Have you ever been in vacation hell?

Oh yeah!
Plane flight out of town was grounded because some wacko passenger opened the emergency door and jumped down to the tarmac while the plane was taxiing in to our gate. Because of the Terror Threat then the plane had to be gone over with a fine tooth comb to be sure he hadn’t planted explosives anywhere. Anyhoo, I had to wait two hours for another flight out of town and then when landing realized I had pinched my sciatic nerve and still had to catch a train and walk from that station to my friend’s apt. while dragging my suitcase. I was beat, beat up and it hurt too much to want to go walking about for meals or sightseeing which we’d planned. If felt like one huge bummer. On the return trip then my plane couldn’t land because of tarmac traffic so I missed my connecting flight- the last of the night to my city. I had to sleep overnight in the terminal, freezing and with no food for more than 12hrs. Garrrr!

Last year I got stuck for two days in a beautiful little B&B in one of my favorite vacation retreats, Flagstaff, with an old but long-since kaput GF who asked me to help her finish her ‘07 and ‘08 tax returns. Top that for hell.

Coming back from my Cruise to Alaska. Hottest day ever in Portland, Ore. It was supposed to be an hour layover. We were stuck at the airport for 6 hours. AC in the Airport was broken and it smelled like the toilets were backed up.

Nope, it never happened. Once, when I was stranded in the Denver airport because of snow, with a little two year old, I gathered all the other children together and we made Christmas trees (corn stalks) out of newspapers people gave us. Several people around us came up with decorations for the children to put on their “trees”.

From there we went on to coloring a giant mural on the paper one of the restaurants gave us. What? You don’t carry Crayons around in your purse? Well, I do.

In the hours that followed, we had a picnic with the food people brought over for us, and played newspaper baseball on the floor. (Roll up newspaper balls, use newspaper bats), and I and other parents read from the books that people bought for us.

When the planes started flying again, some kids didn’t want to leave. They took home the newspaper houses (boxes) I showed them how to make.

Oh @Austinlad, you really should not have thrown down the gaunlet.
I went to the beach, against my better judegment with a b/f that I knew I really didn’t like, but just wanted to go to the beach. I knew he really didn’t like me either, just wanted someone to go to the beach with. He snorted 3 ambiens in front of me on our first night there (crushed them up to see what rush he could get from them) and left me in the room alone. When he got back at 5 a.m. he was so drugged up he could barely talk, but told me had been to a strip joint.

Oh yeah. We took a family vacation to Florida (Disney) one year. My sister-in-laws grandparents decided to tag along. It was a long vacation and it took all my will power to keep my mouth shut out of respect for my sister-in-law.

@chyna:—Perhaps we know the same guy? I had one who alerted me to the fact he was high on Cocaine when I went to visit him and then he offered it to me. When I refused then he went and snorted all huge, all of it and then announced to me, “okay, it’s gone now”. ~

@Neizvestnaya Oh yeah, same guy. I found out later he was out buying cocaine before the beach trip.

@chyna: Heh, like clockwork- Cocaine followed by some Valium and enough booze to pass out drooling. Yay, guys!

Back in 1988, when my two grown children were still young, we left early in the morning on a road trip on I-5 from our home in Sacramento. Our destination was Anaheim (Disneyland., of course). There were six of us in my parents’ van- my parents, my girls, my wife, and myself.   About two hours into our trip we got a flat tire. (Bad omen number one.) After fixing this we headed down the highway. Another hour passed and we came to a stop as there was a dead body on the road. (Bad omen number two.) Apparently an inmate from some jail had escaped and was hit by a semi while trying to cross the interstate. I remember his shoes had been knocked off his feet. Fortunately both my daughters were asleep during this time and missed seeing this. It was rather hot that day and about another hour on our AC went out (Bad omen number three.) Right before we hit the Grapevine (that would have been another hour and a half or so) my (then) youngest daughter threw up all over the back of the van. When we felt her head she obviously had a fever. (Bad Oman number four.). We decided the half hour trip to the nearest hospital, which was in Bakersfield, would be too much for my daughter in a van with no air conditioning. So we took her in an ambulance. The emergency room was the busiest I’ve ever seen in any hospital and we had to wait for hours. (Bad omen five.). After they finally saw my daughter they took some blood tests, which was quite traumatic to my five-year-old and then had us wait back in the crowded waiting room for results. After waiting what seemed an eternity they called for us to come up to the counter. Apparently they couldn’t locate the vials of blood they had taken from my daughter and would have take some again. (Bad omen number six.). This caused quite a panic for my little girl and she broke down crying.  I also remember my older daughter finally breaking down a little later. Fortunately the tests didn’t show anything and we decided this trip just wasn’t meant to be. After spending the night in Bakersfield we headed for home early enough in the day before the heat would affect us.  Her fever had broken the morning we headed back and the following day we took her to her own doctor. He said she seemed fine and okayed her for another trip. We tried again the following day and, fortunately, our trip down was uneventful. If I had been a believer I would have sworn that God was trying to tell us he didn’t want us to make it to Disneyland.

I hate going after the ubiquitous Astroturf. But anyway: it was a relatively short drive about 7 years ago with my partner – 3 hours long. Relatively for those of you who live in countries with 3–4 time zones. For me, it took forever because we had an argument the whole way. And she was winning. She later wrote about it on a rock, believe it or not, which she threw at my head – and I still have it – the stitches and the stone. We recently started dating again. I don’t argue with her anymore, or at least I try not to when there are heavy things around. I try to keep the fighting to when we’re either naked, or in a body of water, to soften the inevitable blows.

In 2008 my wife and I went on a cruise to the Galapagos Islands to see all the animals and plants and geology of the area. We had a great trip until it was time to leave. The following is a couple of paragraphs from my trip journal:

5p.m. 9–23-2008. “Everything was going great. Such a smooth trip!” I thought as I stood in line to get our boarding passes on the LAN-Ecuador airline in the Quito airport. Then A woman working for LAN told me “Your flight has been cancelled… We notified everyone two months ago (a lie)... You are scheduled for a flight tomorrow…come back tomorrow at 1630 p.m.” Then she said “I’ll try to get you on a flight to Lima to Miami tonight (another lie). (No one at LAN offered us a hotel room with food & transportation) ..Wait here, I’ll be right back.” (another lie she never came back and ignored me when I saw her later). I waited there for over half an hour while Fay (wife) talked to a manager in the LAN office for help. Meanwhile there were 2 power outages. Standing in the dark, I called Fay on the walkie-talkie and said “We gota-get-outa-here!”. When the lights came back on, the manager said that she could fly us to L.A. that evening at 10:30 but not all the way to Seattle as that route was too expensive. In order to get home without paying more we would have to come back tomorrow for the cheaper flight to Miami. So Fay said “Just get us to L.A. and we’ll pay to get the rest of the way to Seattle. So we got on the plane to L.A. And while in flight, we planned a diabolical retaliation on LAN and it worked.

9–24-2008
As soon as we arrived in LAX, We went to American and United Air Lines and got their
support that LAN Air Lines was responsible for returning us home. American even made
reservations for us on Alaska. With this support we went to LAN at LAX and politely
(with smiling faces) requested a ticket for Seattle. The LAN people were very nice and
also smiling and said that they would have to call LAN at Quito. We waited there standing
in place for 45 minutes. While we waited Fay read her novel and I did leg exercises.
We were there so long that 2 sets of security guards asked us why we were there. Finally
we were told that Quito only authorized the L.A. tickets because we said that we
were only going to L.A. So with smiling faces we said “Oh no, there must have been a
miscommunication” (a big fat juicy lie, yeah!!!). Then while the man wrote out our tickets
by hand I told him “I’m sorry for making your job more difficult” (lie). And he smiled and
sail “It’s no problem.” (lier). They act so friendly while they treat you badly. As we
walked away with our tickets, I thought that you have to be strong, have infinite patience
for world travel. When we stepped onto the terminal at SEA, I got down on my hands and knees and kissed the ground. It was good to be home. I looked at my watch and saw that our total trip time from Quito, Ecuador was 19 hours an 4 minutes. Not too bad.