Vacations from hell

Parent Cafe
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Resurrecting this thread… :slight_smile:

A visit to relatives in Mexico with friends. On the first leg one of the friends, who stayed the night with us prior to flight, starts to look green and excuses himself to barf in the bathroom. Well, apparently what he has is virulent and fast moving, because on the 6 hour second leg our 6 month old baby gets sick. And when I say sick we’re talking Linda Blair sick-projectile vomit and explosive diarrhea. I’m trying to do my best to keep the stench down but of course the only alternative to changing her in the seat (not an option with the disgusting diaper leakage) is to cart this appalling mass of human effluent up and down the aisle to the bathroom at regular intervals, allowing all the other passengers to enjoy our olfactory treat. Use up every diaper the bag meant to cover a full 2 day delay could hold, as well as all the extra clothing. We arrive with her bare-bottomed and wrapped in nothing but my tank top and me in a puke and s***-covered sweater wet from my attempts to wash off the worst of it. I’m surprised they let us into the country.

The virus goes through the entire group, taking down all but one of the 11 of us over the course of the week. My turn comes on day 3 after my first trip to In-N-Out Burger on a cross-border trip to LegoLand San Diego. “In-N-Out” takes on a whole new meaning. Luckily it seems to last 2 days, one of “please God, let me die” illness followed by another to stop shaking and regain some basic hydration. Karmic payback for probably infecting an entire planeload of people on the way down comes in the form of the return flight, where a mechanical problem means the only way we can get back to the States within 24 hours is to hop onto a flight where we’re seated in the next to last row, by an apparently malfunctioning toilet and 3 rude and rowdy pre-teen unaccompanied minors, who proceed to spend the entire flight screaming and kicking the seats, waking my desperate to sleep child every 20 minutes. The harried flight attendants can do nothing, despite multiple threats to the parentless kids. I finally get them to stop by propping recently ill other child over the seat back and telling them I’d positioned him that way so that if he barfed due to their bashing it would land on them.

I’ve never been so happy to be home in my own bed!

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@Sue22 Wow!! That is enough to make me never want to travel again!!!

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One of my kids actually wrote a draft of a travel gone wrong story she’d experienced while traveling on her own as a possible CA college essay. She didn’t end up using it but I though it said a lot about her resilience and resourcefulness. Some of our family’s favorite stories are about things that went sideways on vacation.

We all remember the cousin’s green jacket the toddler threw up on while being given a piggyback in a Tokyo fish market the morning after a 20 hour journey from Boston. Cousin was good humored and earned her free trip.

The cow shower (yes, in the middle of a working dairy barn with cows standing nearby). Nothing has ever felt so good.

The relatives’ cabin, covered in every variety of spider imaginable, the week our toddler developed her spider phobia. She laughs when we still give her a hard time about her shrieks.

The creepy guy at the semi-private beach who spent an hour taking selfies of himself in muscleman poses. So entertaining!

The one hour small boat trip to an isolated Panama resort in the midst of what could only be described as a hurricane. Our kids proved their hardiness and learned the phrase “Watch the pilot. If he’s not panicking we’re still okay.”

The jerky and hard boiled egg apparently from the Paleocene Era offered as breakfast by the island tribe. 10 year old daughter knew enough to choke it down and not insult the hosts despite having spent the preceding 3 days sick and having vomited in the 8-seater seaplane that brought us to the floating village. She proudly earned her stripes as a traveler.

Getting really, really lost and finding unexpectedly wonderful places as a result.

35 years ago, the vodka used to defrost the windshield of the bus taking us from Glasgow to London after my flight was diverted due to fog and ice. This was on the tail of multiple mechanical issues resulting in a 34 hour trip from Boston to London. I and a group of other teens sat gathered in the rear seats singing and enjoying the treats being passed around.

Getting thrown by a horse, landing in the surf unharmed and coming up laughing, then walking 3 miles back to the stables.

The radiologist in Mexico called in to take X-rays of toddler daughter whose teeth had been knocked out by a huge falling fountain. Radiologist to grandmother “Don’t I know you?” Grandmother, “No, I don’t think so.” Radiologist, “Yes I do. I treat your dog!” We still joke about taking daughter to the vet for her health care.

The foreign cleaning solution that looked just like juice. Who puts pictures of fruit on the front of detergent? Thirsty kid was luckily unharmed.

The amazing doctor who somehow jerry-rigged an IV on an isolated Cambodian beach. Very Gilligan’s Island. Dehydrated kid snapped back quite well and had a great rest of the trip.

The kid who screamed “I love you [girlfriend]!” while bungie jumping off a bridge in Whistler. Yeah, girlfriend broke up with him a week later, but she was crazy anyway!

The monkeys at the Costa Rican nature reserve who lined up on the inside of the enclosure, allowing hubby to get nice and close, close enough for them to all, in concert, turn and pee on him. The kids have never laughed so hard.

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I’ve always told my kids that its the things that go wrong/the difficult or challenging moments while traveling that make for the best travel stories, ones we remember and tell for a lifetime. @Sue22’s posts above are proof of that. Hilarious!

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I wanna go on vacation with @Sue22!

On second thought, maybe not.

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@Sue22 - tell your Hubby that monkeys only choose the best of people to favor! I was branded by one last spring in an uncaged walk through area in Singapore. Lots of signs about how not to stare at the monkeys or they will attack, but no warning that if you edge into their turf, they might pee on you! I guess most of their visitors aren’t clueless Midwesterners like me.

My kids remember that Mom was the only one out of a whole barnful of visitors that the llamas at the petting zoo decided to spit on. But, I guess if those are my worst recollections, I’ve been lucky. Love the perspectives put on vacations by these stories!

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H and I took a very “budget” honeymoon to Jamaica back in the 80s, when Negril was just a couple cheap hotels on the beach. We wanted to go snorkeling one day so we saw some guys with a tiny boat sitting on the beach and paid them $10 to take us out. We had a great time snorkeling, but when we arrived back at the boat we noticed that the two guys had been spear fishing and had filled the bottom on the boat with fish (some dead, some still flopping around). When they tried to start the motor to take us back - no go! And then it started to rain. So there we are sitting in the middle of the ocean, in the rain, in a sketchy wooden boat that is rapidly filling up with rainwater and fish blood. And of course, no radio. After about 20 minutes of bailing, another fishing boat passed by and was able to tow us to shore. But the good part is that the guys gave us some of the fish to take back to our hotel for dinner.

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@Sue22 My sincere sympathies for your travel travails. And my sincere apologies for laughing out loud about them.

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@Anomander, you’re welcome to come along. Our travels are neither as perilous, nor as vomit filled as my post would lead one to believe. :slight_smile:

We do take a lot of trips, and we like to try new and out-of the-box experiences, to the point where we were easily able to convince our modest and not usually gullible teenager that on an upcoming trip to Asia we were going to be staying with an isolated indigenous tribal group who wore only a sort of thong, and when in Rome… Oh, and a BBC film crew would be there documenting our (largely naked) trip. Amazingly she took it in stride. I think she was a little disappointed when a couple of weeks before departure we revealed that it would be a much more conventional trip-elephant training and floating markets, but no topless living in a mud hut.

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Did you go to Chiang Mai? One of my kids has my researching this.

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We were in Chiang Rai, in the Golden Triangle, just north of Chiang Mai. It was among my favorite trips. The area was very beautiful and we were able to go into Laos and Myanmar for side trips. I’d highly recommend it.

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Thanks, the area fascinates me!

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Sometime staycations are the best. They can be very relaxing.

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I can’t remember my last vacation. I think it was in 1999. Stay-cations since then!

On the bright side - no vacations from hell since the last century!

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Work trip, not vacation. Rural India (Uttar Pradesh) - flew into Allahabad and traveled by car 2.5-3 hours each way every day to rural villages. Totally fascinated to see this part of the world and learn about people who live a completely different lifestyle. Was scrupulous about not eating anything that wasn’t from a Western style hotel, drinking only bottled water, etc. Didn’t matter - came down with dysentery, was confined to my hotel room, and spent several days eating nothing except milkshakes from room service and praying that I could get from my bed to the bathroom 15 feet away in time. Let’s just say that I threw out two pairs of pants and leave it at that. the bug stayed with me for a long time back in the states and resurged 2 months later - just as I was taking a trip to Japan (where sanitation is NOT an issue!). Was able to manage the digestive piece thanks to plain rice and tea, but then had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic that left angry red welts all over my body. Ugh!!

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Deleted - posted twice by accident

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@Pizzagirl
How did you manage to line up back-to-back trips to the furthest most endmembers of the toilet spectrum…

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2 trips to India is enough for a lifetime. Never again.

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Bummer you got so sick, PG. I’ve been to India twice but didn’t get sick on either trip. OTOH, I’m a HUGE believer in doing a probiotic diet before leaving – lots of yogurt – and take acidophilus pills during the trip. My husband, who travels to very remote places, and who used to get sick all the time, hasn’t had one bad spell since doing this regime. He didn’t even get sick after eating yak brains and drinking yak tea in Mongolia.

That said, on my last trip to India I came down with The Mother of All Pink Eye Infections. It took quite a long time and quite a lot of western antibiotics to get it under control.

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Great thread! @katliamom thank you for starting it. I’ve been to some holidays that have really stunk, but my first ever is not one I’m likely to forget.

It was a holiday to my home country (which shall remain unnamed for the time being) and I was a young kid. My mom hadn’t been back in almost 7 years, and so was excited to see her family again. My dad had work so he couldn’t join us (lucky him), so it was just me, my mom and the rest of my siblings.

Trouble started on the plane when my sister ran a high fever and my brother’s asthma started acting up. We couldn’t find his inhaler anywhere. Turns out it was in one of the bags in the overhead luggage, and my mom had to extract the bag and sift through it all by herself while my elder sister tried to keep us quiet. (None of the men on the plane offered to help my mom lift the bag back up, and to this day she likes to use this story as an example of the lack of chivalry in some men). My sister vomited all over my other sister due to her fever and then promptly fell asleep. Two people on the plane also started fighting, which prompted all the kids on the plane to have a “who can cry/shout louder” contest. For some reason, I joined in. Let’s just say that everyone stepped off the plane in a less than happy mood.

Out first night in my Grandma’s house, we decided to sleep outside in the garden (which was enclosed within the house) because the weather was nice and the rooms were all taken up by our other cousins who happened to visit at the same time. Mosquitoes then decided to bite every single inch of my body. The next day I developed a nasty rash and the bites turned to water filled blisters. To top it off, I ended up with Malaria. They gave me antibiotics that I remember did absolutely nothing to alleviate my misery. The fever did go away eventually, but I was very thin by that time ( I was 5 and lost like 7 kg).

One of my sisters was disgusted by the bathrooms in the house, and so “held it in” for three consecutive days. My mom found out and dragged her to the bathroom. When my mom asked her afterwards if she relieved herself, she smiled and said yes. She lied. She had to be rushed to the hospital eventually, where my mom picked up something from someone in the waiting room, and became sick with Typhoid (bear in mind that we already had vaccinations and a whole bag of prescription medicine that was supposed to stop this from happening).

I’ll spare you the rest of the details, but the rest of our stay did not get any better. The only remotely interesting thing we saw was courtesy of my somewhat morally skewed, asthmatic brother. My sister and I were sitting with him and two of our cousins in the living room and were really bored. Let me just preface this by saying that we particularly disliked said cousins at the time, as they were horrible and often condescending to us. My brother asked us if we wanted some “entertainment” and we innocently nodded. He then went and whispered something into my cousin’s ear and after a few moments had a hushed conversation with her brother. I have no idea what he said to them but they started fighting and hitting each other. He then went and told their mother that they were ‘frightening’ me and my sister with their violence. He ran back inside and instructed us to fake cry, which we did dutifully. We then watched as my aunt gave both of them an earful and a thrashing. My brother smirked, gave a little giggle, and then turned back to us and said " show’s over. Let’s go". He was 12 at the time. That this morally reprehensible act was the highlight of my holiday should tell you what kind of a vacation it was. My mother never looked happier boarding a plane when we headed back. We didn’t go visit again until a death in the family occurred.

Every time we share the stories from that vacation with our friends we get skeptical looks. I then proceed to show them the permanent scars I got from the mosquito bites on my arms and legs, and their doubts vanish.