Our hotel is on fire and other holiday travel disasters
There are few things more stressful than traveling during the holidays — and that is when everything goes well.
Murphy’s Law is amplified during holiday travel. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
The important thing to realize is that you aren’t alone. Holiday travel disasters happen to everyone. We asked our writers and our community to share their very worst holiday travel stories, and we got some doozies.
Kathryn O’Shea-Evans (Yahoo Travel Writer) - When I was growing up in Portland, Ore., my parents would regularly rent a vacation house in Sunriver (Oregon’s answer to Aspen, Colo.). One year, when I was a tween, there was a huge snowstorm. We were all sitting outside in the alfresco hot tub, watching the downy snowflakes fall on the evergreen trees and soaking up the high-mountain air. When we were ready to head back inside, disaster struck: We got locked out! My stepdad had to run around barefoot in the snow, in his swimsuit, trying to find an alternate way in (He couldn’t.). He’s very handsome, so I’m sure if any neighbors saw, he made their day!
Eventually, because his wife and daughters were shivering-slash-steaming in the hot tub, he just broke the house’s glass door and reimbursed the homeowner for it. We still laugh about that trip!
Melanie Renzulli - It was Christmas Eve in the mid-1990s. I was heading home from college to visit my parents. I had booked the first Amtrak of the day from Union Station to Durham, N.C. — the closest train station to my home. The trip was supposed to take about five to six hours, but an ice storm along the East Coast the night before meant the tracks were slow. At one point, the train just stopped and sat there for hours. No one had a cell phone, and the pay phones on the train weren’t working. Eventually, the dining car ran out of food, and the passengers got restless. Around mid-afternoon, the train crew served everyone boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken. I can’t remember how soon after that the train started moving, but I remember arriving well past midnight — well past that magical time when everyone tucks into bed and dreams about Christmas morning. That 15-hour train trip broke me, and I remain to this day uneasy about any Amtrak trip beyond the D.C.-NYC corridor.
Erica Bray (Yahoo Travel writer) - My biggest holiday nightmare was when I lost my mother at a Christmas market in Vienna. I turned a corner to take a photo, and when I turned around, my mother, a stroke survivor with aphasia (which means she cannot talk), had disappeared into the swirl of the crowd. That was the longest 30 minutes of my life. I felt like the worst daughter ever, imagining all sorts of terrible scenarios about my helpless mother being lost in a foreign land. With the help of Austrian police, I found her: She had wandered back to the tour bus on her own. She wasn’t so helpless after all, but I kept my eyes on her for the rest of that trip!
Shelagh Plunkett - Traveling in Bangladesh with my 10-year-old, we got stuck on a bus in a “traffic jam” that resulted from fog on the river and an inability for ferries to dock. The “jam” lasted two days – no place to sleep or buy food, and no toilet! Lots of bored Bangla bus/truck drivers watching our every move.
Elie Abou Zeid (via Facebook) - One of my worst holiday travel memories was when I was called out at the security office in Brussels Airport for carrying 5 liters of holy water from Lourdes in my checked-in luggage.
Randall Snead (via Facebook) - One time, I went to Mazatlan, Mexico, (no weather channel then) and partook in some drugs, and a major hurricane came ashore a few hours later. Hotel staff had all taken off for shelter and left a 16-year-old boy at the front desk who spoke no English. We were so blitzed, and many of the guests were Drug Enforcement Administration agents… what a vacation.
Carrie Kirby - When we were coming back to Cali from Wisconsin after Christmas this past year, the temperature dipped to 14 below (not windchill, regular). I was flying alone with my three children. Thinking we’d be warm in the airport, we left the winter coats and boots in my dad’s car and went into the airport wearing pajamas and tennis shoes. But the lines to check in were so backed up with people trying to reschedule flights that had been canceled due to the extreme cold, that we were forced to stand right in front of the sliding glass doors at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, causing them to open over and over. My kids were crying that their feet were frozen — INDOORS.
After waiting in line about 45 minutes, someone told me that since we were only waiting to check bags, we should be in an express line. I tried to get there, but with my little kids and our luggage, we could not get through the crowd. When we finally made it to our Southwest flight, we were among the last to board — even though we had arrived at the airport two hours in advance — and no one wanted to move so I could sit with my kids.
Nancy Diaz Abarca (via Facebook) - The worst is the airline losing our luggage with gifts and all our clothes. We didn’t get it back until a week later.
Jo Piazza (Managing Editor of Yahoo Travel) - We were stuck in a complete whiteout snowstorm driving from Des Moines, Iowa, to Minnesota for 11 hours, completely missing Christmas morning.
Suzanne Kamata (An American ex pat and writer living in Japan) - An arsonist set a fire in the corridor of our Vancouver hotel while we were on a ski trip. Had to escape by hook and ladder in the middle of the night! "I had convinced my three Japanese traveling companions to forgo a group tour and leave everythinp up to me. I booked a perfectly respectable family-owned hotel near Stanley Park. That night, we heard a commotion. I thought people were fighting across the hall. I looked out the window and saw fire trucks already arriving. Opened the door to the hallway and smoke billowed in. I shut the door and waved out the window and went down the ladder."
Let Yahoo Travel inspire you every day. Hang out with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
