I’ve been a travel junkie all my life. It may have started as a child, when our family bounced around to various Air Force bases while my dad was in the service, before he returned to the ranch and resumed his life as a cowboy.
But, regardless of the reason, I’m hopelessly addicted to strange places, getting lost, airline food, jet lag, unfamiliar beds, balky toilets, mystery meals, intense humidity, mosquitos, the friendly TSA, never actually knowing what time it is and using hand gestures when I can’t find the words.
While normal people are doing something productive with their leisure hours, like watching Netflix, I’m scrolling through lists of travel accessories, looking for that one perfect thing I need to add to my collection. Or looking to see where I could go with the Hyatt hotel rewards points I’ve been collecting, just in case I ever need to visit Singapore.
When travel junkies meet each other, sparks fly and they sometimes become bosom buddies. I have one friend with whom I can happily spend four or five hours sharing stories about our adventures, even though we’ve never traveled together.
Our latest conversation led me to think about our “oops” moments, which are those where you made a colossal blunder that affected the course of your trip. You readers tell me this is the one thing that scares you senseless about traveling: Getting lost and sleeping on the street in a foreign country, because you can’t find your hotel. Being beaten senseless in Cuba by people who hate Americans (doesn’t happen), or being sprayed with water in Barcelona by people who just hate tourists in general (did happen, but not to me.)
I’m not saying that bad things never occur on vacation. But I can tell you that these incidents invariably make the best stories later, and the ones you’ll repeat until your dying day. Which won’t be on the day the bad thing happens, I promise you. Unless you’re on a boat with a certain celebrity and Natalie Wood.
It’s so easy to drive yourself into a frenzy worrying about these things. Just now, while you’re reading this, I’m busy mooching off my friend who’s living in Paris for five months. I can’t even tell you how many people asked me before I left, “Aren’t you scared to leave the country right now?” Because America is not at the top of the world popularity contest right now, for some reason.
This attitude makes me roll my eyes. I consider it quite unlikely that I’ll be attacked by an angry mob in Paris because I’m an American. Especially because I’m going to wear a T-shirt with a maple leaf on it, stating proudly that I’m a Canadian. No, no, I’m just kidding. But my friend who happened to be in Iran in November 1979 when the American hostages were taken said he did just that. He and his friends avoided problems by telling everyone they were Canadians.
Anyway, I could spend the next eight hours blathering on about my mainly “oops” screwups, but a few memorable ones pop easily into my mind.
When I went on my second trip to Egypt last year, I realized at the ticket counter in LAX that I’d accidentally brought my son’s passport instead of my own. Annoyingly, they wouldn’t let me on the plane. Imagine that. But I’ve learned over the years to always get to the airport hella early, just in case of screw-ups like that. So I called Cheetah Boy, my young adult son, who was at home. He didn’t have a car at the time, but he was able to grab the correct passport, jump into an Uber and bring it to me at the airport just in time for me to make my flight. Whew.
The most epic “oops” moment I can remember happened in 2019, when I arrived for a 22-day vacation in India to discover I hadn’t gotten a visa, so the customs people were going to send me home on the plane on which I’d just arrived. I was writing a travel advice column at the time, so this was not only a personal but professional disaster. I cried. I begged. I offered money. But they were just not going to let me in the country without a visa. I realized that I would have to hide in a motel somewhere and pretend to be in India, posting fake photos for 22 days, so I didn’t have to admit this mistake. Luckily for me, the airport manager took pity on me, and helped me get a 45-minute flight to Nepal, where I stayed for three days while I got my visa for India. I fell in love with Nepal and was glad for the screw-up. Someday I’ll go back.
Gee, I’m already out of room for this column. And I have so many more idiotic moves to confess. I guess I’ll have to write a sequel.