Your worst holiday.....ever!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Ours was to Tunisia and was an utter and absolute shambles from start to finish

The flight was delayed 7 hours going out, the airline graciously gave us each a £5 voucher which was enough for a pint and a stale sandwich.

So we arrived in Tunisia, got on the coach to transfer to our hotel and about 500 yards down the road another coach ploughed into the side of ours…great!

We’re stood at the side of the road waiting for another coach to pick us up…we stood there for 3 hours in the blistering heat with no shade and no bars to take refuge in.

Eventually coach #2 arrives and we set off, after a few hundred yards this fucker breaks down, smoke billowing from under the bonnet/hood.

So we are again stood for another 2 hours waiting for coach #3.

We all pile on when it arrives and eventually get to our hotel. The courier calls us into a meeting to explain that our luggage which is still on coach #1 will be with us within the hour :dubious:

We check into our room, the AC is off and out of order so the hotel has supplied us with a 7" fan…seven fucking inches!! no more use than a chocolate fire guard.

We shower, the water runs cold after about 5 minutes, I mean ICY cold. My dick shrinks to about 00001" and Mrs Cs nipples are about 4" long.

So anyway we phone reception and ask about our luggage and are told it not be with us until tomorrow. Dressed in the clothes we set off from England in we go seeking the holiday rep, she has gone home :frowning:

We decide on a drink and make our way to the bar…the bar is closed :eek:

OK we go out of the hotel and walk about 1/2 mile to a bar, sit down and order 2 glasses of cold lager, no luck, the “bar” does not serve booze of any sort.

Yours truly is thoroughly cheesed off by now, sweaty,thirsty, hungry and tired we return to the hotel, walking slowly down this street which has half finished buildings on one side and waste ground to the other. It starts to rain…really heavy rain, torrential fucking rain to be honest with you.

Arriving back at the hotel we discover our luggage has arrived :stuck_out_tongue: but whoever dropped it off left it outside the hotel and the rain has flooded the forecourt and our luggage :frowning:

Should have cut our losses at this point and tried to get a flight back home but no, we chowders are a stubborn breed, we stayed.

That evening we decide to go to a casino. I can’t take my camera inside so it’s left with a security guard as is Mrs Cs .

We lose about £50 in a matter of minutes and think “Fuck it” we’ll go back to the hotel and get shitfaced. We ask for our cameras, they can’t be found, great, just bloody great.

At this pint we are wondering why God hates us so much, but decide it’s just His way of having a laugh.

The following morning we contact the holiday rep about the lack of AC, she tells us it will be back on this very day…it isn’t and doesn’t come back on until the day we leave. Hot sweaty irritable sleepless nights are to be our companion for the next 13 long nights.

We returned home absolutely knackered but on the good side the holiday company gave us EACH a £25 refund…a whole £50 :frowning:

We never went back to Tunisia and as a gentleman at the hotel bar said to us “If we had known what a shitty country this really is we wouldn’t have fought the Germans here, we’d have begged 'em to take it”.

The flight back to England is delayed by 5 hours.

I 've also been to Egypt but that’s another tale, not for the faint hearted.

That’s my tale of woe…your turn now

2

Hmmm, I was justing thinking about planning a vacation to Tunisia. Scratch that.

3

We decided to take up camping, so I bought a family dome tent at a bargain price on eBay…

(actually, I could stop there and you’d be able to work the rest out for yourself)

… the description said ‘pitched only once’ - on reflection, we think this is true, but that it was pitched on a site for a whole season, maybe at some place where you can go and rent a ready-pitched tent.

Anyway… our first time out in the tent, just for a couple of days in the half-term hols, was OK, so we booked a 10-day stay at a nice site in Somerset.
It was dry for about an hour or two after we arrived and pitched the tent - after that, it pissed down, continually. After a day, the tent started to leak a bit. After another day, it started leaking a lot and by the end of the third day, water was streaming through the canvas in places - our clothes, bedding, food, shoes, were all soaked - we tried drying stuff in the site’s tumble dryer, but it was a losing battle. The rain continued to piss down, the river next to us (“yeah, let’s pitch right next to the river! That’ll be great, won’t it?”) turned from a tinkling brook into a raging torrent and threatened to burst its banks.

So we sat there in the wet tent, in wet clothes, eating wet food - it was 7pm on the third day and we decided to check the weather forecast for the rest of the week - if it was going to dry out, we’d have stayed - we were in a deep valley, so I had to hike up to the top of a hill in the pouring rain to get a signal on my phone - I checked the weather on the web and yes, at least three more days of heavy rain.

We packed up everything into the car and drove home, arriving back at home a little after midnight. To their credit, the camp site offered us a full refund, but I asked them to keep it as credit against our next visit - as an incentive for us not to give up completely.

I dumped the tent and bought a brand new one this time, from a shop, and we did go back to that site the next year (and it was lovely).

4

Nothing to add to the OP, except that if you want **ubiquitous and functioning **A/C in the MENA region, then there’s really only one country that can provide it…

Luckily, it’s the one I’m living in, or I’d go nuts from the heat, myself! :eek:

Yes, I know it’s a lot more expensive here than in Tunisia. OTOH, you’re unlikely to run into that kind of “fun” while here. Think about it before your next vacation :slight_smile:

Sorry you had that bad experience, BTW! :frowning:

5

I must have been about eight, which would make my sisters six and three.

It was a two-day car trip to get there and we were going to camp overnight. Not in like an RV or anything… we had a pup tent from like the 50s that the three of us girls were supposed to sleep in, and then a bigger one for my parents.

On the first day, my sister (the six year old) puked up her lunch. But… I guess my parents had decided there was no turning back. So onward we went. The little one got the middle seat in the van all by herself because she kept whining, and I got to sit in the way back with puking Margaret. who was also whining.

So we reach the campgrounds and set up camp. My poor puking sister got to sleep in the car. I got Anne, the three-year-old, in the pup tent with me.

But, just my luck, my dad and Margaret and Margaret’s nasty friend had been telling darling whiny Anne about all the monsters and bugs that live in the woods. So all she did all night was whine her head off (which, in retrospect, was almost understandable. But it annoyed the hell out of me at the time. And that girl was and is an olympic champion whiner, so it would probably still annoy me.) and wake me up every time I got to sleep, and then fall asleep in my lap so I couldn’t move without waking her.

Soooo morning comes around, we all load back into the car… Maggie was feeling a bit better by that time, but still not great… she was sweaty and feverish, but not puking much anymore. But… oh joy of joys being the big sister, I got to ride in the back with her again and got to spent most of the remainder of the trip with her sweaty head on my shoulder.

We finally reach our destination- my grandmother’s house. joy! but… she was out for the night and had plans for the next day, so we all got to spend the first night and first full day sitting talking to my grandfather (who, bless him, utterly creeped me out. I feel bad about it now, but he wasn’t in good health, which scared me, and was very gruff/stern and… odd.)

The second full day, Margaret was over her bug, but Anne started puking. And Anne is the golden child, so her being ill meant we couldn’t do anything but wait around for her to get better. Which took us to the third day. Annie was feeling better around the middle of the day, so we went out to my aunt’s apartment’s swimming pool.

The fourth day, we went to some, like, ruined mission we also always go to. It was horribly hot, and I started feeling really ill while we were at the Mission (all outdoors.) but my parents got mad because they knew I didn’t want to go to the stupid mission in the first place, and we stayed until dinnertime. I was feeling even worse by then… we went to some sort of diner-type restaurant, which smelled like deep-fried stuff. I started puking there.

The fifth day, I was still puking, but we hit a bunch of other outdoor historical places with a lot of walking and heat not a lot of anything interesting. So my sisters were bored and cranky, which made my parents cranky, and everybody was hot and I was sick and all the fun things we had planned on doing had been skipped on account of we lost time with my sisters being sick and they weren’t going to skip the things they wanted to do.

The next day, we set out for home. We had planned three days out camping between Texas and home, so… we set up camp. I was still quite ill at this point. But this campground had spiders. Daddy longlegs, so they weren’t really anything dangerous, but Anne FREAKED OUT. And Maggie kept torturing her, so Maggie ended up sleeping in the car again while I, still puking, got another night in the pup tent with whining Anne.

… the next two days were mostly just a continuation of that night, except that I ad stopped eating, and so stopped puking and was just miserable until we got home.

6

Dad died in February of 2000, after a series of bouts with cancer (no condolences needed, thanks, it’s been a while). I’d spent the last two years helping care for him and having temp jobs, most pretty lousy.

After Dad’s death, Mom was clutching my neck so tightly that one of our parish priests warned her not to “try and substitute her husband with one of her children.”

I got a temp job in July which became permanent in March of 2001; moved out again that same month. It was that or dying, I swear. The job was in the weekend shift; most of our hours came from working 12-hr shifts on weekends and vacation periods. The factory closes completely during the last week of July; for the first 15 days of August, us weekenders were on duty.

Mom had started badgering me about vacation since I’d been told I’d be made perma (I was told in December, they waited until March because of a new law that was coming out in February). The idea was a roadtrip through Castilla-León. From my hometown in southern Navarra to Burgos, then León, Palencia, Nájera. From the start I’d been saying (or trying to say) “since we’ll be in León for two nights, why not go to Astorga?” Mom would react with irritation, even anger.

We were in my first Yaris, a green Luna. I was bringing one backpack. Mom brought three suitcases, one large sports bag and a full-body pillow (she hugs it to sleep). Shared rooms all the way. Mom snored fit to wake the bricks on the wall; I can sleep through WWIII if I’ve fallen asleep, but I need silence in order to, you know, do the actual falling. I barely slept the whole trip. I was used to having breakfast at 5am or dinner at 7am (depending on which shift I’d been in) - she was used to breakfast at 10am. We ate when she wanted to eat. I need salt and proteins in my breakfast; never got any during the whole trip, it was always pastries :frowning:

Burgos is gorgeous and I got a sculpture I just love; the artist was only a local boy back then but I’ve been seeing his work everywhere later.

Mom loves Romanic art. I hate it. I love Roman engineering and Gothic art. She hates them. She claims to hate Baroque - I’ve been pointing out “it’s Baroque” every time she exclaims “what an expressive (sculptute of Our) Lady!” since that trip :stuck_out_tongue: way not to like Baroque, Mom. Her favourite artists ever are Antoni Gaudí and Alphonse Mucha: when in doubt, we make her a gift of Yet Another Art Decó Book.
Dad expected us kids to be able to tell him what kind of art a building was, years before anybody had taught us - and there’s styles nobody tells you about in class (Visigoth or Templar, to name two you find in Spain). The way I learned to tell Gothic from Romanic from Templar was:
— if it’s a very old church with those long beautiful windows, very tall, and I like it a lot, it’s Gothic.
— if it’s small, dark, rectangular and makes me feel like I’m trapped, it’s Romanic.
— if it’s small and dark, very geometric with a strange shape (hexagons, heptagons…) and doesn’t make me feel threatened, it’s Templar.

In León and after visiting the Romanic and Gothic cathedrals, we hired a local guide for a “walking general tour.” When the guide told us her name was Ana, we both exclaimed “congratulations!” She was mightily surprised until we explained that St Anne and St Joachim are our hometown’s patrons, so of course we knew it was their feast :smiley: Great tour.

There’s a house in León by Gaudí: La Casa de Los Botines. Botín, meaning booty in the pirate sense, is the family who owns the biggest privately-owned bank in Spain (perhaps the biggest, period, but I’m not finance so I don’t really know). There is a sculptor who makes sculptures of famous people, seating them on public banks. In León he has a Gaudí in front of Casa Botines. When the guide said “and here you have the sculpture of Gaudí,” Mom suddenly went :confused: :eek: :o “…GAUDÍ?”

Ana: “yes, he built this house and…”
Me: “which is why I’d been proposing Astorga!”
Mom: “really?”
Me: “why did you think?”
Mom: “uh, the roman stuff, you know I don’t like that…”
Me: “I so appreciate your taking my tastes into account, Mom. I have to swallow all the Romanic in Castilla and you can’t put up with a single aqueduct, gee thanks. I also really, truly appreciate your having let me explain why I wanted to go to Astorga. May we go to Astorga tomorrow, now that you’ve remembered Gaudí built the Archbishop’s palace there?”

Later telling my brothers about this incident, Mom was claiming that I’d never mentioned Astorga until we were in León - they said that yes I had and listed times I had. This was part of her post-Dad’s-death retraining on “treating us like we own three brains between the three of us.”

We went to Astorga, moved on to Palencia (where we discovered a throve of Art Decó architecture that we didn’t expect at all), then to Nájera. In Nájera we happened to hit upon the last day of a local festival where the neighbors act in a play about the history of the town. The Kingdom of Navarra started its life as Kingdom of Nájera.

On the trip home, we stopped at San Millán de la Cogolla, whose “lower” monastery (Monasterio de Yuso) holds a book containing the first written words in both Spanish and Basque.

The only times she stopped making noise with her mouth in the whole trip were when I cut her and when she was listening to a guide. I specifically did not say “stopped talking” because of the snoring - oh God of Mercy, the snoring!

By the time we got home, I had gastrenteritis from the stress. The first week I was on night shift; I spent most of it doubled over with pain in my chair. It wasn’t until several months later that I found out that it was actually something for which I should have stayed at home and maybe even gone to the ER.

The places we visited? 8 over 10 (remember, I hate Romanic). The trip itself? URGH! Being able to start teaching Mom manners? Real cool but if I have to do it again in another lifetime I’d like to skip the sleepless night and the gastrenteritis - thank you.

7

I think you’re more than likely right about the A/C business.

I’ve been to Egypt, Morocco and Turkey as well as Tunisia.

Not once has the A/C been up to scratch even tho’ I’ve stayed in 4 star hotels. Nope not once, oh it’s worked, sort of :dubious: , but not efficiently enough to guarantee a decent nights kip.

There have been times (Turkey) when I’ve got out of bed, showered, then lay down still wet through in the hope of getting some sleep.

It may well be that Israel could be one of the next places I visit before I pop my clogs, it sure won’t be any of the above…ever

8

I’m going to bring this thread up (particularly, chowder’s post) whenever Europeans start bitching that Americans don’t travel outside of America as much as they should.

“See the world!” my foot!

9

Last summer. The first week of August. We packed up our 2.5 yr old and 8 month old for a week of camping at the beach in Lewes, DE. We’d done the camping at the beach thing before. We are seasoned campers.
What we didn’t count on was:
Record heat, around 105degF
Insane humidity
Lack of any kind of breeze with which to drive away the. . .
Swarms of biting flies
Which bit me on the legs, which were already covered with . . .
Poison ivy, except for my Mom who thinks she had chigger bites on her legs.
Oh, yes. My parents and brother were at an adjacent campsite.
What I hadn’t counted on was that my mother is going through “the change” and having
Hot flashes and . . .
Irrational displays of temper accompanied by
Loud and public criticism of my parenting skills.

We’re not going on vacation this year.

10

Honey, traveling with my mother can be a bitch in any country :slight_smile:

11

While there were some horrible aspects of other trips – like, say, getting trapped in a cycle of airline hell after someone jumped in front of our train in Germany, causing us to be very late – there is one trip that is definitely my Worst Holiday Ever.

It was a trip to Grandma’s house at Christmastime.

Participants:

  • My dad, who most assuredly did NOT want to go, but insisted on going anyway to keep up appearances, no matter how much my mom said he didn’t have to go
  • My mom, whose parents we were visiting, and who had the stress of her own family along with her mother, who has been a little more than slightly needy
  • Myself, back from college in my freshman year; I had driven 6 hours to get home late one night, and my father insisted we leave at 6am the next morning for our 8 hour drive. Oh, and right before I left for college, my dad and I had a huge fight, and he gave me the silent treatment for six months (including at Thanksgiving).
  • My younger sister in high school
  • My other younger sister in 6th grade
  • Our golden retreiver

So we leave from central Iowa to middle-of-farking-nowhere Oklahoma at the crack of freaking dawn. I am pretty miserable and try to sleep in the back of the minivan, but it is too loud and bumpy. I feel kind of sick.

About 20 miles into the trip, smoke starts pouring out of the heating vents. We pull over and evacuate the car but nothing bad seems to happen. I’m pretty tired, so I don’t remember this too clearly, but there was a lot of arguing. The heater will now only work on full blast.

My father insists we keep going, but without the heater. It is farking freezing. At one point, we stop for gas in Kansas and my mom turns on the heater all the way for the whole time my dad is in the bathroom because we are so miserable. When he returns, he starts yelling at my mom and my mom is irritated enough with him to yell back. Tensions are high throughout the whole ride.

Finally we get there. I am stressed out because I’m vegetarian, but they have nearly nothing I can eat - only cheese and coleslaw. Also, I am not allowed to drive to the store, because our car is broken and they don’t want us to drive the other cars. The next day, we take the car in but I am still not able to get anything to eat.

My dad simmers the entire time and closes himself off in a bedroom by himself all day. He barely interacts with us except for opening presents, and generally acts like a jerk the whole time, ruining the trip.

The weather is bad so we are stuck in a farmhouse. It turns out the smoke in the car was a dead mouse that had gotten in the engine. It takes several days to repair with limited mobility to leave said farmhouse. I am angry because I have to subsist on crap – I had no car at college, had no time to go to the store because of my dad’s rigid travel schedule, and now can’t get anywhere to get something decent to eat. I end up becoming sick, which blows even the rest of the winter break after we get back.

By the end of the trip, my parents were furious with each other and my dad always had precious little tolerance for us kids to begin with. The ride back was awful. It was New Year’s Day and there were cops running speed traps all through Kansas, slowing traffic to a crawl. Literally there were 25 or more cops with people pulled over, with more waiting and running radar, and people got freaked out and started driving way below the limit. It took forever to get home.

My parents ended up getting separated shortly after this. It wasn’t the cause - the marriage was on the rocks - but this trip definitely was the last straw.

12

Oh but you guys should see the world…some of it at least

Just avoid the ME

Did I mention the flies in Egypt??

Big as fucking bats they are

13

You type really well for someone with so obvious a head injury :wink:

Camping with an 8 month old would be …damn, no way.

14

Thanks!
Camping with babies is old hat in our family. They’re actually pretty easy to take anywhere until they’re mobile, then all bets are off. I honestly think she’s the only one who had fun on the trip. She got to nap in a hammock and go swimming naked in the rubbermaid storage bin that we used for supplies (mostly to keep her cool). She’s pretty easy going.

15

My worst trip? I gotta go with one time I went camping with my dad. I must have been around 15 at the time.

Now, my dad is a seasoned outdoorsman; he grew up in the woods, and we went camping a lot. However, his ideas of adventure were a trifle more adventurous than mine - he really liked to explore, to break new ground. Simetimes this was a great idea, sometimes not.

Every summer for many years he’d take a few weeks off and go canoing with me in the wilderness near lake Kippawa in northern Quebec. There are a number of well-known canoing routes that run through there; he preferred to fly in on a floatplane, and canoe out, on a route he’d traced himself on topographic maps.

Well, this particular trip started unpleasantly. The guys flying the floatplane were pretty obviously drunk, something we discovered when in the air, mostly because of the empty booze bottles rolling around on the floor of the plane - this was a quarter of a century ago, but still it raised alarm bells. Then, we ran into turbulence. By the time we landed (on a lake the size of a postage stamp, seemingly) we were both turning green.

We landed in the rain. While setting up camp that first night, we made an awful discovery: somehow, a pack containing much of our food had got left behind. We didn’t really have enough to eat, to get back.

The next day, we started out … and discovered one of the perils of choosing your route by topographic map: what appear to be wide streams on the map were in reality mere trickles of water. We spent the first couple of days hauling the canoe down these creeks, generally wading it over rocks and deadfalls. In our underwear, to keep our clothes as dry as we could. In the rain.

Sadly, these streams were thick with leeches. We had to take breaks to pick them off. Naturally, mosquitos had a field day as well.

Did I mention it rained cointinually the whole time? Sometimes a downpour, sometimes Scotch mist - it never let up. For two solid weeks. By the second week, finding anything that would burn became really, really difficult - if my dad did not know some tricks involving pine stumps, we would have been without fire. As it was, making a fire was an ordeal.

If fish were not abundant, I don’t know if we’d have made it - forunately, we were able to catch as many as we wanted. Fresh fish is tasty, but after two weeks, not so much.

A memory of that trip: sitting in the canvass tent watching the rain fall, while my dad and I used playing-cards to scrape the last of the peanut butter out of a plastic tub. It was our last non-foraged food, and we were still days away from escaping.

Another memory: making a stew of some pike we caught, and forgetting to put the top on it. Next morning, it had a skin of dead mosquitoes a half inch thick on it, attracted by the heat and drowned. We scraped them off, re-heated the stew and had it for breakfast.

I was never so happy as when we finally canoed back to civilization.

In spite of it all, I must admit I’m greatful to my dad for giving me such experiences - most of the camping trips we did were great. On this one, everything conspired to make it unpleasant.

16

I went to a professional baseball game (minor league) a few years back with a group which inclued a 6 month old. The game got rained out–in fact it was raining by the time we got to the ballpark. Many folk kept coming up to comment on how well the baby was doing with the rain. Well, Baby didn’t know that the evening’s entertainment was supposed to include a cookout and a baseball game. She was dry, being held by her grandmother, and had lots of fun stuff to watch. She might have lost patience later, but since the game was rained out, we got home in time for Mommy to nurse her, and put her to bed at her usual time.

17

During my honeymoon in the Caribbean:

The airline lost our bags.
After a couple of hours in the airport, we got given a voucher for €70 as compensation. But as Guadeloupe’s expensive, and all we had were our European clothes, and it was about 100F outside, it didn’t go far in re-clothing us.
The hotel was overpriced and underdeveloped.
We went to the beach and a guy offered me a young coconut. I agreed, he sliced off the top with a 12" machete. Handed it to me, I took a sip, and then he said “€20”. I said “You mean 20 francs (they’d just changed to the euro).” He said “No, I said €20”. I looked at the machete glinging in the tropical sun, and sheepishly handed over €20.
The next day we went to the resort restaurant after our bags turned up. The menu said “Lobster, €8”. I ordered one. The bill came. €80 for the lobster. Turns out it was €8 per 100g.
The entire island shut down at 7.30pm. Everything - bars, restaurants, everything. And the people were damn rude.
We were so bored decided to leave Guadeloupe and take the ferry to Dominica. My wife was desperately seasick the whole way over.
The hotel we’d booked in Dominica turned out to be a shithole. The room was full of mosquitoes. When I put my bag on the bed the landlady shouted “Don’t do that, you’ll break the bed!”
The “shower” was a showerhead suspended over a toilet at the end of the bed. This was our “ensuite bathroom”.
On the first night we had an inadvertant contre-temps with a crackhead in a bar, who ended up chasing us through the rain to our hotel, where he tried to break the door down.
We checked out and went to a “real” hotel. We were the only people in a 48-room resort. It didn’t improve the service.
Then we had to brave the ferry to get back.
Our flight was delayed by eight hours overnight (though we did get upgraded thanks to the missus doing some convincing waterworks).
We missed six or seven connecting flight in Paris and had to wait another five hours in the airport.

It sucked.

18

jjimm And I thought I’d had a bad time.

BTW how was the coconut and lobster :stuck_out_tongue:

19

Along the same lines of the OP’s experience. I went to New York & Boston in August. One of my friends works for SFO, so my traveling partner and I had coach from SFO to Seattle, but first class to Newark, and first class back from Seattle to SFO.

The flight from Seattle to Newark was delayed by two hours, they told us, so we went to the bar for a little over an hour, and when we got back to the gate, the plane was gone. So we coached to Jersey three hours later, and had to literally sprint from the plane to the monorail to the Manhattan train (LIRR?). And I had never been in humidity, so that yet another unpleasant surprise.

After Boston, I bussed back to NY and cabbed to Newark, since that was cheaper than leaving from Boston. I was also sick as a dog, and this was the very morning when everyone shit themselves over toothpaste and perfume. I actually got through security okay, but the plane was two hours late, and once we boarded we sat on the tarmac for three more hours in a thunderstorm (they had the nerve to show Failure to Launch). Got back to Seattle at about midnight, missing my plane (and reconvening with said traveling partner) by a few hours. And nothing was going to the Bay Area until 6 the next morning. The clerk offered to find me a hotel, but after getting there, getting up, and returning to the airport would’ve meant about two hours’ sleep, so I crashed at the airport. And the only place with an open plug for my iPod and phone was directly under an AC duct (did I mention I was still sick as a dog?). I did get first class from Seattle to SF, but I pretty much slept through it.

All in all, it took me 27 hours to get from Boston to San Francisco. Mind you, I don’t like flying even when everything goes well.

I’m going to Seattle in July, and I will definitely be driving. As I will for damn near everything this side of Chicago.

20

A hundred yoyos! :wink: