Some horror stories are fun to share. Here’s mine:
On the flight, my toddler screamed the whole way. Turns out, he had an ear infection.
Within a day of getting to the all-inclusive (our first and last ever) we all got tourista.
In the afternoon, the ocean was full of jelly fish. Of course, my daughter was stung.
On the way to the pool, my husband slipped down a set of concrete/tiled steps. He was carrying out toddler, and to protect the boy from the fall, he braced himself with his arms, resulting in giant, bloody gashes on both his elbows that required several stitches and yet another trip to a local doctor (the first was for said toddler’s ear infection.)
When it wasn’t hot-as-hell, it was raining.
Let’s say, everything went wrong. At least it makes for a memorable story.
Though I’m not sure if it was worse than my sister-in-law’s honeymoon in Tahiti during hurricane season. She said she and her husband spent most of their time in the hotel basement playing chess!
Honeymoon: We used a friend’s father’s travel agency. We wanted to go to the Bahamas, St Thomas and then New York city. I kept in touch with the agent. But we will say that he was a disaster. Instead of the 4/4/4/ night split we got 7 nights in the Bahamas, 2 in St Thomas and2 nights in New York. Hotels were crappy and expensive.
Our trip (for a business intro) was the ultimate disaster. We were diverted to newerk new Jersey. Our rent a car driver locked himself out of the office, he drove us back the airport…which was now closed. We found one blessed cab driver who drove us to New York. He called ahead to a hotel on then very problematic area. Cabbie walked us in.
The men at the desk asked if we had luggage. Yes. We had 4 suitcases, golf bag, two cases of liquor, and two carry ons. And yes, that was what they were asking.
When my oldest was about 12 or 13 and my twins were about 7, we decided that we would let my oldest invite a friend along on a one week beach vacation. He was a very nice, well-behaved boy we had met a number of times. Or so we thought. It started on the car ride. All of a sudden, my twins were yelling. The guest thought it would be hilarious to pull on their seat belts so that they “locked” and my twins couldn’t move at all. This went on several times. Yes, I should have been more assertive but we were taken aback by the behavior.
When we got to the rental space, the older boys got to share a room, my twins got to share a room and DH and I had the master bedroom. The guest, along with my son, marched into the master bedroom and removed our TV, announcing “we are the Masters.” This is something my son NEVER would have done on his own, and to this day I am disappointed that he was a “follower” that time. (He’ll be 30 next month, LOL)
We went out to eat every night and of course, the predominant menu item was fish, given that we were at the shore. After the 3rd night, our guest announced, “I wish we didn’t have to eat the same kind of food every night!” So, DH and I found an Italian restaurant for the next night, not something we’d usually pick at the shore. What does the guest order at the Italian restaurant? Linguini with shrimps! After dinner we stopped in an ice cream and candy place. My kids ordered $1.50 ice cream cones and I walk over to where the guest is standing, and he’s already ordered $10 worth of fudge!! We were paying, of course.
The week didn’t really get any better than that. But, I did get to teach all my kids about what it means to be a good guest if you are lucky enough to be invited along on someone else’s dime.
There’s an episode from the tv show Arthur where the family goes on a beach vacation that turns out horribly - it’s pouring rain, the hotel is awful, etc. Then they end up finding things to do here and there, like a fudge factory and a cow festival, and they ultimately have a really good time, even if it wasn’t what they were expecting.
It seems like every single vacation my family has, something goes wrong. Usually related to dietary issues. Or the first time we went to Disney, I was 5 and horribly sick. Or on New Year’s when we left my brother’s insulin behind. To be fair, stitches are a whole different level of awful, but in the end it usually leads to a memorable vacation to look back on.
The second half of our trip to Spain a few years ago. My daughter and I apparently ate something in Barcelona, and so we missed all of Madrid. Couldn’t move for days, felt terrible. Felt good enough to travel on our last day–at the airport, all four of us upgraded to First Class! Hurrah! Then, after hours, the flight was cancelled, we were all bused to a nearby hotel (in a scene of chaos and no information). The next day, no upgrade. “Well, can we at least go back into the frequent flier lounge since we were supposed to be flying first class?” “No.”
Ocean Beach when S was going into 9th grade. I left with a stomach bug which I had for a few days already. The first thing I did was have a soft shell crab sandwich (I knew I shouldn’t but I couldn’t help myself) and that only made my tummy troubles worse. Then, even though I was feeling lousy, I felt I had to go to the beach and decided to try boogie boarding. Well, I had a smash landing, broke ribs, had to go to an urgent care where they thought I was a drug addict because I was asking for pain pills! Of course they didn’t take my insurance so we had to fork over about $300 (I did submit and get reimbursed for 80% later.) I could barely move the rest of the time we were there and barely got any sleep so I was quite unpleasant to be around.
When we saw my oldest after my mom died, for Christmas, it was stressful.
We had two hotel rooms, and they ( she and her then BF) mostly were in ours, which wasn’t as big as I thought.
I thought we could play games or talk, but H wanted to watch TV and it was just tense.
Now he seems to have separation anxiety and barely lets me out of his sight. How do you get people bigger than you to see a therapist?
Another Christmas, wasnt really a nightmare, but it was hard.
Both I & youngest, who was two or three, had strep throat with ear involvement, and I had to drive almost 60 miles on a rural snowy road to see a Dr. ( H was staying back at lodge with oldest)
We had a situation similar to that once when we took a young teenager with us (paid) to help out with our younger children. It turned out to be much less of a help and more of a pain in the behind than we had anticipated. I felt very un-adult to have been so happy to be done with them when things ended. A lot of complaining and “entitlement” in terms of asserting themselves. In hindsight it makes me wonder whether the family had prepped them to not be “pushed around” by someone who had enough wherewithal to pay someone to help. In any case, instead of having kids of our own who needed looking after, we had that plus one, and the one was older and unpleasant to be around.
We did it again (and had done it before) with different personnel several times, and it was fine, but we made a bad choice the one time.
The other bad trip was a Hawaii vacation where it rained steadily for about 5 days, and we gradually realized that there was a media conspiracy to not broadcast weather forecasts. This was before the internet.
On May 27, 2015, I went to orientation at my college. Everything about it was amazing except the car ride to and from there. The only method we could find to transport me there was via tax. I lived about 130 miles away from the college, so that makes 260 miles to and from orientation. Let me state that taxi companies are not cheap, and a pair of 3-4 hour car rides aren’t so fun either.
Tent camping was supposed to be fun. We had even camped at this campground before. We could pick a spot right beside the lake, so you lifted your head up and could see the lake when you first woke up each morning.
Only we got there and the entire campground had been dug up to add water and electric service to every single campsite. Imagine the loose dirt that got tracked into the tent. Then imagine that it rained 9 inches in 36 hours. And we are trapped in a tiny 2 person tent, but we also have squeezed bil and his gf into the tent too, otherwise the whole point of vacationing with them would be lost.
We are hot, sticky wet from the rain, the mud, and the humidity. And we finally give up and drive back into civilization and find comfort in a restaurant that allowed us to enter even though we looked like we had just escaped from prison by digging out of the sewer system. We ate in silence. There were just no words for how awful we felt. The only thing we could discuss was how many years it would take before this would become a funny story.
One time when I was little we were visiting some family, far enough that we stayed there for a few days but we drove. I think I was 6 at the time and my sister would have been 3. We all got the flu or a cold or something.
Walking back from the beach, we looked around in a few stores and got ice cream. The kids and I continued walking. H was nowhere to be seen. I told the kids that he must have gone back into one of the stores to get me a present because it was my birthday. 45 minutes later he limped in, his ankle swollen to twice its normal size. Why did you walk away? I was yelling for you! Sorry, we didn’t hear you. Of course both phones were in the beach bag I was carrying.
We borrowed a car to drive to the nearest urgent care facility. It was broken.
