Loco’s Staff’s Travel Ls
“My travel failure was when I went to New York City back in 1992 while attending my first college in East Rutherford, New Jersey. After I arrived to New York City I eventually got lost while trying to learn NYC walking by myself. Wow! What learning experience I had traveling to New York City on my own. Since, than I have yet to travel to NYC by myself. But, it was sort of fun. This was my travel failure but I still learned from it.”
-Chris
“This is more of a close-call than an actual fail, but when I was in London a group of friends and I booked train tickets to Cambridge. We wanted to see the universities and more grass than the parks in London. Our train was early in the morning, so we woke up and got ready with, what we thought was, enough time to spare. Cool. We started to travel to King’s Cross, when we realized that was not where our train was. So we quickly rerouted, still with enough time…or so we thought. When we got closer to the Liverpool Street Station, we checked the time and somehow it was 5 minutes until departure. So, being the annoying Americans who didn’t plan properly for travel, we sprinted about 3 blocks to the station, and thankfully arrived like 30 seconds before we were supposed to leave… The train was delayed by 5 minutes.
Or the time when I was in Austria with some friends and we first thought we would be kicked out of our hotel, then we wouldn’t be able to leave. Buckle up. Four of us planned a trip to Austria in late March of 2019. We stayed in this little town called Hallstatt, which is on a lake, tucked between some beautiful mountains, and it’s so charming you even have to take a ferry to get from the train to the town. Anyway, we booked this cute hotel room for 3 people because that was the max number we could pick. The other hotel was like double the price. So we looked at the pictures, and there was plenty of room for an extra person. Fine, right? Being the rebels we are, my friends and I devised a master plan to sneak me into the hotel once the owner was asleep every night. It worked for the first night. My three friends checked in, I waited in the town square. We were set. Our day was spent visiting shops and finding dinner. We came back late, so there was no interaction with the owner. The second day, three of us went down to breakfast, and my friend stayed up in the room. Our first mistake. They greeted us and didn’t say anything, so we thought we got away with it. And we did, until later on in the day when my friend (who hadn’t showed up to breakfast) had to use the bathroom, and decided to use the one in the hotel. The owner kind of looked at her and asked “how many of you are there? Were you at breakfast?” Yikes. So, she panicked and bullshitted her way through an answer somehow. We all freaked out when she told us because we thought we were going to get kicked out for lying and wouldn’t have anywhere to stay. So we brainstormed and thought of an excuse. Our plan was to tell her that I had surprised them that morning, and ask if we could just pay for an extra person that night. It worked, but I doubt she was dumb enough to believe us. Thankfully, she was kind enough to not leave us on our asses. I probably would have.
After that was over and done with, we enjoyed the rest of our stay, soaked up the sun we could find, hiked up a mountain, almost got attacked by swans, the usual. When we were planning our departure, we had to keep the ferry in mind because it was our only way back to the train. We had an afternoon flight in Salzburg, so we figured we’d leave early in the morning and have free time before the flight. We all walked down to the dock with our luggage, and it was… empty. Hmm. We read the signs and our ferry should’ve been loading. No one was around to ask. Other people eventually came down and waited, too, but no one came with the boat. We freaked the fuck out. All of us truly thought we wouldn’t be able to leave the town in time for our flight. My friend and I were trying to rationalize, so I went over and checked the schedule again. In fine print (and by that, I mean highlighted) it said the ferry would not start until an hour later than usual. To be fair, it was set up very strangely, and in German with tiny English translations. So basically, we panicked for 20 minutes for nothing. Karma for lying to the hotel”
-Allora
“My travel fail comes from being a stupid kid who didn’t get how Mad Libs worked. On a long, boring car ride (don’t remember where), my family was enjoying the classic game that asks other people to include a noun, a verb, etc. When it was my turn, I had to mention a “Person in the room” for one of the blanks. I, being a stupid kid, thought they were just asking for a name, so I blurted out “Sam.” None of my family members are named Sam, and I was laughed at and mocked by everybody in the car. And to this day, my family still will not let that flub go, and still make fun of me for it.”
-Eric
“My friend Maddie came to visit me while I was studying in London. I had booked us train tickets to Brighton and also tickets to see the Lion King. However, I had way too much confidence in my ability to remember dates and times so we woke up on her second day there and headed to King’s Cross St. Pancras to catch our train to Brighton, our tickets didn’t work in the machine to let us through but the kind worker let us through any way and said it was probably just a glitch. We had a wonderful day in Brighton and no trouble getting on the train back home. The next evening we headed to the West End to go see the Lion King, I went inside to collect our tickets from the booth and the lady looked at me and said “I’m so sorry it looks like your reservation was for last night not tonight.” I then looked at our tickets from Brighton that were still in my wallet and sure enough I had mixed up the days. So, we spent the night getting drunk at a Pizza Express, classy. Also incase you were wondering, Disney will not give you a refund for your tickets if your reasoning is simply that you are an idiot.”
-Allie
“This more of a travel mystery than a travel fail but while I was studying abroad in London, my friends took a weekend trip to Paris. Our last day there, I got a baguette for breakfast. It was a giant baguette and I didn’t eat all of it inn the morning so I decided to save it for our overnight bus ride back to London that night. I carried and kept the baguette all through the city that day and took it on the bus with me. It’s a long bus ride, so I got myself situated and put the bag with my baguette between my seat and the wall so it was easy to grab when I wanted it and I wouldn’t have to dig through my bag. I fell asleep for the first two hours of the ride and when I woke up, I was hungry, except my baguette was not in it’s place. I looked under my seat, nothing. I could not find it anywhere. After the bus ride was over, my friends and I searched the empty bus just because we were confused as to where it could have gotten too. It was not in any of the trash bags along the aisle either. The baguette just disappeared. The only explanation that I can think of is maybe someone stole my half eaten baguette? I guess I’ll never know.”
-Savannah
