Nightmare travel stories…what you NEVER want to happen to you!

Entertaining short stories of disasters you never want to happen to you.

 

Freezing, homeless looking travelers:

         My teenage daughter and I were traveling from Jacksonville Florida to Boston.  We missed our connecting flight due to plane delays and were stranded in the Dulles Airport.  We had to fly standby and the next flight wasn’t due in until the next morning at 6am. 

               We tried to find a section of seats where we could lay down, undisturbed and secluded from lots of people.  We only had our carry-on bag with us and we certainly didn’t have enough clothes for what we were going to encounter.  We were starting to get so tired and trying to get comfortable on the seats was almost impossible.  At this time, I think they turned the air conditioning on “freeze” and it got to flipping cold.  We looked at eat other, like “what the heck!?!”…this is like a meat cooler.  We were so cold our fingernails were blue.  We started to take every bit of clothing out of our carry-on bag and put it on.  We had 3 shirts on, clothes laid over our legs and socks on our hands.  We tried to put clothes over our heads because our noses were so frozen.  We finally fell asleep on the benches. 

We wake up to find people sitting all around us.  When we start to move, I notice people looking at us …. Probably wondering “who let in these homeless people”, or … “nice socks on your hands”.  No one spoke to us, they just stared.  My daughter and I looked at each other and starting laughing at our situation…. what a good story this will be 😊.

 

$400 Philadelphia Cheese Steak:

               Stranded on a lay-over in Philadelphia due to extreme fog.  We were on our way to a tropical vacation and we couldn’t get out.  People were so angry around us, yelling at the ladies at the desk at the gate.  I felt so bad for those employees who were having to try to help these not-so-nice people.  My husband was one of the angry people, but he never yelled at anyone…. He had a bit of a temper tantrum and walked away to cool off because there was 0% chance of getting out.  The bottom line was we were NOT getting out anytime soon. 

               We got a room for the night because our flight out wasn’t rescheduled until 11 am the following morning.  That was an unexpected $300.  We went to our hotel and had a drink at the bar so the husband could regroup… LOL.  While sitting there he asks the bartender… “Where can I get the BEST cheesesteak in Philly?”  The bartender tells him the name of the place, but said “It’s not close though”.  Why would that stop MY husband??…. I find ourselves in a taxi about 20 minutes later and we are going to the BEST cheesesteak place.    The taxi ride is about 30 minutes and cost us about $35 plus tip.  Not to mention the area looked a bit sketchy…. Ok, we order our Cheesesteak ($20) and it was delicious!  Now another $35 taxi ride back to the hotel. 

               All in all, that wonderful cheesesteak cost us about $400.  It was good, but not that good.  Oh, well… we made the best out of a crappy situation and actually ended up enjoying ourselves.

 

Dominican Tray Table:

               We are in the Dominican have gone through customs and are seated on the plane ready for take-off to fly home…. Wait a minute – there is a tray table that won’t secure in the up position.  The captain said we have to have this repaired before we can take off…ok this shouldn’t take long; I mean it’s only a tray table.  Holy crappolla was I wrong!!  We sit on the tarmac for hours, no exaggeration, HOURS!….no food, limited drinks, no air conditioning.  We can’t get off the plane because we have already gone through customs and we can’t get back into the airport.  Kids are crying… I’m almost crying for that matter. 

               Ok now we are probably 4 hours into this shit-show and the pilot comes on the overhead speaker and says he has some bad news for us.  Now that the tray table is being fixed… he, and the crew are almost out of flight hours and will be prohibited from flying if we don’t take off within the next hour.  The only crew available would need to be flown in from the States to take over (at least 4 more hours). 

               Update… tray table is fixed… we have received approval to fly into Miami and a fresh crew and captain will take over and then get us back to Boston.  So much cheering, claps and hoots!!  We made it home only about 10 hours later than planned!!  Good thing Boston wasn’t a connecting flight.

 

Costa Rican Abandonment!!

               We are in Costa Rica with 2 of our good friends, spending our last night having dinner and getting ready to rip it up.  Oh wait, what’s this email?  Your Jet Blue flight has been cancelled for tomorrow morning and you need to call in to rebook your flight.  Oh shit… so we are calling the Jet Blue service number to rebook our flight and we are on hold for about 3 hours over dinner (phone on speaker so we can eat).  We finally get through to a human… she tells us the flight has been cancelled (no explanation given to us at ALL!).  She says she can get us home NEXT Saturday (7 days later) and that is the ONLY flight she has.  Ok really?  You’re stranding an entire plane of 270 people in Costa Rica for another 7 days?!?…what the hell.  The couple traveling with us has a 7 year old child and need to get home…. We all need to work on Monday.  What a disaster!!

               The friend we are traveling with has a friend of hers who is a travel agent and she calls her.  LUCKILY, she can get us booked on another airline out of Costa Rica the next day – but it is another $600 per person to get home, AFTER we have already paid Jet Blue for our cancelled flight home.   We take it because we have to… we don’t have a choice (our hotel doesn’t even have any rooms available for us to stay even if we wanted to). 

               Long story short… Jet blue gives us a $400 voucher per couple to fly with them again within the next 12 months.  That’s it!  No thank you Jet Blue!

 

Way to start a trip!

               This embarrassing story is a very recent one.  So may I start by saying… I get car sick very easily…. I can’t read in the car, I can’t turn around to look in the back seat, I can’t ride in the back seat easily.  So we are traveling to Puerto Rico with another couple and their daughter.  It’s a snow storm where we live so we go to Boston the night before to be sure we can be at the airport just in case our flight can still get out.  I’ve told my husband we should book a hotel in Boston in the off chance our 1.5-hour travel would be in a snow storm.  No, he says… we’ll be fine.  Ok so the weather continues to look awful and we (last minute) call Boston hotels to get a room.  We find 1 room with 1 king size bed available… that’s it, nothing else available!!  We take it.  Our friends are also flying out with us so they get an Uber from Newmarket, NH to drop them off at our hotel.  Their Uber driver smells like pee and they are pretty sure he either peed his pants or a cat pissed all over the upholstery in his car. 

               Anyway, we all try to sleep in a room the size of a postage stamp with 5 people.  There is a mini-love seat (super small and narrow) in the room so our adult male friends sleeps there.  In the King-size bed is me, my husband, my friend and her 10-year-old daughter.  I guess I was snoring during the couple hours we did sleep and she had to get up and sleep on the floor covered with a complimentary house coat (that must have been so awful).  Her daughter was kicking my side all night and my husband was hanging on to the side of the bed so he wouldn’t fall off. 

               Ok so lots of fun already?… that’s not all.  We are driving to the airport to get dropped off at the terminal so my husband can go park… we missed a turn and had to turn around… the quick turns, morning lights through smeared  crappy windshield wipers…. Oh no… I’m getting hot and cold, sweaty… I say I’m going to get sick…. Before I had time to get my window all the way down.  PROJECTILE vomiting all over my door, my dashboard and me!  I even got splash on my friend in the backseat.  OMG!!  How embarrassing.  Clean up on Isle #2.  Luckily, I had paper towels in the car and Armor all cleaning wipes.  We got it all cleaned up and then I went in to clean myself.    What a way to start vacation!!