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Do you have travel memories that stay with you forever?
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06-21-2011, 11:23 AM
Do you have travel memories that stay with you forever?
Sometimes when I am just sitting around daydreaming, a cherished travel memory pops up and I find myself reliving the experience. For example, in Ecuador, we were on a houseboat on one of the Amazon river branches. We were in the middle of nowhere and we dropped anchor so the guide could take the passengers on a hike. I decided to stay on the boat and just was laying in the hammock on deck. The chef made me a pitcher of lemonade and I watched the parrots and macaws flying overhead - it was so peaceful. In Peru while staying in a small Amazonian jungle lodge at Lake Sandoval, we had some Peruvian wine with dinner on our last night - I don't really drink and I got plastered (the wine was 16% alcohol!) and I remember telling my husband and the other guests we were eating with that I wanted to go down to the lake and jump in to swim with the giant river otters - my hubby and friends had a tough time talking me out of that one! On our trip to Paris, I always remember my 1st taste of real French food and the bread and pastry - the taste will stay with me forever. Getting hit by a tour bus in Guatemala, coming through the jungle and seeing the temples of Tikal rising above the trees, rounding the corner and seeing Machu Pichu for the 1st time. This is what travel is all about!
Share your special memories!
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06-22-2011, 10:01 AMDo you want good, bad or stupid......we have an extensive collection in most categories!- Ω -
"Toujours Prêt"
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06-23-2011, 09:36 AM
Great question, Denise, but since I have so many travel memories, I'll recount one that has to do with your drinking story in Peru. A buddy and I backpacked through Europe when I was seventeen. We were in a train station in Irun on the Spanish/French border, waiting for the train to Madrid. A group of Canadian backpackers suggested that we go to the Festival de San Fermin in Pamplona, also known as the running of the bulls. We jumped on the idea since it meant a shorter wait in the train station. We arrived in Pamplona, stashed our backpacks in lockers at the station, then proceeded into town. As evening came, the streets filled with people. Brass bands paraded through the narrow cobblestone streets, followed by locals and tourists. We bought some cheap Spanish wine and got really drunk. I vaguely remember a band playing "It Never Rains in Southern California" in the central plaza. It was the only song that I recognized or remember. We ended up sleeping on the grass in a public park, which wasn't the wisest thing to do since we had just cashed all of our travelers checks, so we had a lot of money and passports in our pockets. The next morning, while hung over and perched on a wooden fence, we watched the running of the bulls. At some point, I threw up on a bus, but I have no idea where we were going. Yup, fond memories of my first trip overseas many years ago.
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06-23-2011, 01:51 PMGood ones can be so boring. Blah, blah, blah. How about something stupid. Careful. Silly won't cut it. Don't bother to fill up posting space with anything else!
Originally Posted by omegaet
t-2-f
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06-23-2011, 03:28 PMSo, where's your contribution. T2F? (ps--nice to see you here!) Originally Posted by travel2fun
I sadly have so many naughty ones, I'm having trouble doing an edit to protect the guilty...."wherever you go, there you are"
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06-24-2011, 11:28 AM
the good, bad and the ugly - lets hear 'em all!
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07-26-2011, 12:54 PMBad ones. Well, most of my bad ones happened during an earleir travel period given over to low, low budget charter packages. I've been stranded for days in the Canary Islands due to mechanical problems with a World Airways plane, I think it was a DC-10. Took them three days to fly in the right parts and personnel to fix the plane. The local charter company representative argued it was the fault of World Airways, not that of the charter company, therefore, World needed to find us a place to stay. Not so, said the outsourced airport ground personnel, World was not responsible for finding us a place to stay. Well, this disagreement continued for hours and a group of us finally decided to find a local hostel and book in for the night and wait out the repair, which stretched into three nights. As it turned out, we complained for a while, drank sangria for most of the delay time and made the best of the matter. Once we returned home, we did get a small refund, which was not enough to cover the hostel, food and sangria, but the company gave us a travel certificate worth $50 to use toward the purchase of a future trip. Originally Posted by omegaet
No, I didn't use the certificate.
I think World Airways still operates today and provides services for the military. I'm sure military personnel are glad to put up with World Airways, especially if it means flying out of a combat region.
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07-30-2011, 03:20 PM
You want bad ones... Well, this one goes back a long time, when we traveled on a shoe string budget, and air travel was still hit and miss. I remember, we had booked a student charter flight from Vienna to Istanbul, Turkey. The plane was very late and we arrived at our hotel in Istanbul after midnight. The hotel had rented out our room to someone else and then proceeded to send us to a hotel down the street.
Unsuspectingly, we walked the few hundred feet to the hotel recommended, handed in our passports and paid for the room. While a clerk walked us upstairs to our room, we noticed several couples coming down the stairs... When we got into the room, the sheets were not changed from the previous user, the bathtub had rusty water flow out of the fossett, and the smell in the room was overwhelming... We realized we had wound up in a brothel, a hotel you pay by the hour... We went downstairs, demanded our passports and our money back... but no help was forthcoming from the reception clerk. He pretended to neither understand English, German or French. We wound up calling the police who was of little help since we had paid for the room and had handed in our passports. We wound up sitting in two chairs at the reception all night, watching the steady flow of customers coming down the stairs and waiting for the first morning light, so we could get our passports back and leave....
We visited the city all day and then that evening we had a student flight back to Vienna which also was delayed past midnight. In Vienna, the hotel we picked would not let us check in till after lunch time. So once we got into the hotel room, we slept for 24 hours straight and hardly saw anything of Vienna.... but then, we were young, and not too to savvy...
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07-30-2011, 04:27 PM
ewwwww ick--like Las Vegas Pool Water...
"wherever you go, there you are"
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07-31-2011, 10:14 AMWhen I was in high school, my sister and a high school friend and I went to France to backpack through the Loire valley. We stayed the first 2 nights in Paris and spoke French about as well as any American high school student who has studied it for a few years (pretty badly). After battling jet lag and waking up in the middle of the night we attempted to call our parents from the room phone. Somehow in trying to dial long distance to the US, we accidentally pressed whatever combination turned out to be the French version of 911.
My friend who spoke the most French was trying to figure out what "allo, le pompier" meant when the phone went dead. We tried a second time and spoke with our parents and then we heard sirens outside. Turns out that firemen had shown up to our hotel and ended up being sent away by the front desk. The next morning they informed us we weren't allowed to make phone calls from our hotel room. These days I'm horrified by this story since we definitely gave the Parisians a reason to hate Americans! But my family still laughs about it, so I can't regret it too much.
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