While we waited for our new flight to Paris (after missing our first flight by waiting for an hour at the wrong gate on the other side of the airport) Kris and I reflected on how not all of our trips have gone so smoothly.
I like to think that I have written this blog as a “warts and all” look at our travel, catching the good, the bad and the ugly (normally me in the mornings) of most of the trips. But when remembering back on trips it’s normal to have the rose coloured glasses and only remember the good times. Looking back on old Facebook or blog posts we remember the fun parts and the excitement and not the dash through Copenhagen to find yet another toilet, the kids fighting nonstop, the frustrations of delays and the worries.
In the end, every trip has given us amazing memories, but when things go wrong sometimes it’s good to look back at others of the disasters and realise that these are the events that add flavour and excitement, no matter how frustrating they can be at times.
Of course we are lucky with everything going on in the world that these 'disasters' are surmountable and we are all still healthy and safe - in no way do I want to diminish the major disasters like war, terrorism, the pandemic and other actual disasters - this was just a fun way to look back upon things that went wrong for us on our trips.
So, for something different, Kris and I decided to countdown our top 10 causes of trip disasters, most of which can be found in this blog and then a few of our more memorable disaster trips.
Number 10: Lost Items
Traveling, especially with kids, seems to be the perfect way to come home with fewer items than you left with. While these things don’t destroy the trip, there’s nothing like the sinking feeling of realizing that an important, expensive or sentimental item is now gone for good.
A prime example was on our trip to Stockholm to visit Birka, the Viking island, where Cameron accidentally left his iPad in the seat pocket of the train and was too embarrassed to tell us until the next day, by which time it was long gone. I left my English Nemesis beanie from Alton Towers on a bus in Malmö and despite Kris visiting lost and found every week for three months we never got it back. Cam had a special limited edition World Cup soccer ball that rolled under bed in Kiruna and was accidentally left behind, and Kris left her purse at a hotel in England, resulting in us needing to spend the day driving back the way we came, missing out on Stratford-upon-Avon and Nottingham.
Number 9: Language
One of the best parts of travel is getting exposure to different cultures and experiences. It's been a huge part of my enjoyment of the trips, but can also be a big source of confusion and problems.
What does that road sign mean? Can I park here? Did that person just greet me or abuse me? Does the salad contain pickled fish?
Most of the countries we have travelled to we have been able to get by with English, a bit of gesturing and some terrible attempts at their language. Knowing the words for sorry, thank you and excuse me are always handy and appreciated.
There's been a few times that we've had issues with not being able to read signs or understand the language. When we first arrived in Sweden there was an official looking notice on the lift and an exclamation mark. The few words we knew led us to think that it was saying not to use the lift, so we carried all our bags up the three flights of stairs. Turns out it was just a notice to make sure to put the rubbish in the correct bins.
We have had many times where we've had issues trying to work out if it is legal to park somewhere - the Swedish signs are split into three parts, the top numbers are weekdays, the bracketed numbers are Saturday and the days before a public holiday and the red numbers are Sundays or public holidays.
So on the bottom left sign:
P
Avgift
8-24
(8-24)
8-24
You can pay (with a payment) between 8am and midnight on every day, and for free outside of those times.
The text at the top says the first two hours are free if you have a parking or SMS ticket.
Another time we had issues was when someone threw fireworks into the shop we were at. People panicked and opened emergency doors setting off all the alarms. There were announcements over the loudspeaker that all was ok and we could continue shopping, but we didn't understand them and had no idea what was going on.
Counting can be an issue too. In German, the units are said before the tens, so 29 in German is neunundzwanzig (9 and 20). Other languages like French have some strange numbering schemes, such as 80 being quatre-vingts (4 twenties) and 99 being quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (4 twenties and nineteen). Danish blows them all out of the water though:
10 = Ti
20 = Tyve
30 = Tredive
40 = Fyrre
50 = Halvtreds
60 = Tres
70 = Halvfjers
80 = Firs
90 = Halvfems
100 = Et hundrede
The Danish numbers work on twenties rather than tens, so Tres is 60, meaning Tre (3)- Sinde (times) - tyve (20) = Tresindetyve which is shortened to Tres.
With me so far?
50 is halvtreds - or (2 x 20) + 10 (half of the twenty - or the halv)
Halvtredje-sinde-tyve or halvtreds for short.
The of course you need to add the units, so 95 would be femoghalvfems (five and half fives):
90 is 4x20 +10 or halvfem.sinde-tyve or halvfems.
(thanks to Scadikitchen for helping me make some sense of this).
And then there's the little things like word order - Pratar du Svenska? means "Do you speak Swedish?"- a question, but "Du pratar Svenska" means You speak Swedish - a statement.
Number 8: Crowds and scammers
One thing you can never avoid while travelling is crowds. I've never liked crowds and its been even worse since Covid times. We try to travel out of season as much as possible because during the high tourist season places can get crazy. Unfortunately that is also the time when there is the least scaffolding, repairs and closed attractions and the most additional attractions like street performers, fairs and events.
Major tourist sites like the Rome fountains, Versailles and Disneyworld can be a lot less fun when you are getting people pushing into you, you are pinned shoulder-to-shoulder or you just can't get near to what you actually want to see:
Number 7: Slips and falls
Travel tends to take you that dangerous place known as outside. Once there you often encounter hazards like mud, ice and mindlessly wandering children and this can lead to some spectacular falls. Again, most of these were not disasters so to speak and hence this one ranks quite low on the list. The most memorable for us was on our trip to Gothenburg and the Liseberg Viking market where I stepped out of the cabin holding a pile of iPads and my newly acquired Viking drinking horn, straight on to a patch of ice. I managed to avoid dropping any of the items but I tore the entire groin out of my jeans and had no spare pants. For the rest of the trip I ended up in my waterproof rain paints, which were plastic, sweaty and uncomfortable.
In Disneyworld I got some special attention from Donald Duck when one of the kids wandered in front of me and I tripped on the back of their feet and ended up going for a very impressive dive and skinning both my knees to avoid falling on them. I narrowly avoided knocking poor Donald over also.
On the topic of me falling over, I also managed to do an impressive slide in a muddy set of steps at Svartifoss waterfall in Iceland, sliding at least 5m and ending up covered in mud.
But it’s not just outside that is dangerous, I managed to slip while holding a tray of cold oil and spilt a little, which I then slipped in the oil and fell, pouring the rest of it all over me.
To top off my list of gymnast quality falls (I’m not clumsy, honest!) our house in Sweden for the second trip had a shower inside quite a tall bath. I managed to slip on some shower gel, crash shin first into the side of the bath, flip out, hit my arm on the sink and land flat on my back on the tiles. Somehow I didn’t hit my head, but I did cut open my shin, bruise my forearm badly, knock the wind out of me and badly bruise my pride.
Kristine bought a nonslip mat to make it safer and then had a slip herself when the mat didn’t adhere properly and became an even worse slip hazard.
Number 6: Weather
They always say that you can't control the weather, and that there is no bad weather, just bad clothing. The weather can have a pretty big impact on our trips. We're used to rain and getting soaked is more an inconvenience than a disaster - although it can suck on trips where we don't have ways to dry our clothes and shoes - like on Great Ocean Road where we resorted to drying socks over a camp stove:
Bergen was the most rain I have even seen in my life, we were soaked to the skin through our waterproof jackets just walking five meters from the car to shelter.
The weather can also bring a big dampener (pardon the pun) on the expected views - like these:
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| The view to the famous Skellig Michael islands - they are there somewhere in the fog |
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| Our first views of the breathtaking Iceland scenery |
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| The amazing views from Zugspitze |
The weather can also make things more dangerous - a wind storm in Iceland, a blizzard in Kiruna and a massive rain downpour in Bergan can make walking unsafe and driving even more so.
Number 5: Flights
Road trips are fun, but to get to some interesting places or until they invent a floating car, sometimes we needed to hop on a flying metal tube to get from A to B. We’re all fairly experienced flyers by now, but sometimes things can’t be helped. I’ll discuss our Paris disaster more later, but here’s a few other examples.
On our way home from our first Sweden assignment we flew to a rugby competition in Glasgow and then were due to fly from Glasgow to Florida to visit Disneyworld for a final holiday before heading home. We had an early flight so we’d have plenty of time to check in to our hotel and spend the day at Disney. Unfortunately the plane we were due to fly on had technical issues and a new plane needed to be found. This took about 3 hours. But now the flight crew had exceeded their allowed shift time, so we waited on the plane for another 3 hours while they found a crew. This was made much more fun by three kids 13 and under who were bored and excited for Disney. When we finally landed in Florida we’d missed the window for the passport office and it was filled with the passengers from other planes so we needed to wait another 2 hours on the runway until it was clear for us to leave - hence missing our whole first Disney day.
This trip was then completed by a flight from Houston, Texas to home. Houston was 36 degrees C and the aircon in the plane had failed, making it about 40 degrees in the plane. We had to wait for a couple of hours until the plane cooled enough to enter and then sit in a sweltering hot plane while we waited to take off. Once in the air it was fine, but it was an uncomfortable few hours, especially with tired kids.
Number 4: Vehicles
So it is unfair to pick on planes without mentioning the other mode of transport that causes no end of fun on holidays - cars. There are way too many stories to tell of mild and near disasters with cars, but here’s a couple.
While driving our rental car in Canada, we took a wrong turn and ended up behind an old KFC building and hit a massive hole in the road. The rear of the car struck the ground and exploded the stop and indicator light into a million pieces. This was a small price of $300 to fix.
When we first visited Oslo, we found an awesome park, translated the parking rules and made sure we had the right parking ticket for the car. The next day we came down to find a fine on the car. I ended up calling the Norwegian traffic authority to question it as I was sure I had the correct ticket. Turns out it was a fine for having studded winter tyres in Oslo without a permit. My work had chosen studded tyres as our winter tyres for safety. This was also an issue when we wanted to go on a road trip to Germany, so we had to buy ourselves a whole new set of non-studded tyres before we could go.
We also had a few of these issues closer to home - When the kids were young, Kristine and I booked a romantic weekend away together to Kangaroo Island, staying in a nice hotel and eating at an expensive restaurant. We drove the three hours or so from home to ferry before realising that the car windscreen had a very slight ripple in the glass right at eye level. This gave Kristine a massive migraine and she spent most of our romantic weekend crashed out.
Even if you try to avoid the issues it’s still never perfect. Before we went on our snow trip, Kris got the headlights adjusted so they didn’t just illuminate a foot of road ahead of the car but the change meant that they now blinded the car ahead of us and trucks kept flashing their lights at us believing we were on full beam. And before a trip to Lower Glenelg we had a service done on the car. All went well until we stopped to idle on the side of the road and the car overheated and started smoking. Turns out the mechanic had forgot to reattach the fan cable and so the car was fine when moving but overheated when stopped.
Number 3: Maps
Finding your way around in a new country is never easy, and this has led to a number of interesting and stressful situations. Google maps is a great tool that makes me wonder how I ever lived with paper street directories, but sometimes it doesnt work as well as expected.
One of our earliest issues was when we travelled to Melbourne when the kids were young and GPS units had just come out. We had set our location to be Mount Buller, but we decided to take a detour up another mountain first. As we drove up the very steep road with a sheer drop to our right, the GPS continued to call out "Turn right now, turn right now." Since the only thing to the right was a sheer drop of about 100m, we decided not to listen to it.
Our run-ins with GPS and Googlemaps did not end in Australia. When we first moved into our house in Limhamn, Kristine ducked out to pick up some dinner while I continued assembling the Ikea furniture. Unfortunately her phone locked up and then ran out of battery, leaving her stuck on an endless loop around the roundabouts outside Svågertorp.
We've also had issues where the location for something in GoogleMaps is not the location we actually needed. On our trip to Upper Heyford Airbase for a tour, we set the address in googlemaps and instead ended up 20 minutes away near an old field. The same occurred more recently when we were taking the boys, one of their friends and all of the rugby jumpers to a rugby game at Odense in Denmark. We got to the location googlemaps marked as Odense Rugby Club to find out that it was someone's backyard - maybe a postal address? We'd overshot by 20 minutes and had to head back the way we came to find the actual ground.
It's not just a problem while driving - when we visited the Fort Claudia ruins in Austria, we used GoogleMaps to track our path back down to the carpark - a fair simple 'wanderweg' trail, expected to take about 60 minutes. We ended up on a goat track and then at the side of a main road, before having to backtrack to find our way almost 2 hours later.
Number 2: Accommodation
One of the big parts of our trips is accommodation. We don't tend to stay in any place for too long, preferring the whirlwind mode of camping: arrive at a place, race around and see as much as we can, sleep and then move to the next stop. But we need to sleep and we need a safe place for the night. We have been lucky in that the majority of the places we have stayed have exceeded our expectations (or it may be due to sheer amount of research we do before we book a place). We have booked using both booking.com and airbnb and most of our places have been perfect, but it's the bad ones that really stand out.
Probably the most uncomfortable accommodation was in Stavanger, Norway. It was listed as an apartment with a shared bathroom (something we usually avoid), but instead it was a small bedroom in someone's house. There were several small rooms available and the owner still also lived within the house. He was friendly but very insistent that we give him a good review. Luckily we were the only guests because it would have got crowded had he filled all five rooms. The cleanliness left a lot to be desired - there were gloves and cleaning gear in most rooms, but stains and marks on most of the walls. He spent a fair portion of the night in the kitchen arguing with someone on the phone and we locked ourselves in our room and waited until either morning or when the door was broken down with an axe, The Shining style.
Our first Airbnb house was on Iceland and the apartment was great, except it was still filled with the owner and his child's personal effects. Turns out that he lives in the apartment with his kid and when a booking is made they move out to his parents house. It was a great apartment but it felt really uncomfortable, like we were invading someone's personal space.
Our Niagara trip was interesting, the prices of accommodation were super high so we stayed in a motel. The whole place smelt like cooking cereal, due to the cereal factory next door and at one point the staff knocked on the door and asked us not to use the bath as apparently there was a leak that was dripping water into the room below.
One of the most memorable issues was our first trip to Rovaniemi in Finland. The place we booked at was a small farm that had two houses. We were travelling with Kristine's parents so there were seven of us in total. The property was big enough to house eight so we booked it in. On the day we were due to arrive we were told the keys would be left in the door and we could arrive and just move straight in.
When we got there, the place was nothing like the pictures. It was much smaller and had less beds than expected. There was a second apartment next door that was already occupied and the neighbours were pretty loud. There was an optional cleaning charge of 100 euro, but before we left we scrubbed the place from top to bottom, leaving it cleaner than we had found it. A few weeks after we arrived back in Sweden we noticed that we had been charged the cleaning fee, which was a little odd. It was only a few months later that we realized what had happened. The other family had arrived earlier than us on the same day and with both apartments with keys in the door, they took the bigger apartment and left it in a mess. There was a significant price difference between the two apartments and I'm guessing that they would have got their cleaning fee back also. It was too late to do much about it, but we weren't super happy.
Number 1: Health
Luckily, as I write this, we are all healthy and happy, but medical issues can be the scariest and most impactful parts of any trip.
This year we had Tomas seriously ill with pancreatitis and in hospital for almost a month, the mental toll that can take is significant. Kristine visited hospital on the first trip after slipping and exacerbating an existing back injury and again after acquiring a new nut allergy, and I ended up with a number of surgeries for an infection and abscess.
On top of the stress and worry over sick family, there is a big impact on cancelled travel plans. The three major medical incidents I mentioned above were probably the biggest, but it was our arrival in Sweden that had us thinking maybe we'd made the wrong decision. I broke my eye socket playing rugby five weeks before we were due to fly and the inability to fix the pressure in my head, coupled with the stress of relocation gave me terrible flight sickness on the 24 hour flight over to Sweden. I threw up almost constantly on the plane and as a result of this ended up with a severe case of tonsillitis when we finally arrived. We had yet to get our Swedish Person-numbers (Social Security numbers) and had no idea how to see a doctor so I ended up just pushing through it. I was in bed for almost a week with fever, sweats and hallucinations before it all finally broke. Not the best introduction to Sweden!
I also contracted Covid-19 on my first business trip over to Sweden and, while I didn't end up very sick, I was confined to my hotel for 5 days and ended up having to delay my flight back by two weeks - missing getting home for my birthday.
Each time we have changed country we have found that we have picked up all the difference varieties of cold and 'flu, spending a fair bit of time feeling sick as our bodies acclimatize to the new collections of diseases.
Not to mention our 2020 Swedish holiday, which was all booked and paid for, being cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic...
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Sometimes these individual events conspire together to create a much bigger disaster than they would alone. The strange thing is, that these next three most disastrous trips are also the ones I look back on as my favourite trips. Not because of the disasters, but because we've gone outside our comfort zone, seen something new or persevered and overcome.
Here's our top three disastrous trips:
Number 3: Paris (May 2024)
This trip was one I was most looking forward to. A chance to see Paris and the Normandy beaches and to travel a new part of the world. But it did not start well and while the trip was amazing, it was plagued with issues throughout.
We started with a 5am wake up to get to Copenhagen in time for our flight at 8:15am. It turned out that there were two 8:15am flights to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris (but we didn't know that part) and since we had arrived early there was only one on the first board - 8:15am at gate A6. We headed to the gate and took some quiet time to recover. After some time, Cameron made a comment that he would have expected that we should be boarding soon, which should have prompted me to check the destinations board. Instead we waiting until the flight was boarding and noted that it was SAS, and we were Easyjet. Not a problem, a lot of the flights codeshare, flying under another airlines tag. But when I went to scan my ticket I got a big red cross and was told abruptly by the lady behind the desk that we were Easyjet not SAS.
We raced out to the departures list and saw that Easyjet was in terminal F - the furthest terminal from terminal A.:
Number 2: Iceland (Nov 2016)
The trip to Iceland was one of my favourite trips of all time. The scenery was amazing and the entire country is filled with all sorts of incredible views and sights. But we were pretty ambitious on this trip, driving the entire way around the country over a few days.
The first issue we had was in our drive up to the northeast of the island. The drive started off fine, but soon it got very dark and the volcanic soil absorbed all of the light, leaving us driving in almost complete darkness. The road twisted and turned ahead of us with lots of drop-offs and we could only see the next road marker, no further.
The weather also didn't help - the first few days had been rainy, so the roads were slippery and potholed and any chance of seeing the Northern Lights was blocked by a thick layer of cloud.
But the one incident that marked this trip was a pretty serious one. We had driven to the Dynjandi / Fjallfoss waterfalls in the north east of the island. We only had a small car and no winter tyres as snow wasn't expected. The road condition was pretty bad, but we made it ok:
The falls were amazing and made even better by the snow that started to fall, turning everything white. 2cm of snow fell while we were at the falls and covered the roads. Our poor two-wheel drive was not suited for that and when we came to a 30 degree incline it was not able to get traction and continued to slide down. We tried a few times but each time the car would slide back and we were getting dangerously close to the creek at the side of the road. The area was very secluded, we'd only see one or two other cars all day and it was cold and wet. There was too much risk of the car slipping back and hitting me if I tried to push it, so we were stuck.
We called the roadside assistance number and when I explained that we'd lost traction and were stuck in the snow I was told "There's no snow in Iceland right now." The fat snowflakes and 5cm of snow under my feet begged to differ. In the end they said it would cost 60,000ISK (about $1000 AUD) to send someone to help tow us out due to the distance. They suggested that we wait and see if anyone passed.
Number 1: Ireland (Feb 2018)
The motorhome trip through Ireland was one of my favourite all time trips. The country was beautiful, the people were friendly and we had some of our best experiences there. We tried to book a caravan park only to be told it was out of season and they were closed - but they let us stay for free and even gave us the toilet keys. We were invited back to someone's house for scones and tea and we saw some amazing sights.
But the motorhome was cursed. We started badly - I'd been sick for several days with a nasty man-flu and had slept for the last few days. We got held up at security for a random bag check and then because security saw "two large flasks of liquid", which turned out to be binoculars. We were the last to board the flight and needed to check-in all our carry-on bags as the plane was full. On the plane there was someone already in our seat, having misread their own ticket.
When we landed in Dublin we had organised a pickup from the motorhome company at a glass bridge outside Terminal 2. We waited there for a while until we realised we were at Terminal 1 and had to race through to the correct Terminal.
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