—I must have blacked out while my mom smashed the little demon?—but we eventually marched downstairs to tell the concierge, who scoffed and said “well, it won’t kill you, you know.” Yeah, we got the hell out of that place. 

Yet somehow our Parisian misadventures weren’t over. When it came time to head to the airport, the express bus simply never showed up. Just as we started to worry about missing our flight, a taxi driver appeared, asking if we needed a ride. We thought it was divine providence…but we apparently hadn’t noticed there was a massive cab line across the street, right outside our hotel. One of the cabbies in that line had seen our driver jump the queue, and he was pissed.

He marched up to our driver’s window, shouting that there was a line and what the hell did he think he was doing. In an act of rage, he threw the back passenger door open, jumped onto my lap, and said, “fine, I’m coming with you!” (During this whole wretched exchange, my poor mother, who does not speak French, is yelling what are they saying? WHAT ARE THEY SAYING?? directly in my ear.) After a momentary standoff, the second cabbie got out of the car, and our driver saw his chance—he peeled out, the back passenger door still open and me hanging halfway out of it. Suddenly we were flying up the Champs Elysées and the driver was yelling at me to shut the damn door, but I couldn’t get it to close due to the acceleration of the car. So our driver stopped in the middle of traffic, got out, and slammed it in my face. We showed up to the airport incredibly frazzled. But hey, we made our flight—and on the freeway we passed the bus we’d been waiting for, still stuck in hellacious traffic on its way back into Paris!

Reader, I’m curious…

What travel fumbles do you look back and laugh about?

In case you missed it…

I wrote a mini guide to Cairo for

Brenna

, where I spill about the best cultural experiences and adventures in the city—but more importantly, the tastiest coffee and pastries. I also wrote an autofiction essay about life as a “trailing spouse” for paid subscribers, and interviewed

Michael Jensen

and

Brent Hartinger

—the men, the myths, the legends behind

Brent and Michael Are Going Places

. They told me all about Thailand, and were an absolute delight to chat with.

Up next…

This upcoming Thursday, I’m sending out a big, juicy post on my approach to travel and how to make the most of it, which will be free for all. The following week, paid subscribers will get an in-depth research essay about the ongoing marginalization of women and spouses in the American diplomatic corps. Upgrade your subscription to come along for the ride!