I have had a few crazy adventures in travel over the years.
A few months after I got my first drivers license, I was sent to help my Grandmother drive from Florida to Michigan. Someplace in Tennessee I made a wrong turn, got on the wrong expressway and drove for about 75 miles before we figured it out and turned around - opps!
The first time I went to London, I thought like an American tourist, and rented a car to drive from Gatwick to the hotel in Hammersmith. Driving on the opposite side of the street, shifting with my left hand, and utterly lost. I have driven past the landmarks of London. This is on the all time list of the ten-stupidest things I have ever done.
The first time I went to Rome, I missed a connection in Atlanta, due to a weather delay, and ended up in Frankfurt instead. We made it to Rome a couple of hours behind schedule.
After flying overnight from Alaska to Charlotte, with a change of planes in the middle of the night in Las Vegas, I boarded a plane for the last leg of the trip home, and we backed into another airplane, pulled forward and backed into it again. Oh, well, not the last leg of the trip.
Shortly after I was seated on a flight out of Atlanta one Thanksgiving weekend, the baggage conveyor ran into the side of the airplane - hard enough to leave a dent. We offloaded, and waited, customer service was saying that everything was overbooked for three days. The Pilot came off the plane and picked up the PA microphone. He said, "we have consulted with the engineers at Boeing and they have certified that the plane is safe to fly with the dent. We understand if you prefer to fly on another plane, but if you want to go, get back on board we are leaving in 20 minutes." I got back on.
Last summer I missed a turn, and we ended up in France for three minutes until I could make a U-Turn and go back across the river to Germany.
What is your greatest misadventure in travel?
One month post 9/11, flying into a Middle Eastern country but being stopped at London Heathrow because the visa in my passport had unbeknownst to me been granted according to the Arabic calendar which has fewer days per month than ours. And as the visa was written in Arabic I was unaware that the visa had expired the day prior. So after not being able to board the plane to continue my trip I was then amongst all the people in Heathrow who were hastily evacuated from the airport after a phony bomb threat was made. Took me a week in London to get the visa issue sorted.
ReplyDelete~ Freckles
rut row, freckles has found your blog! this is a good thing! :)
ReplyDelete1997, late august/early september, spouse and I were in chicago after taking amtrak from minneapolis. princess diana and mother teresa had just passed. we boarded another train to return to the DC burbs, BUT we saw our train would be terminating in pittsburgh. hurricane remnants had passed through PA and washed out the train tracks with a rock slide.
in pittsburgh, amtrak put us on a greyhound bus. sweet mother of pearl, what an effing nightmare! NO BUS EVER AGAIN!
the bus ride went just like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZkouut-9RQ
missing a flight seems to press a panic button like no other. I think in some previous life I missed the last helicopter out of Saigon or the last lifeboat from some sinking ship. What else explains my aversion to travel lest I am stranded somewhere.
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