I’m back from the United Kingdom! And holy hell, what an ass-pain it was to get home. I had an incredible time at Goodwood, and we have plenty more good stuff coming about that, so please stay tuned. But I have to say, mostly due to the cruel, capricious whims of weather, who lately has liked to dump rain down all over me, partially flooding my basement and then showing me a rainbow or two so I’ll get all misty-eyed and forgive them, like some kind of serial abuser, this trip has been, um, challenging.
First, there was the strange set of weather-related circumstances that had me routed through the Bermuda Triangle, and that was after my original flight was cancelled, making me have to start the trip about 12 hours later.
But the worst part was what happened yesterday, as I was trying to get home. I flew from London into JFK in New York (you know, the airport named for Jeff Fucking Koons) and then was supposed to get a flight from JFK to my home-base airport at RDU. Sadly, though, cruel cruel weather conspired again, and not only was my flight cancelled, they couldn’t book me on any other flight until motherscratching Wednesday.
Wednesday.
Matt was a sweetie and offered to let me stay at his place just outside the city and feed me good food and all of that, and while I appreciated that, I just wanted to get home. I checked other airlines, trains, everything, and eventually finally found the answer, and it was a painful one: the bus.
Yes, the bus! There was a bus, for $80, less than what it would have cost to Uber to Matt’s place, that would leave at 10:00 pm and get me home by 7 in the morning. I bought a ticket, oddly curious about what the experience would be like.
Next thing I knew I was in Chinatown, in a tiny and kinda dingy waiting room with so much weed smoke in the air the ceiling fan was telling me how freaky it would be if the color red it saw was different than the color red I saw.
I mean, I’m not expecting much for $80, and really it’s fine, but the contrast between that environment and where I was about 24 hours before, when I was within elegant-gin-and-tonic-spitting distance of a literal Duke, was pretty jarring.
The biggest issue that I noticed with the cheap, last-minute bus experience I think has to do with information: finding out anything is a pretty chaotic process. Is the bus idling outside the one I’m supposed to get on? No idea, at least until finally someone yelled something about Indiana. So that wasn’t it.
Eventually, enough people seemed to be mentioning “Raleigh” so I got onto the plain white oddly generic bus that was probably headed to where I needed to go, and once on, it was generally clean and in decent condition so I can’t really complain about that.
It wasn’t easy to sleep on the bus at all, and the lack of communication still remained an issue: we stopped a few times, and it wasn’t clear if these were stop stops to let people out or just opportunities to walk out and pee? I’m still not sure.
Eventually, we arrived at my stop, which was not a bus depot or anything that I was expecting; it was a strangely desolate and maybe out-of-business shopping center. I had to look at the map on my phone for the address to know that this was, in fact, where I needed to be. If I didn’t realize that, I think I’d be in Georgia now.
What if I was asleep? Or confused? Or both?
Whatever. I’m home finally, and that’s what matters. And I’m thankful for that $80 overnight bus.
This was not an easy travel experience, but I can’t say it was horrible, exactly. Just you know, kinda shitty. I’m exhausted and dirty and cranky but I’m home, and that’s what matters. But I bet you have better stories, and I want to hear them! What kinds of misery have you had to endure after a trip just to get home?
Kvetch away!
For as much travel as I’ve done – which is a lot, globally – I don’t really have any international horror stories worth mentioning. However, there was one closer to home…
N years ago I went to visit a customer site. Flying wasn’t really practical and the drive was under 4 hours north, so no big deal. (This was in February or March.) The plan was to drive up one day, get started early the following day, and drive home that evening. Easy peasy.
The day I drove up the forecast was clear. The next day while I was on-site, the local weather folks were calling for snow but not until late in the evening, by which point I would be long gone. No problem.
As the day went on, the sky got darker. And darker. And more threatening. By about 2pm the company was thinking about sending everyone home. I got on the road right away and the snow and sleet had already started.
As I drove, the interstate became covered in what looked like 3+ inches of sleet; there were some tracks in it but it was almost like driving on sand. What made it so purgatorial was that directly ahead of me, some miles away, were the sun and a clear blue sky.
After 30 minutes of white-knuckled unpleasantness I emerged on to a clean, dry road awash in sunlight. I felt like Andy Dufresne at the end of Shawshank.
I once got lucky enough to outrun a blizzard between Chicago and Denver. I think I used one of my 9 lives…
Totally worth it, I’d say 😮
That reminds me of the “snowpocalypse” storms the southeast was often in the news for years ago, including the viral photo from Raleigh.
Work started sending people home and I made it out quick, in enough time to stop at the store for a couple rations (beer) and home without issues. But I knew people that hadn’t gotten out as quick and wound up having to hoof it home. Driving back in to work a couple days later was eerie to say the least, with cars stranded all up and down the side of the road, under sunny blue skies.
Not really a just-want-to-get-home story, but speaking of snowstorms, I once attended a training week in the Chicago suburbs. This was back in the ’90s so I’m not sure if Al Gore had invented the Internet yet. Anyway, I did not pay attention to any type of weather forecast as I was just focusing on completing the training during my allotted week away.
I finished the training on Thursday around 3 pm. I had checked out of my motel that morning in anticipation of driving home as soon as I was done. I headed out to my rental car – A Subaru Legacy Outback wagon – and saw it was snowing lightly. As I was from Wisconsin, I didn’t even give it a second thought and I just started driving home. In good weather, with no traffic delays, it was usually about 5-1/2 hours from the training back home to the shop where I worked, and another 25 minutes back to my house, so I figured I’d be home by around 9 that night.
The light snow continued as I drove from the Chicago suburbs across the tollway towards Rockford. Then my route turned north, but the weather turned south. The snow turned wet and heavy, and was coming down almost sideways. By the time I hit Janesville, the roads were absolute crap. It had gotten dark out and you couldn’t use the high-beams due to the snow coming down so heavy. So I plodded along at around 45 mph. After a while, the right lane was pretty much just two ruts of ice, but the left lane was pure snow. Turns out that little Subaru wagon was pretty happy at 45 in the fresh snow. I occasionally passed a slow-moving truck on my way north that evening, but traffic was otherwise nonexistent. The snow kept piling up, and was starting to scrape on the undercarriage, but it seemed all I had to do was to point that Subaru where I wanted to go and it just plowed on through. I was down to 40 mph, but I kept going.
Then I saw a snowplow… Stuck in the ditch.
I kept going.
Then I saw a state trooper… Stuck in the ditch.
I kept going.
It was eerie and desolate on that interstate until I got between Stevens Point and Wausau, WI. All of a sudden it was like someone had flicked a switch and it stopped snowing. I hit the high-beams, set the cruise to 65, and enjoyed the next two hours of dry roads until I made it home.
The next morning I went in to the shop to drop off my paperwork and training certificates and my boss was surprised to see me. Apparently some of the office management had gone to that same training seminar (management courses, not the hands-on training that regular-guys like me got) but they had only gotten as far as Janesville on their way home before the Interstate was shut down. They had left at 2:30, but had all stopped for a late lunch on their way home. I guess I was one of the last vehicles to get through Janesville northbound before they closed the highway.
I must say that little Outback wagon was really good in the snow. Probably the best rental vehicle I ever could have hoped for that week.
I had a trip like that, visited a friend in Jefferson City for the weekend in I think February or March and overstayed my welcome. It was Sunday afternoon and it started to rain. It was about 34*F out at the time and quickly jumped in my Thunderbird and attempted the drive back to Ottumwa, IA. A drive that took me 3 hours to do there.
The rain kept coming and getting colder and colder and at one point I remember watching taillights in the distance become headlights become taillights become headlights as the car in front 360’d themselves in the sleet. All the way from Columbia to the state line I was pushing 35mph, and at one point remember fishtailing and nearly putting the car into a row of those reflector-on-a-stick metal post things.
As soon as I hit the Iowa state line, it had snowed but never rained, and it was all dry powdery snow that didn’t even stick to the road. Easy goings and made it home in 5 and a half hours. Then got stuck in a parking lot in town for an hour after trying to do doughnuts in the fresh snow.
Actually just got home from such a trip. My wife and I were in Portland, attending my brother’s wedding. Great trip, nice wedding, saw some old friends. Dropped off the rental car (a bright blue Nissan Sentra, much better than I expected) at 9:30 and went to the American Airlines check-in.
Only to be informed that the middle leg of our trip home, Dallas to Philly, had been canceled due to weather 15 minutes earlier. No email, no text alert, nothing. They had re-booked us on a flight leaving the next morning, but weren’t offering a hotel stay or anything, just a “sorry, sucks to be you.” This upset me, but absolutely enraged my wife, who yelled and swore at the counter agent.
Everyone has felt like swearing at those people now and again. You know what happens if you actually do? They kick you off the rescheduled flight and escort you out of the ticketing area. Still waiting to hear if they’ll refund us for it. Probably not.
So we scrambled around, trying to find another way out of PDX. We had to aim for Baltimore, since American is the only airline that flies to our tiny local airport. Finally got on a Sun Country red-eye flight, with a layover in Minneapolis – which announced “final boarding call for early departure” when we were still half a concourse away. Sprinted the rest of the way, made the flight, got to Minneapolis in the wee hours of the morning.
There’s a shuttle bus that runs from BWI down the length of the peninsula, but it’s $90 per person, and takes forever. So my wife had the idea to just rent a car one-way, and go pick up our car at the local airport. Cheapest option available was a midsize SUV – which turned out to be a 2024 VW Tiguan. What a piece of garbage that is. It handles OK, but it’s noisy, rough-riding, has very little power, and has a legitimately terrible transmission. It upshifts too early, downshifts too late, shifts hard, and has a sort f sickening wobble at low steady speeds.
Two and a half hours later, we finally got home. And tomorrow we’re driving back to Baltimore for a concert. At least that’ll be in my own car.
Had a wild thanksgiving journey with a shower curtain ring salesman. Our flight was snowed off, some guy stole my cab…ah, you’ll never believe it!
Those aren’t pillows!
Not a getting home, but getting to destination story. Many, many years ago, I was flying from Austin to Geneva via Chicago and Heathrow on American for business. Get to the airport to find out that my flight from Aus to Chi was cancelled and there are about 200+ folks in line at the American check-in counter. I look at my ticket and remember that (at that time) my company sprang for business class on international flights including 1st class for domestic connecting flights. So, out of the nice cozy line of 200+ people and into the 1st class line that was devoid of people. So lonely! Then I had to wait approximately 2 whole, freaking seconds to be called up to the next counter agent. She proceeds to put me on a British Airways flight through DFW and freaking upgrades me to 1st class. The nerve!!! After an eventfully uneventful flight from Aus to Dee-effing-dub, I get to the BA flight where I sit down and almost immediately have champagne and small snack shoved in front of me before we even take off. Jeesh people, talk about rushing things! After take off, I get handed a menu for the dining choices: fillet mignon, roast duck, and some veggie option, each served with red or white wine. And was the wine the cute little bottle of generic red? No! I get served a glass poured from a full size bottle of French vintage that is shared with other people! How gross is that! Eventually I make to Geneva where I have to hop into a Mercedes E-class taxi to a downtown hotel that’s walking distance to the lake. Gosh, travel sux.
Mine is actually from before I had a car. Christmas 2007, I was unemployed and visiting my sister in Central Washington. On Christmas Eve, a company called me and said they want me to start right away, because the guy who would be training me was moving out of town at the end of the year. I told them I was out of state because I assumed no one was going to do hiring during the last week of the year, but I would try and get back.
The weather was awful that year, and the heavy snow meant even the Greyhound I booked for the 26th to get home ended up getting canceled. I was totally stuck, but my bro-in-law was a hero, and he closed his furniture store to drive me across Snoqualmie Pass in his Yukon XL. He got me to Seattle, where I was on my own to find a way to Portland, which I finally did via Amtrak.
I ended up starting my job on December 27th, and I still am at that company to this day, so it was all worth it! I told my sister I wouldn’t come visit during the winter again, though. April to October is my “sibling window” now…
That’s a nailbiter with a pretty sweet ending. Also, yay unexpected job offers from Portland, I took one almost exactly <mumble> years before that.
Back in 2000 my dad was living in Venezuela (pre-Chavez times) and we flew down to visit him. We were supposed to fly out on a Saturday but on Friday the travel agent calls and says the flight from MIA to VZ has been postponed so don’t show up on Saturday, come in on Sunday instead. There goes 1 day of vacation but oh well.
We get up Sunday, fly from HOU to MIA and wander over to the Avensa counter and find at least 300-400 ppl just milling around in front of the counter. Nothing against venezolanos but waiting in a line isn’t a natural response for them so you have to fight your way up to the counter only to learn that today’s flight has been delayed as well. Spent about 8 hours on the floor in front of the counter (no chairs) only to have them announce at the end that the plane wasn’t flying today so we spent the night in the Miami airport.
The next day, back to the Avensa counter. Good news, they’ve got a plane! Bad news, it’s not the original plane, it’s smaller, and not everybody will fit on it. Luckily we got on, but was that good luck or bad luck? I say that because it didn’t land in Maracaibo like the ticket said it would but rather in Caracas. They seemed to think this was acceptable but since my dad didn’t live in Caracas it didn’t help us much. Luckily we weren’t alone, the whole rest of the plane thought we were going to Maracaibo as well so they rose up. The lady that sat next to us on the plane had waaaay too many bags and needed help. I lived in VZ as a small child so my spanish is good but it’s not very technical so we struck up a deal. I helped carry her many many bags and she handled the negotiations. Long story short (I know this isn’t short and I ain’t halfway done yet) the airline suggested we could wander around the airport and ask if we could charter a plane for the remaining flight to Maracaibo. This didn’t go over well with seatmate, she raised hell, climbed up on a chair, rallied the troops (the rest of us passengers), and convinced Avensa to hire a charter plane for the remaining flight with the threat of a riot.
Avensa managed to wrangle up the oldest plane I’ve ever flown on in short order. The jet engines were soooo loud I raided my wife’s makeup bag and tore off pieces of her makeup sponge to shove in my ears but we finally landed in Maracaibo. This is back when it was rare for someone to have a cell phone so most of us didn’t have one, I had no idea how I was going to get in touch with my dad since we’re landing a day and many hours late but somehow he was there at the baggage claim waiting for us! I hugged him, thanked him, then confiscated his cell phone and loaned it to my fellow travelers so they could call their families. A few of them would have to wait hours for their family to travel to pick them up and the airport wasn’t the safest place so dad invited them all back to his place to wait. It was a crazy crazy trip but we all helped each other out.
Anyways, we spent the week in Venezuela doing the touristy things and having flashbacks to my childhood. At the end of the week the day before our flight home I suggest we swing by the airport and check that the flight is going to be taking off on time. Ya know, because the flight down was so trouble-free and all. So we drive to the airport and walk up to the Avensa counter…and it’s gone. Seriously, the furniture is gone, the PCs are gone, the sign is ripped off the wall, and the lights are off. Not a great sign.
So from the abandoned Avensa counter in Maracaibo we tried calling our travel agent in Houston but the agent working that day had limited English and instead kept insisting we just go to the counter and everything would be alright. We couldn’t explain to her that the counter was fucking gone!!! We asked around the airport, and turns out Avensa’s certificate to fly out of Maracaibo had been revoked, in fact all their certs are being pulled but they can still fly out of Caracas (for now).
So we rush back to dad’s to pack and jump in his 4Runner and drive all night (8 hours) to Caracas to see if they’ll honor our tickets back to MIA. It took some arguing but we managed to talk our way onto a plane for later that day, much later it seemed because Avensa never met a flight it didn’t mind delaying. Delayed soo much in fact we missed our connecting flight from MIA to HOU and there wouldn’t be another one until tomorrow. Yep, we’re going to be spending another night in the Miami airport.
So I went back to the Avensa counter and suggested they put us up in the airport hotel for our trouble. Guy behind the counter looks at my tickets and points out that by law (allegedly) your connecting flight can take off no sooner than 1 hour later than your first flight is expected to land and since I bought an illegal connecting flight they owed me nothing. Well fellow Autopians, when I get mad enough my spanish improves and I unloaded on the poor primo. I retold everything I just typed above, mentioned being delayed several days, driving all night across his damn country, and I wasn’t putting up with anymore. I guess I was loud enough his boss came out from the back and told the 1st guy to put us up in the hotel.
You think this is done? Almost, but not quite, it continues. At the hotel they’re no longer accepting Avensa’s business cards, primo had to run back to his boss and get his personal credit card to pay for our room. It’d been a really long couple of days at that point and we hadn’t eaten so we just wanted dinner and to go to bed. There was a Burger King in the concourse right next to the hotel so we just grabbed a couple of burgers. The ladies behind the counter kept referring to my wife as “la chinita” which pissed her off. She’s Asian but not Chinese and took offense but of the two of us she got off lighter than I did because BK’s treat to me was some e-coli or salmonella or some shit because that’s exactly what I woke up doing the next day.
So, next morning we’re finally on our way home to Houston, on American Airlines this time. Avensa is far behind us and we’re in the clear, except not quite, the ghost of Burger King is still haunting my gut and I spend half the flight getting up and running back to the lav.
Normally at this point I would recommend everybody to avoid flying on Avensa Servivensa but if you can believe it, they’ve ceased operations! I can however recommend you avoid the Burger King in the Miami airport, or anywhere really.
Damn 8A, or 138, or whatever your name is: You win… or maybe you lose… guess it depends on your perspective. But that’s a helluva story!
Thanks! I think 😉
And it’s 138, it’s a number of regional significance originally from a song. You’re only the 2nd person to notice!
Dude. Just… dude.
I bet you could have arranged an Autopian Reader Relay to get you from New York to Raleigh-Durham.
Coming home from our family camoping trip last summer: The remnants of hurricane Debby made out with another storm system over Quebec and caused a bunch of flooding. It closed one of the autoroutes (think intersate). Detour along a secondary highway. It took 3.5 hours to go 20km.
Needless to say, once back on the autoroute, the only speed limit I was following was the speed rating of the trailer tires.
**cracks knuckles**
Okay, so I found an old Jeep for sale, for dirty dirt cheap. 98 Tj that “wouldn’t stay running” Guy said it was going to the scrapyard if someone didn’t come get it that weekend. We agreed on a price, I hopped in my Gladiator, grabbed my buddies old trailer, and headed off to get it.
Grabbing it was uneventful enough. Back the trailer up, drop the ramps, shove the broken jeep on, tie her down, saddle up and head home.
The weather was typical January nastiness, loads of snow on the road, but with a brand new truck and all the traction control/stability/trailer sway stuff a modern truck provides, I was relatively spoiled. The trailer was heavy as all hell, a homemade creation of his dad’s. Being made out of old mobile home axles and welded up angle iron, the trailer alone was around 2,000 lbs. With the TJ perched on it I was probably pulling right about 52-5300 lbs. Simple stuff. Or so I thought. Once underway, I realized that the trailer brakes effectively had two settings. No trailer brakes, or LOCK UP ALL 4 TIRES AT THE SLIGHTEST TOUCH. After about the 3rd time the trailer attempted to enter the passing lane and get past me, I just turned them off and went a bit slower.
Now, I don’t care what anyone says, just because a truck is rated for over 5,000 lbs doesn’t mean it’s going to be happy with it. The freeway was easy enough, slow and steady and smooth. But once I turned onto my backroads (the only way home) that trailer became an unruly disaster back there.
When you tow something that weighs nearly as much as your truck, and that truck has a (very softly sprung) coil spring suspension, life gets interesting.
Every big bump that I forgot to slow down to a crawl for seemed to want to send the ass end of my truck into the air. When it came back down, I had NO steering traction on the snow.
Regardless, I made it to the home stretch. My house sits on top of a ridge that can be accessed by three roads, but all three presented a big problem. No matter what I did, I would be confronted by a pretty steep climb up a hill. One was a windy 2 mile climb up bumpy backroads that hadn’t been touched by a plow yet, another that would take another 20 minutes of backroading to get to, and the third-rhe shortest way, with a pretty steep (but very smooth) 3/4 mile climb, but all on gravel. It was nearing 2 AM and I was tired, so I decided to just hit the lockers and rely on the traction from the gravel to climb up nice and smooth. It would probably be the quickest way, I figured. I came to the bottom of the hill, dropped into 4 low, engaged both lockers, turned off the radio, and started up.
Started out nice enough, I settled on 3rd gear and was moving at a nice pace. Plenty of traction, and plenty of power. About halfway up the hill, I was beginning to feel pretty damn proud of myself and my little Gladiator. Then out of nowhere, the RPMS shot up and my gut sank as I felt that oh-so ominous complete loss of momentum.
I stabbed the brakes as soon as it came to a stop, and then the gut sinking feeling gave way to full blown panic as I started getting dragged backwards by the trailer.
This is a one lane road, and I was halfway up the steepest part of the climb, with nothing but ditch on my right and a hillside to my left. I looked in the rear view and saw absolutely nothing but a red glow lighting up a bunch of falling snow.
“Hoooooolyyyyyy shiiiiiit, this things going straight over the hilll”I thought , so I yanked the e brake and popped the driver door open to bail. Right before I did, I miraculously came to a stop, I’d gotten back into the soft gravel again.
The next hour of my life involved winching the whole idiot train up the hill, dragging out 30 feet or so at a time, winching up, getting out, trudging back through the snow, unhooking, dragging another 30 feet up to the next tree, winching again, and so on.
To save about 20 minutes, I nearly cost myself 2 vehicles, one of which I didn’t even legally own yet, and an irreplaceable trailer, and maybe even actual injury.
But if there’s one thing I did learn in all this, it’s that the Harbor Freight APEX is one hell of a good winch.
It wasn’t one of David’s holy grails, was it?
Nah dude. I have the same enthusiasm as David, just none of his common sense.
This was all over a rusty 2.5l 4 banger with a frame that had the structural integrity of a dollar store taco shell.
Day 2 of every family vacation, nuff said.
best comment ever! oh, so, painfully true!!!
I’m fortunate to not have had any major flight disruptions like this. But the time when I can recall having the strongest urge to just get the hell home and out of the situation I was in was when I was towing my Lemons racer from a race outside of Bakersfield, CA back home to San Diego. I think I already told this story in response to Mercedes’ dramas with the Ford Super Duty.
My trailer blew a tire at 9PM in a section of freeway in Pomona that was under construction and had no emergency lane so I had to limp along for 1/2 a mile with the tire shredding itself to pieces. Got off the freeway and into a Walmart parking lot, but of course all tire shops were closed. I looked around at nearby motels and none could accomodate a truck and trailer. I considered unhooking the trailer and leaving it in the parking lot but I wasn’t in a great area and got paranoid about it or my race car being stolen, and/or all of the tools and equipment in my truck getting stolen. After a bunch of phone calls I eventually got ahold of a 24 hour truck tire service, and they amazingly had the correct size and type of tire for the trailer. At midnight a nice gentleman from the tire service found me, replaced the tire, and $400 later I was on my way. That $400 hurt since it was a trailer I had borrowed for free, but still way better than the alternatives.
I used to think letting people borrow trailers for free was a cunning ploy by trailer owners to get someone else to pay for maintenance out of guilt for breaking it, but after owning a trailer realize that no, they’re just in a continuous state of breaking, one wire or bearing at a time.
Absolutely. I have about a 50% failure rate on the tires of the trailers I have borrowed over the last 15 years. I borrowed a different trailer a month ago for a 1200 mile round trip and decided I’d buy a spare tire for it if if necessary to as insurance and give it to the owner at the end. Thankfully it got new tires, bearings, and a new spare tire before I borrowed it and the trip was uneventful.
So did the person that borrowed it before you have to fix everything on it? Sounds like you lucked out for once.
No, the owner just put a bunch of maintenance work into it that I was able to capitalize on.
That said, the last time I borrowed that particular trailer (probably 5+ years ago) I did replace a missing Bearing Buddy on one wheel and just paid out of pocket, so the owner knew I was a responsible person. When I borrow equipment I often return it in better shape than when I got it.
Work travel has done this to me a couple of times with mixed results. I never resorted to one of those busses, but I know plenty of people who used them religiously since they are pretty cheap and reliable transportation. Here are my top 2:
I was in Houston for work doing some filming. My crew and I had a direct flight home when the plane got delayed for… reasons. Those reasons changed with each announcement, but they finally seemed to stick with “it needs a new tire for the landing gear”. This was after a gate change that sent us all the way across the airport. By the time they figured out how they were going to address the problem, the crew had timed out and were required to get some mandatory rest. We got food coupons and hotel vouchers. It was technically breakfast time at that point, so we used the vouchers on chicken minis and our flight left the next morning. Could have been worse. Like that time…
I was filming in New York and scheduled to film in Norfolk the following day with a camera crew of four people I hadn’t worked with previously. Storms rolled into New York and we watched as every single flight got cancelled, jeopardizing our filming schedule for the next day. I made the call to rent a car. We got the biggest thing we could to accommodate five of us plus our gear, and it was a Chevy Trailblazer-sized thing. Traverse? Whatever. We barely fit. And I was NOT going to let them drive it. I made tracks. Got us home in pretty good time, even with them requiring stops for coffee and cigarettes every two hours.
Ok, one more. Was in Israel for a company even last year. Everything was going great, but it’s already a grind – I do this every year – go to Israel for a day and a half then head right back. I try not to think about what time it is anywhere. Everything goes like clockwork, and I’m at Ben Gurion airport waiting for my flight. We board. Then they unboard us because something is wrong with the plane. Delays start to stretch into the evening. They gave us food vouchers as we were deplaning, but none of the restaurants accepted them. Two hours later the missile sirens go off and we’re all hiding in the safety corridors, which everyone else there seemed to think was fun. I’m not sure how long I had been awake waiting on this plane to take off when we finally boarded, but I legit started hallucinating. I was seeing things that just weren’t there. I don’t sleep well on planes, but I think I got in a bit on that flight. If a boat was an option…
I thought that shopping center looked a little familiar…backing into it on street view I know where exactly it is. At least you could get a Baja Blast or a milkshake while you waited and if your wife was picking you up it was easy access off the interstate?
Then backing into the bus company with that address looks like all their stops add a landmark as if to answer the question you’re already asking: “no yeah, it is in fact behind the [McDonalds/Walmart/Chinese buffet.]”
Mine was getting held in Miami due to a passport issue (clerical, not on my end), which turned waiting at the airport from a dull experience into a very stressful one. Turned out to be a good thing my flight was delayed or I may not have made it. After that I knew I was getting home, but still had another connection, so two flights thinking “wtf just happened?”
It is not my story, but several co-workers were stranded in Canda at a conference on 9/11. My co-workers and some other American attendees of the conference chipped in to rent a coach that had velvet upholstery and seemed to have been a tour bus. Luckily, no one had a black light on them. The driver found an unmmaned logging road to get across the border and drove all night to get to whatever city they had all agreed on as their final destination. Then they had to find a car to drive back to Charlotte.
For me personally it would probably be driving back from a bowl game in Florida, with bumper to bumper traffic from Orlando to the Georgia border, while someone in our group threw up in a styrofoam cooler the whole time after getting food poisoning on the trip.
A friend’s dad had a similar experience after a hunt in remote eastern Canada. A day or two before he was due to head back to civilization, he saw military planes escorting several airliners toward Gander AFB and immediately understood something was up. He had no way of knowing just what had happened until he got to the nearest town, where there was a bar with satellite TV. From there, he faced a long and fraught saga of trying to re-enter the US days after 9-11… with firearms.
I once wanted to get home so badly that I rode 1400 miles in the back seat of a 3rd-gen Z/28.
I feel ya. Ouch. I did it in the backseat of my aunts fox body Mustang once so I could see the Ocean 5 states away. No fun when your over 6 foot tall.
Circa 1997, my Australian girlfriend told me that if she left the US and re-entered, they would stamp her passport for another 6 months. My sister and her took a day trip from Nashville to Canada. She was denied re-entry into the US and my sister needed to get back to North Carolina for work.
I drove up to Canada across the Ambassador Bridge, picked her up, and drove to Toronto where we visited the US consulate; no dice. In the end her parents bought her a place ticket back to Sydney and I dropped her off at the airport.
I came back into the US through New York and got caught in a lake effect snow storm in a 2-wheel drive 1995 Nissan truck. I pulled off for gas and upon attempting to return to the interstate promptly performed a 180 degree spin on the overpass. Since I was now facing the direction of the nearest motel I figured it was a sign and headed that way.
Some random guy in the parking lot asked me about what happened, then informed me I needed some weight in the back of the truck (I was about 24 and Nashville was the farthest north I have ever lived). He told me to follow him and somehow I didn’t end up hacked up in a cornfield somewhere. When we arrived at a warehouse of some sort, he lowered a pallet of cinder blocks into my truck bed, didn’t ask for any money and told me to toss em out after I got out of the snow.
Never having driven in snow before, I somehow managed to not kill myself and pulled off at a rest stop hours later. I slept in the truck cab for a few hours, heaved the cinder blocks into the woods, and headed for home.
I feel like taking a bus would be a highlight for Mercedes.
And we’d get a whole article giving us the many reasons for the generic bus business. Or why America didn’t better develop passenger rail service.
Truth be told, getting from NYC to Raleigh by train isn’t out of the question. The Carolinian runs direct every day and alternatively either the Acela or NE Regional will get you to DC to catch the Floridian.
The times have to work out right though. I did a round trip on the Carolinian from Raleigh to NYC for a long weekend just last month, it worked out great.
Yeah, I took Amtrak from Philly to Raleigh for work last year and it was great. Probably cost more than $80 though.
After all was said and done, the train trip cost $111 each way.
“What kinds of misery have you had to endure after a trip just to get home?”
Blasting through the Mojave desert at top speed in a beat up, grossly overladden, dying Toyota Tercel SR5 4×4 with a blown head/block/head gasket and bone dry radiator, praying to Dog to make it within the AAA free 100 mile tow radius before the engine literally exploded and that the tow truck which had been summoned would be able to catch up.
Good times!
Rode in a Porsche Cayenne with the factory coil suspension from London to Le Mans and back again for the 24 Hours of Le Mans classics race. On the smoothest toll roads that France had to offer I thought I was going to piss blood, at the age of 14. I can’t think of a car with worse suspension than that.
Besides that the main issue I’ve always had with travel was when traveling with my parents my father always leaves no sooner than 2 hours before the flight, with an hour drive to the airport, so he has to rush and then if any minor hiccups pop up at the airport they almost certainly miss their flight. So I’d lie to him, tell him the flight is an hour earlier than what it actually is, and by the time he figures it out we’re already at the airport.
“the contrast between that environment and where I was about 24 hours before, when I was within elegant-gin-and-tonic-spitting distance of a literal Duke”
Based on that transfer address on the bus I’m pretty sure you soon enough again found yourself within elegant-gin-and-tonic-spitting distance of another literal Duke:
That might just be the registered business address as it comes back to basically a residential home. But it probably would have been closer to JT’s home than the actual “station” seems to be.
Only one way to find out. Break out the gin and tonic, we’re takin’ the bus!
(Mercedes you can bring the Malort).
If home counts as my hotel…
After spending a long but fun day at both Ferrari museums in Maranello and Modena (skip the bus tour of Fiorano, it’s not worth the time or money), we decided to stop by Bologna for dinner. We caught the train back to Florence where we were staying around 9pm (all times are guesses). Noticed that there were people on our assigned seats, so we found the conductor, and turns out we were on the wrong train. Not just the wrong train, but an express train, that had zero stops between Bologna and Rome.We had to watch Florence pass by.
The train got in to Rome around 10pm, and the only train back to Florence was the slow, cheap one that would get us there by around 3am. The train stopped everywhere, and some of the passengers were shady AF (to be expected, given the time of day and the cost). At one station, the police came abord and asked everyone for ID. We didn’t have our passports with us (thanks, YouTube), but luckily we got off with a just warning, and instructions to carry them all the time.
Got to Florence tired and hungry, and had to make a run for the solitary taxi that was parked at the station. To add insult to injury, we missed our time slot for the Uffizi Gallery in the morning.
Made for a very memorable trip tho.
if only you had a TAXI!
According to my wife, I have an end-of-the-trip syndrome that makes me into a crazed lunatic (like George Costanza running from a fire) that happens every trip.
So my story is about being sick in europe on a business trip and just desperately wanting to go home to my bed and recover. It was a miserable week of meetings and plans culminating a beautiful hotel room in a small Italian town that all I wanted was a bowl of soup and sleep.
I took a bus from indianpolis to harrisburg and back thanksgiving week of 1987. I remember the horrid bus ride but I have no memory of the ride back. It must have been bad
More recent I hate being on a Spirit airplane. The school bus of the sky.