What was your worst vacation?

Question

I just went to disneyland: The turbo in my peace of crap 82 volvo station wagon went out and I was only able to go 25 miles and hour for some time. Then I accidentally turned onto a street with a classic car parade. I'm sure people were wondering when they saw me! Whats your worst experience?

Answer 1

West coast of Greece. I went to Greece to visit an old University buddy who was teaching English. She just finished and we toured around then headed for Egypt. Egypt was a lot more fun and interesting than Greece. In Greece we did a split of trendy touristy (fun and cultural) destinations verses more Greece secret traditional locations. Well I had one particular bad day. It was a result of about 3 things.

1) In Greece, other than Athens and the Islands, there is a lot of local opinion that their backward little village with one road (Seriously - 1 road) winds through it and is usually the highway (with no bypass - it will enter town say on the north east, go to the outskirts on the west, make a 180 degree turn and exit town again at the south east) anyway, they think their village is the best place on earth. Lucky if they leave and make it to the next town once this year. So, if you ask how to get somewhere else, the answer was frequently why do you want to go there?

2) They had many places with big English signs that said Tourist Information. Now where I come from, that is usually run by the city or province realizing there is value to the economy if you have happy tourists with good information. These places were private travel agents trying to sell you their tours, usually local day trips. They had no information about anything else, and spoke next to no English. No English is fine by me, it is their country. But different if you have a big English sign saying information is available.

3) My friend spent a lot of time in Greece. Arriving she met me in Athens showed me all the sites, spoke sufficient Greek to get by, and knew her way around town. I realize I trusted her skill too much and not enough of my own travel smarts.

So one bad day. We spent all day trying to make arrangements. We booked our ferry for the next day. We got up super early and had to leave to the next town, across Island to catch it. We get there, and it's the wrong ferry. The info guys gave us the wrong info. Our ferry was in the town we came from, and we didn't have time to get back to catch it.

Then, my Friend started acting like a looser. Way over the deep end of making lemonade when given lemons. I just wanted to forget the problem, work on our solutions and get back to the vacations. I think she was taking too much of the blame and didn't know how to act.

I wasn't mad at my Friend. I wasn't assigning blame, other than blaming myself. I realized then that I needed to pick up on my end of the planning as her Greek only went so far. It was a good lesson, as things went a lot better in Egypt. We ended up finally getting some luck and caught a better ferry that night. We lost about a day and a half of talking to agents and unnecessary travel. And a day of that with big stress.

Answer 2

I find it hilarious that 2 out of five answers complained about Florida being involved in their worst vacation experiences. I live in Florida, and the ten years that I've been here have been the longest and most hellish of my life. The heat is unbearable, not to mention the alligators, snakes, and mammoth spiders roaming around everywhere. Every vacation I've ever taken has been incredible, however.