Best/worst things that have happened to you on vacation?

[Spinneret]

worst the car breaking down

 

[Neapolitan Ice Cream]

Best? Seeing Disney fireworks for the first time.

Worst? Drawing the curtains in my decidedly dodgy Italian hotel room to uncover a brick wall...

 

[mickey916]

Best: DS was chosen as "Big Kahuna" at Typhoon Lagoon when he was 10 years old. It totally made his day!
Worst: Got awakened by knock on hotel door at 5 am. It was a sheriff telling us our car window was smashed and the car broken into when we still had two more weeks left on our roadtrip.

 

[Lord Manhammer]

Best? Making love in Paris. Incredible.

Worst? Walking into my supposed "boutique hotel" in San Francisco and promptly booking a room at the Radisson at twice the price.

 

[Rogue1677x]

Best will always be seeing the expressions on my daughter's face whenever we arrive at a new destination. She's so eager to explore and loves to travel with me.

Worst was getting violently ill in Morocco and having a language barrier that made it difficult to communicate with my caregivers (my then husband was too busy with his friends to hang around and translate). Fortunately between the bit of English my sister in-law knew, the bit of French I knew and hand gestures with my father and mother in-law, I was able to communicate enough to assure them that I was pretty sure I wasn't dying.

 

[NannyBeBe]

Best -- getting married
Worst -- my husband fell in the shower in our hotel room and wound up in intensive care with a brain bleed. The hotel paid the entire hospital bill and did not charge us for the six days we spent at their hotel.

 

[Disneyland1084]

Best? So many , wouldn't know where to start.

Worst: When the motel front desk called us at 2 am (yes, we were all sleeping) to ask us if we needed a wake up call.

 

[Meriweather]

Best......taking the DGD to WDW for the first time and watching her having so much fun

Worst.....getting a really bad case of food poisoning while on a cruise (I don't think it was caused on the cruise, I think airplane)

 

[BrianL]

This is a difficult question. I've been lucky enough to never have any real vacation disasters, only minor inconveniences.

BEST: My best day at WDW was when I went for the Villains After Hours event, which not only was incredible, but int he hours beforehand I decided to just ride around the Lagoon/Bay Lake area and grab some food, etc. I ended up being the only passenger on the oat from Fort Wilderness to the Lodge, and the skipper serenaded me over the PA the entire way. It was one of the best times I've had.

WORST: It's hard to pick a worst, but maybe this very rainy day at Disneyland where not only did we get wet from the rain, we rode Spalsh Mountain and soaked our shoes as the boats would tend to fill with water. It was kind of a rough one, and, man, did our shoes stink that night. We tried to get some shoe de-stinker but the CVS didn't have any, so we settled for soem Febreze which only helped a little.

 

[lynxstch]

Best--our honeymoon in Disney world

Worst- Food poisoning on the first night of our vacation in CA (Disneyland)

 

[TiggerTrigger]

Best: I'm torn between a few of our national parks trips and my older one's 5th bday surprise WDW trip.

Worst: I call it the car accident trip. We had just surprised our kids with a trip to WDW and were on our way to the airport. We were stopped at a red light when a car going over 70mph rammed into us. We were less than a mile away from home. The damage was awful, but we walked away visibly unharmed. For this reason, we decided to go on with our trip. Some of the details are a blur, but from the scene of the accident, I got our flight changed and arrival details with Disney updated. While it was better than being home, every day presented us with new pains...both physical, emotional, and insurance/police related. Riding things like Test Track also didn't go well. To add insult to injury, the Contemporary bakery created an expensive cake fail (celebrating a milestone bday this trip). It was absolutely hideous, looked nothing like I requested and was even made with the wrong flavors.

 

[bcla]

Best would be seeing something for the first time. I don't know if I could really classify what's the best, but I know what I might put in a list of among the best.

Worst would be on a family vacation where the radiator sprung a leak. Brought it in to a local mechanic and they used a radiator stop leak which was enough to get home. I've also gone on vacation right into a hurricane (tropical storm strength by that point), my first two nights were automatically cancelled because visitors weren't allowed to enter those areas, but a hotel let me check in two days early (really early too since I got there around 8 AM before normal check in time). I got a quick primer on storm preparation. I had an efficiency studio room with a full-sized refrigerator and bought food and beverages to last me a week, which I ended taking home. My big worry was that my rental car might be damaged by something like a branch or a lamppost.

Come to think of it, even worse was when my travel documents were stolen on an international vacation when I was a child. Had to go to a consulate to sort it out, and that's tough when you're a kid.

 

[easyas123]

Best? I'm not sure - I've had some wonderful vacations, and I hope to have more so I'll say I hope my best is still before me!
Worst - well that would be the one when my grandmother died. We'd rent a beach house in the Outer Banks for 2 or 3 weeks in late summer back when several of us were all STHM's and we'd go down with all the kids for a few weeks, including my mom and my grandmother always joined us, and our spouses & my dad joined us for the last week. So the second night of a 3 week stay my grandmother passed away in her sleep. It was a shock of course, but the local authorities couldn't have been nicer - I'm sure this kind of thing happens a lot. So we call, they come over and confirm. We call the rest of the family that wasn't there yet, everyone comes down and says goodbye to her. We have her cremated and spend the rest of the 3 weeks down there, celebrating her and dealing with our feelings and well - living. We don't do formal funerals or anything, and my grandfather had already passed, so a few months later we took her ashes down to the BVI's and buried her at sea where my grandfather, great grandfather & great grandmother were all 'placed'. I think if she could have picked a way to go, where, with whom and under what conditions she'd have probably picked just how it happened. It wasn't a traumatic, horrific death thankfully. She was one of a kind and would have approved 110% of how we remembered her in those weeks. I say it's the worst, but honestly thinking back now 25 years ago when it happened it is almost a good memory if that makes sense. I miss that old lady, she was one of a kind.

 

[Jeannie]

I can't single out one 'best', but the worst was being onboard the Crown Princess on July 18, 2006 when it listed! Grabbed life vests and thought we were going to end up in the water!

https://www.gainesville.com/story/n...crown-princess-listed-15-degrees/31490519007/

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/MAR0801.pdf

 

[PrincessShmoo]

Hard to pin down the best - I've vacationed in soooo many places, many of which had unique and outstanding opportunities.

(Question - is traveling after you've retired still considered "vacation"?)

Worst, however - trip to Florida when we were held up (yes, with a gun) after checking into our motel. Had 3 young kids with us- VERY unnerving.

 

[nancipants]

Best: getting engaged while visiting my husband when we were still dating long distance.

Worst: car breaking down at the Canadian border while driving back from our Alaska cruise honeymoon.

 

[Lumpy1106]

Best could have been the worst but really worked out for us;
Before kids, DW and I decided to go to Boston, then Maine in the winter to do snowboarding. Spent a couple of days in Boston, then got a rental car and started the drive north during a cold storm. We got to where we were to spend the night (https://innbythesea.com/) and went to check in. The guy at the counter greeted us but was very apologetic - the storm had been a pretty bad ice storm in Portland and some of the rooms were damaged. They had to put someone in our room.

Oh. Now I'm thinking we're spending the night in the rental car. He continued;
They were putting us up in the Portland Regency (another very nice place in town), and they were paying for our dinner and breakfast - another apology.

OK - so are we paying for the room here tonight?

Oh no! Inn By The Sea was paying for all of it. I was dumbfounded. How incredibly nice of them! But wait, he was really happy that we were OK with it because I guess the previous couple, that also had to move, was pissed! Huh?!?

It got better. We got all the way to Sugarloaf and we had booked a room that turned out to be on the dark side - no natural light. DW was not happy so I called the front desk. No problem - they moved us to a loft room - but sorry, no kitchenette. Deal! We opened the curtains te next morning and, no kidding, the entire mountain was our view. It was GORGEOUS! Ski-in, Ski-out, too bad we'll have to eat out every night. We loved it.

Worst had to be our 1 year anniversary trip. DW got the Chicken Pox (remember that disease?) just prior to our trip. She spent the first 3 days sick in the room. Thankfully I had had the Chicken Pox as a kid so I could take care of her and not get sick myself.

 

[loves to dive]

Best - Tough one since we have had some really amazing dive trips and/or trips to WDW. I'll go with seeing a Sunfish coming out of gloom in West Palm Beach Florida. They don't frequent the east coast but there was a big jelly fish bloom that year. We were on a small dive boat, the only customers with 3 dive masters and the captain. It was also my birthday. WPB is good diving, not great but a good way to blow bubbles. It's sort of known for it's ripping currents but there was almost none that day and vis. was horrible. We were sort of just hovering around the bottom looking for macro fish when out of the gloom this pre-historic creature comes slowing swimming in. Hubby had his camera but was so shocked he didn't have a chance to get a good picture although he did get one with everyone's bubbles in it. None of the dive masters even knew what it was. As soon as we got on the boat we were all jabbering about it so the Captain got out his fish ID book and there it was.

Worst - Tough one again since we always manage to salvage something out of every vacation even the bad comes out o.k. I'll go with breaking my big toe on the first dive of the first day of a 5 day dive trip to Bonaire. It was a shore dive and I was walking in before putting my fins on and stubbed it on coral. I went ahead and did the dive but it hurt like heck. Thankfully, there was a doctor in our group so he showed hubby how to tape it and what to do. I did at least two dives a day even after that, one shore dive and one boat dive (which hurt the worst) each day. I only skipped one dive because hubby was doing a very deep dive with two dive masters on a wreck and I was too worried to dive the easy dive with the rest of the group. I even did a dive that required a jump off a cliff into the water (that hurt too). Bonus for that trip, I usually carry my own gear but the leader of the group was so upset it happened that any time he was on a dive with us he carried my gear for me and helped me put it on.

 

[SandyinMonterey]

Was in Hawaii celebrating our wedding anniversary. On the day of our anniversary, my Dad had a devasting stroke. He died 2 days later. I was able to be by his side in time.