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!
In february of 2010, I spent two weeks visiting a friend in Recife, Brazil.
17 hours travel from the capital of Canada, 3 flights. (Puddle jumper to USA, then USA to Brazil, then Brazil to Brazil)
This is because Sao Paulo was the only international airport, which is 1300 miles SOUTH of where I was going.
But that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was trying to get home.
Just before I was supposed to leave, Dulles got hit by Snowmageddon and all flights in were canceled.
This was the middle of my three flights, and the one that was supposed to get me back into North America.
The local airport did not have a service desk for the company conducting the international flight.
So my only option was to get on the first flight, fly 1300 miles from the closest person I know, 5100 miles from home, and HOPE I could find someone to help me in a country where less than 10% of the population speaks English.
As I am here to tell the tale, I survived. I managed to get an alternate flight through Chicago. But Holy SHIT that was the most stressful 24 hours of my life.
Am I the first one to notice the manual shift pattern tattooed to the arm holding the “Autopian Asks” sign?
I’ve had many rough travel experiences over a long career for business travel around the globe (Beijing was horrible), but literally the worst was when my mother passed away (I’m in the states). It was decades ago, but still sticks out in my mind.
I was in Las Vegas doing a heavyweight fight for HBO, maybe a Tyson or Holyfield fight, I don’t remember. The fight long over, we’ve finished the job and finally in our hotel and going to sleep, probably 4AM. Wife calls and it took me 30 minutes to clear my head and understand what was being said. Mom, who lived alone, had passed.
With little to no sleep, grabbed the first flight back home (Houston at the time). Had the step-family ready to go when I got there. Booked on Continental (remember them?), but bad weather was cancelling flights left and right. Our direct flight was cancelled, but an agent found he could switch us to a Delta flight connecting through Dallas that appeared clear at the time (I miss Continental to this day).
We get to Dallas and the storm is now cancelling flights out of DFW, but not ours, which is due in a few hours. We wait and wait, delay after delay, and then at the last minute it’s cancelled. Because Delta waited so long to cancel the fight, by the time this happened, it’s really late, close to the airport closing, so all the rental cars and hotels are gone.
My wife and I, along with our two single digit step-kids, slept on the nasty benches and floors of DFW that night. No food, no water, nothing. Delta didn’t give a shit, provided us nothing, not even a blanket. The whole night I couldn’t help but run through my head, I just want to go home.
As you can imagine, I went without significant sleep for two days, and when we got to where we were going, I was fried and probably the worst person to be around, I bit everyone’s head off.
So to this day I refuse to fly Delta. Maybe that’s wrong, but I’ve never been treated as badly as that airline treated the four of us that day, and I’ve flown over a million miles.
I was living north of Orlando with two roommates who both worked in early education facilities full of those snot-nosed children. Every now and then, they’d come home sick… but the timing of this story was mid-2020… a great time to get sick.
Naturally, this happened a week before I was set to move from Florida to West Virginia. I had the U-Haul truck booked, plane tickets for my friends, some boxes already packed, and the logistics sorted out… How convenient, getting a disease that requires everyone in your household to quarantine for two weeks.
But because I had just signed my lease, I had the option to quarantine away from my two other roommates, meaning I’d have a better shot of recovering quicker rather than staying in the sick house… so I load my TSX Wagon with as much as I can fit, and start the journey on the same day I get my positive test result from the clinic.
I love long drives and trips… but 26 non-consecutive hours of driving, sleeping in my car, vomiting at gas stations, taking drugs, and feeling sicker by the mile while hoofing it up the east coast was miserable.
But I made it, and slept on an air mattress while recovering so that I could go back to Florida once I was healthy, grab the rest of my stuff (with my dad and a cargo trailer instead of with friends and a U-Haul truck), and complete the rest of my move.
My girlfriend and I took an overnight bus, traveling in a remote part of Peru. Not long after departure, the day’s lunch turned on me. The ticket agent had made it very clear that the bathroom on the bus was for numero uno only. I held on as best I could while the Peruvian bus driver drove like a madman through the night. The agony built slowly, and by the end I would have accepted either the end of the trip, or a fiery death. I did in fact make it without incident but am still a bit scarred by it.
Cape Cod to Central PA on my shiny new Ninja 250. The first 3 hours was crosswinds that regularly tossed me and my lightweight kite-bike 2 lanes over. The next 3 hours it was kinda cold. The last 3 it downpoured hard as I’ve ever seen an early summer rain in PA and at one point my newly (poorly) installed Muzzy muffler came off of the also new header. At that moment I stopped and ran back the berm to retrieve it and throw it in my friends car that was following. I got home and my black leathers had turned my skin blue and my bike didn’t want to start for days until I replaced the spark plugs that instantly corroded overnight after that ordeal.
Once upon a time, I was in winter guard, which is when the flag and weapon people in a marching band tell the band to shove it and lay down a tarp in a gymnasium and do our own thing. Anyway, world championships is always in (god help us) Dayton, Ohio. Our bus was fine getting there and while in town. A time or two we drove past what we called “Jumbo Jesus,” a statue of the upper half of Jesus coming out of a lake, arms outstretched. Locally known as “touchdown Jesus.” He became a running joke, of course. On the way home, our bus began to overheat a few hours outside St. Louis. We could make it about 20 minutes at a time before the engine would once again begin to overheat. On board, we began to notice that every time someone cracked a Jumbo Jesus joke, we would be at the side of the road minutes later. This is how we limped to a repair facility somewhere near St. Louis.
To this day, many of those of us involved remain deeply superstitious about Jumbo Jesus and busses in general.
Oh I needed that laugh!
ah yes… reminds me of the days taking the Fung Wah bus, but your journey sounds much worse.
Flight from Osaka, Japan to Chicago and then on to Knoxville, TN. We leave Osaka and 2 hours in the entertainment stops working. So I pull out a book to start reading and then the overhead reading lights go out. Pilot advises there is nothing to worry about as all of the “essential” systems are still working. So we continue the rest of the 12 hour flight sitting the the dark. We arrive in Chicago and there are thunderstorms so we are delayed 6 hours. We finally leave Chicago to go to Knoxville and we get over Knoxville and there are thunderstorms. We circle for an hour until we are low on fuel and then divert to Nashville. We land in Nashville after midnight and the airport is closed. The flight crew has timed out so they leave and a janitor is watching us to make sure we don’t leave the gate and explore the closed airport. About 5 am a rep from United arrives and says they have chartered us a bus to take us to Knoxville. That takes 3 hours and I arrive in Knoxville about 12 hours late and have been travelling for about 36 hours.
I’m not sure if the worst, but an exhausting one nevertheless.
I was finishing my LLM in Budapest and one of my best friends came for a few days before heading to south Germany for his cousin’s wedding. We visited Bratislava, Vienna and Prague, where we split after what some may infer were excessive libations. My train said Budapest, and I hopped in.
After the stop in Vienna I realized that the landscape was quite unexpected. Bratislava appeared on the wrong side, and soon I couldn’t find out where I was.
It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, my wagon was reattached to some other train heading to the Slovak far west. With nobody speaking English (nor Spanish or Portuguese, obviously) I had to wait until the biggest town: Kosice. And then, wait for about an hour for the train to Budapest, which took something like 9 hours to cover about 250 km. Hungry, exhausted, confused, and with barely enough time for a shower before an important meeting, and not even enough time to discover Kosice.
Istanbul 1992, trying to get to my grandparents (where I lived at the time) in southern Austria. There is a war going on in the Balkans and the Bulgarian route requires exchanging more money than I have on me. I have a train pass for Greece and Italy. So. Board train Sunday night in Istanbul. Monday morning arrive in Thessaloniki. Wait all damn day for the train to Athens. Tuesday morning Athens. Tuesday night the harbor at Patras. Overnight ferry to Brindisi, drink way too much ouzo on a belly that has had way too little food for 48 hours. Brindisi on Wednesday morning (55 hours in), train to Bologna. Get there late, wait for a train up to Villach (Austria by now), and then to Klagenfurt, where I wait for the first regional train to my grandparents at 6am, Thursday morning. One last train ride, arrive 80+ hours after leaving Istanbul, and my Oma is sitting there and tells me my Opa died while I was traveling, they tried to find me, the hostel I was in lied and said I wasn’t there, I had missed the funeral.
That trip sucked at all levels.
Dude, that’s horrible. I’m sorry you had to go through all that.
I am so sorry for your loss, not just the passing, but for the lost closure.
I rode a lot of buses as a kid. It can feel a bit confusing, as everyone else seemed to know what’s going on except for me. I never once a had a problem. However, taking highway buses is what I might a call a Slice of Life for sure.
I took a Greyhound from Lansing, MI to Chicago in the middle of January when I was younger, an unplanned solo trip home after my mother had caught the flu and was forced to stay with my grandmother while I had to return to school after the break was over. It was a run ride, plenty to look at, and I had a great time for my first time riding a highway bus. And then we stopped in Michigan City where the bus promptly filled to capacity with everyone and their extra carry-ons and it was a hot, humid, shoulder to shoulder in big puffy winter clothes misery ride.
Its almost a year when the systems on airlines went down due to the Windows update related to cybersecurity. My flight got delayed in Porto for a lot of hours, finally landed in Newark but I lost my connection. That was a Friday, the airline put me on a Sunday flight going home. I stayed the night, the next day I went to Hertz to get a rental car and drive to Detroit. The rental place was crazy, not a lot of cars, people fighting with the employees, etc. I was able to snatch one after talking nice to the guy selecting cars to customers, etc. Drove non stop home in a Nissan Rogue, mantaining BAE status lol. I just wanted to be home after all that drama
Mine was the opposite: We just wanted to get to Bozeman and snowmobiling in West Yellowstone. What was supposed to be CLT to DEN to BZN became CLT to ATL to MSP to DTW to SLC to BZN. Others in our group went through DFW and STL. Yes, we actually went backwards. At least we were upgraded to first class every flight except SLC to BZN.
That time I looked at my dry rotted tires and thought “they just need to last through this trip and I’ll replace them the day after I get home.” That was 4600 miles roundtrip, plus any driving I did while in Phoenix. After a colossal blow-up with my then best friend (we’re still friends now, 9 years later, just don’t talk all that often) I left a day early and just wanted to be home. This was the second 34-hour straight drive done solo in two weeks, I was already tired, and one of those tires cracked just enough to empty at 3 AM in Tulsa. I threw the spare on at one of those incredibly cheap roadside motels, with some lady attempting to convince me to come to her room the entire time, got my own (actually not terrible) room for five hours of terrible sleep, and made an appointment for 11 AM that day to get new tires. The place was asbolutely packed and I had to wait a few hours while curious locals asked me questions, and then was on my way home.
The two lessons, of course, being don’t drive 34 hours straight alone because it’s stupid and dangerous, and don’t trust dry rotted tires.
A cultured Torch of refinery, enduring the crudeittudes thrust upon him, deeply saddens. Not only for the indignity so unjustly dispensed, but universally shared.
I wasn’t expecting private jet travel, but couldn’t you swing a press vehicle? Probably would have required some advanced planning that changes would have scuttled.
I’ll be able to drop a story later but $80 seems high, like it’d be cheaper to rent a car off-airport for a one way trip.
I doubt that, plus Jason was already exhausted. Saving like $20 isn’t worth being Actually Dead.
This past March Break I took my daughter (10) to Japan. The trip was very smooth, one wrong way subway ride was the biggest hiccup. Then came the return flight home.
My daughter leans over and tells me she just had a “wet fart.” I direct her to the washroom as I get out some clean underwear from her carry on.
Then it crept up slowly, stomach ach, no appetite etc. So when we landed in San Fran, I told my kid, we’ll wait to get off the plane if you’re not feeling well. The plane empties and we get up and start walking down the aisle. It was only a few steps before the aisle get coated in vomit. we then make it to the nearest toilet on the plane and that get a heavy coating. The flight attendants were great, saying don’t worry, it happens and we’ve got a cleaning crew on stand by.
We then make it off the plane and start walking to immigration, and a couple more trips to the bathroom to up chuck. Luckily there was comfortable seating for my kid while I waited in the line for customs. There were a couple more trips to the bathroom while I waited.
Then we got through and a couple more up chucks on the floor, and in an elevator.
Then came the 1.5 km hike from gate to gate for our connector flight. I hoisted the kid up on my shoulders, put on her pink axolotl backpack, grabbed our shopping and souvenir bags and started hoofing it. My kid barely had the strength to hang on.
With a couple of breaks we made it to the next gate.
We rest I get some water in to my child and wait for the next flight. I inform the flight attendants we are dealing with a very sick child and ask to be let on first so we can settle in. Again the flight staff were amazing and understanding, we get changed to priority boarding and get front of the plane seats.
That’s when round 2 starts.
Before take off my child has already been to the toilet twice and had two changes of pants and underwear. Back ups were running thin. My poor daughter then had to spend at least half of the flight in the washroom. Every little nibble of food or sip of water was going straight through her.
The battle was still not over, one more connection to make. At this point I had been awake for more than 24 hours, probably closer to 30. Luckily we were in back in Canada, immigration was much smoother and faster and my daughter’s system was completely drained.
We then made to the most comfortable spot to the next gate and my daughter was able to have a solid 3 hour nap. We then boarded our last flight home. Luckily the flight was not fully booked and we were both able to pass out with extra room.
ROFL – I have been flying around for a living for almost 30 years I could write a book. In several volumes.
But the worst “get home”? 9/11. I was in WI near where the UP of Michigan borders WI. The following weekend was my best friend’s wedding, and I was a groomsman. Because I travel enough to know that bad things happen regularly, I booked my work trip to leave and return a day early – Sunday to Thursday rather than M-F. Just in case of flight dilemmas. HAHAHA, jokes on me. The aviation world screeched to a halt on Tuesday with the attacks, flying did not resume until the following Monday. I had originally flown into Duluth, to make it easier to get out I drove down to Minneapolis, and was able to get one of the very first flights out, to Boston instead of connecting to Portland, when NWA started flying again. I missed the wedding, of course. Thankfully, a work trip so not on my dime, but that sucked.
Second, which WAS my problem, and long before I started travelling for a living, I flew to London to visit a college friend on an airline “buddy pass” another friend who was a TWA pilot got me. Buddy passes are absolute, bottom of the barrel, behind EVERYBODY else, standby tickets. They are “free” and you get what you pay for. And I had a great three weeks in London. But while I was there, a fare war broke out, and TWA was suddenly absolutely completely sold out. And the way it worked was I had to go to the airport every day and hang around to see if I could get a seat. I think I did that four days in a row with no luck – and Gatwick at that – which is a HIKE from London. Eventually, I sucked it up and bought a flight home on BA. And to add to the fun, I was sick as a dog with bronchitis through all of this. But still not as bad as missing the wedding.
A couple years ago, a friend let me take his Miata for a test drive, and I decided that I needed to have a car that could handle like that, but with room for a tall driver instead of the pretzel-tastic experience I had in that NB (both feet in the air, head tilted sideways to see through the windshield). Pretty shortly thereafter, I’d found a BMW Z3 three hours north of me and had gotten a friend to give me a ride up to take a look at it.
We found that it was pretty straight mechanically (nice body panels and paint, actually no rust), but there were several questionable things about the wiring (radio wouldn’t do anything but turn its backlight on, several unhappy sensors, and the best part was the Torch-AC-compressor-style dashboard toggle switch to run the radiator fan manually – which would prevent the car from starting if you left it on…).
Against my better judgment, I made a lowball offer which was pretty much immediately accepted, and we started our trek back south.
I think we’d made it about twenty minutes south when the engine started losing power rapidly and I wound up pulling over as it quit entirely. I got my friend to circle back and we were able to jump the car to get it started again, but it only made it about a thousand feet down the road before dying. At this point we figured it was probably a battery problem, so we called the Autozone at the next exit and asked if they could stay open for another ten minutes for us to buy a battery from them. They said they would, so we hooked the portable jump pack straight to my battery and took off towards the exit, rolling in to the parking lot right as they turned off all the lights in the building…
Because my friend is amazing, he agreed to stay overnight at a local hotel with me so that we could try to get the car home the next day.
After the hotel power went out while trying to microwave a breakfast sandwich, we checked out and headed back across the street to the Autozone and picked up a new battery since the old one was so dead it didn’t even register as a battery on their tester.
As I’m sure some of you have guessed, the alternator was also dead, as confirmed by the Autozone tester. After contemplating a few options including driving across the state to get the only in-stock compatible starter and then installing it in a 97°F parking lot, we decided that a U-Haul would be the best option. Famous last words…
When we arrived at the U-Haul facility, we discovered that, even though their website had allowed us to reserve a truck and trailer at this location, none were available. After about an hour of dueling with the U-Haul computer system, we managed to convince them to let me rent one of their in-town-only trucks, with the obvious stipulation that I bring it back to that same facility. The other catch with this truck was that it was completely out of gas, so I managed to borrow a gas can and ferry a few gallons of fuel from across the intersection to get the truck to a gas station under its own power.
This U-Haul facility didn’t have any car haulers, however, so I wound up heading across town to fetch another in-town-only car hauler with the stipulation that I bring it back to that same facility as well.
At this point, it was simply a game of Musical U-Hauls:
1. Take truck to U-Haul Facility 2 to pick up trailer.
2. Take truck and trailer to pick up the Z3.
3. Load Z3 onto trailer and drive it back to my home.
4. Load my daily-driver car onto trailer and drive up to U-Haul Facility 1.
5. Drop my daily-driver off at Facility 1 and take the trailer to Facility 2.
6. Drop the trailer off at Facility 2 and bring the truck back to Facility 1.
7. Drive home in my own car.
Luckily, this was mostly uneventful except for being a bystander to a high-speed chase during step 6. I got home at 4AM…
No international adventure or additional cost for me as I’m I’m a Parisian commuter and it all hapened within the Paris region public transport system. My worst Just-Want-To-Get-Home Travel Experience was two weeks ago (july 1) during the heatwave.
It wasn’t so much the trip itself than the 2 hours of standing while queueing to get in a bus and go home. The train I take usually at Saint-Lazare station in Paris takes about 40 minutes to reach my town, has comfortable seats even in 2nd class, AC and wi-fi (it(s a train to Normandy) but that day there was an electric incident at the station and no train was leaving.
I arrived at the station at 5:30 PM (work gave us permission to leave at 5 due to the temperatures) to hear the announcement that service wouldn’t resume until at least 7 PM. The alternative was waiting at Saint-Lazare or going to La Défense via the RER (which was still working) and take a bus there. I picked the second option, arrived at La Défense at 6 PM and realized the queue was the longest I’d ever seen there, spanning twice the length of the RER platforms 3 levels below. The worst was the last 20 minutes after the previous bus had left (a bus or 2 were cancelled).The next intercity bus finally arrived and left La Défense at 8 PM. The trip was pretty quick (50 minutes) and the AC was thankfully working.
I got out of the bus at 8:45 and walked the 400 m to my appartment building. Almost 4 hours for a commute that normally takes 90 minutes. I went immediately to bed.
United’s last ORD-AUS flight of the day got so frequently delayed that I was able to convince my employer that I needed to take a flight the next morning just because I was tired of getting into bed at 3 a.m. on a work night after that cursed flight got delayed seven times. 0/10, never recommend, F-minus, no stars, twelve middle fingers, rest in farts, may God have mercy on its soul.
I spent less time getting delayed in the Crowdstrikepocalypse than I have on some of those evening United ORD-AUS flights.
The absolute worst was getting home with a bad concussion and pneumonia, though. That was after this. I broke down crying because I hadn’t flown out of Atlanta before and had no idea how to figure it out when my brain wasn’t working, and airport staff had to help me figure out where to go. I don’t think I even had the words to tell them what was up — they just kind of figured it out in between me bawling, handing over my boarding pass and coughing. Then I felt like a plague rat for the entire flight home. I got put in a middle seat because I felt too bad to make it out on my original flight and had to change it. Thank goodness I didn’t drive to the Austin airport because I don’t think I could have gotten home.
If I ever needed to go through ORD, I always tried to do so as early as possible during the day.
ORD as a mechanism is fairly brittle. If everything goes perfectly, cool, but things never go perfectly and the 10am flight is now 11am, so the 11am flight is now 12:15pm, etc. 🙁
If you would like some more middle fingers for them I’d be happy to contribute.
The final straw for me with United was four trips in a row they completely failed to get me the mighty distance from Portland, ME to Newark. Completely dead to me. This was when regional Colgan Air was flying that route for them as United Express, and their Dash 8-Q400s were having HORRIBLE reliability issues. Total hanger queens initially.
But I got my revenge. The last of those cancelled and “we can’t get you another flight until next week” flights was when they were merging computer systems with Continental. Since it was a cancellation, they refunded my $500+ ticket price. FIVE TIMES. 🙂 I stuck the $2600 or so that would have paid off my credit card that month in my savings account in case they ever came looking for it, but they never did. And they could not have just reversed the refund, because coincidentally had my card hacked in-between the original booking and the refund. I even called the bank to see if I needed to do anything special, and was assured that credits would post to the card just fine, but nothing could be charged to the card. Oops.
I never had an issue getting out of PWM to EWR in the mornings, but I learned never to book the last flight to PWM from EWR because it was almost always late or cancelled. I frequently had to stay overnight, and twice had to drive back in a last minute rental because I had meetings in the morning.
I’ve been spoiled flying out of ORD now, it’s been a picture of efficiency in comparison.
These were all mid-morning flights. They had a stretch where it was just completely unreliable due to the problems with the then-new airplanes.
Last week: 23 hours to fly from Richmond VA to Houston TX via Atlanta. On Delta. Which is headquartered in Atlanta, and has been or 100 years. It included multiple delays and one cancelled flight necessitating an unplanned overnight in Atlanta. Because of insufficient crew and plane resources. Insufficient Delta resources. In Atlanta.
I could have driven home faster.
Both of them involve food poisoning just before boarding or en-route on an international flight. One was Hong Kong to Detroit and the other was London to Chicago. Both included copious puking in an airplane lav (you can imagine how fun that is— thankfully I never had to stand waiting with others because all of them were occupied) and once landing, having to clear immigration, find my luggage and car and driving home.
I feel your pain.
I would have at least one chapter in my book of travel fun on in-flight gastrointestinal dilemmas. Most fun being the runs on a Dash-8 (35 seat turboprop) bumping along between Charlottesville, VA and Philly. Not as LONG as yours, but that lav was a WHOLE LOT smaller, I am a giant ape, and a Dash-8 at 12K feet on a warm summer afternoon is not in any way a smooth ride.
A 13+ hour delay on a Frontier flight from MDW to DFW after multiple shorter delays. No explanation was given for any of the delays. I got home 24 hours later. That was a very long day, and I work overnights.