well there was the xmas trip where every single present was stolen ut of our car … and another where in the desert between ca and azx state lines our car burnt up … but on that one we just took the bus and went to the wedding anyways
I was a child at the time, but I seem to recall being less than underwhelmed by the family vacation to Fiesta Texas, which IIRC had just opened and was not yet under the Six Flags banner. It was spring break (but not the cool kind—again, the family vacation kind), and unfortunately the weather hadn’t quite turned yet. Since the park had just opened, it hadn’t really gotten going yet, and there were only a few rides and some incredibly lame live shows (as all such shows were to me at the time, though I can’t say I’ve ever been to a theme park to judge the live entertainment as an adult). It was overcast, with intermittent rain all week. I think it was also the trip on which I lost a favorite stuffed animal (it was definitely on a trip to San Antonio).
To make matters worse, we lived not far from the much superior (at least at the time) Six Flags Over Texas. Maybe the tickets for the half-arsed opening to Fiesta Texas were just that much cheaper? But then we wouldn’t have had to stay in a motel to visit Six Flags…
Now as for my worst port visit… oh, I guess that would have to be Langkawi, Malaysia. But then this thread is supposed to be about vacations, so I’ll let it be.
The building where we’d rented it had an open garage area.
You make a good point, but we were young and knew nothing of cruises (knew no one who’d even taken one). This was pre-internet and more difficult to learn about them or get reviews.
We’ve learned to do this as well. The difficulty for most is getting this level of “integration” into a destination when confined to a 1 or 2 week vacation. As retirees, we recently spent 9 weeks traveling and exploring two areas in detail. We managed to see and interact with a variety of people at a level well beyond “tourist with margarita taking snapshots”. This included personal tours of areas closed to tourists. Like you, we watched with amusement as the throngs poured in on Memorial and Independence weekends, only to leave exhausted and sunburned Sunday morning.
Interesting tourist spots suffer from their own popularity. If we (society) build huge hotels, airports, ships and other infrastructure to service an attraction, it is guaranteed to be crowded with tourists. We’ve learned to avoid this by choosing the “2nd best” attraction, usually during the offseason. Some things (i.e. Grand Canyon) are so spectacular they are worth the wandering crowds. But you can also go to the second largest canyon in North America, during Thanksgiving week, and have the entire place to yourselves. This is the type of choice we’ve learned to make, and in the above example, explored the canyon while being the only ones in the campground. Nothing but us, stars, and coyotes while we contemplated the campfire at night.
My worst vacation was a 3-week road/camping trip to Glacier and Yellowstone. Due to a combination of bad weather and personal dynamics, the trip turned out to be a daily power struggle on what we were going to do and where we were going to stay. While I loved to camp, sitting in a tent or under a tarp for days on end in the rain or snow is not my idea of fun–I’d rather get a room and go to museums or see a movie. My companion, on the other hand, thought staying in hotels was for pussies.
It all came to a head in Yellowstone on a day when it was snowing off and on. At this point it had been in the mid-30s and raining off and on for a week. (this is mid-June) We were driving around a campground–I’m looking out the window and the campers were pretty miserable, huddling around their meager campfires with all their layers on. My friend pulls into a vacant site and asks me if it looks good. I turned to him and said “You know, I’m not interested in camping tonight–I have a little plastic card in my wallet that will let us be warm and dry.”
Well, that set off an argument that ranged beyond the camping issue and there was one conflict after another for the next 10 days. At one point I suggested that we part ways–I would rent a car in the next major town and drive myself home. That didn’t happen and we ended up not being on speaking terms at the end of the trip.
I haven’t had any vacations that were truly disasters like the ones some people posted. I guess the worst I can come up with are bad things that happened while on vacation.
So on that note, last fall I took my Miata on a road trip, driving north on CA-1. Woohoo, driving up the coast in a little roadster with the top down, stopping in little beach towns for a few nights along the way. Until towards the end of the trip, when I was in a restaurant having dinner. Apparently the driver of a big pickup truck didn’t see the little car parked next to him, turned the wheel too soon as he was backing out of the parking space, and smashed the front right corner of his truck into my driver’s door. He was at least honest about it, and came into the restaurant and found me, and we exchanged insurance information and all that. But it meant I had to spend a good chunk of the last day of the trip on the phone with the insurance adjuster rather than hiking in the redwoods. And the damage was bad enough that the driver’s door wouldn’t open, so for the rest of the trip I had to get in and out of the car by putting the top down and then climbing over the door. And once I got home it spent over a month in the shop getting fixed.
Ever since then I avoid parking next to large trucks.
I forgot another one. The whole trip wasn’t ruined, but it was about 2/3 a bust.
We went to France in about 1999. It was early days for finding house rentals on the internet, and I found what looked like a delightful “gite” (vacation rental) in a village in the countryside in the Burgundy region.
We finally found the place after driving while jet-lagged. The village was small and backward with scarcely a cafe or a bakery. The house was a tiny stone house between other stone houses. It was extremely rustic. The first night we stayed there, I was using the bathroom in the middle of the night, and something scuttled across the floor near my feet. I jerked my knees up almost to my chin, and turned on the light to see better. It was a many-legged hideous bug of some sort. I found out later that it was a “mille-patte”, or a centipede. We then discovered that the whole place was infested with centipedes.
Then we both came down with a nasty stomach bug, no doubt from the water supply in this picturesque village. We left the gite and went to Paris and checked into a modern hotel that had a doctor. He came and diagnosed “malade des voyageurs”, and told us to avoid milk, butter, cheese, chocolate, and coffee. In Paris!
I got over it quickly but poor Mr. brown was laid up for the entire rest of the trip. He struggled to accompany me to the Musee d’Orsay and other places, but he was pretty miserable.
Well water? It probably had never been tested. Geez, that would be rotten.
I once discovered I had walking pneumonia two days before leaving for England to celebrate Christmas with my ex and mutual friends, etc. In other words, packed with activities and living in a 225 y.o. house with no central heat. I couldn’t get warm, had no energy, and the ex refused to cancel any of our plans. I arrived Xmas Eve. Had Xmas day dinner with family and then off to work a racing event the following day, where the day started with sleet. Then off to Cambridge to stay with friends, celebrate Xmas again and off to a hockey game.
The whole two weeks were like that. I had done a Z-pack to deal with the pneumonia but I didn’t get well until I was back in the States with central heat and time to rest. I had fun, but I don’t want to repeat that sort of having fun while sick.