Bad, traveller! Bad!

Proof that practice doesn't make perfect...

About a year after I started traveling, I'd been in Ireland for a few months and then moved on to Germany to meet up with a friend. We spent a week in Berlin, went camping in the mountains and then three awesome days at Octoberfest. On my last day I had an early morning flight to Greece where I would be meeting 27 of my family members. After a night in the tents, I headed to bed early, set my alarm for 7 and went to sleep.

The next morning, I wake up, no problem. Get out on time and make the quarter-to train. Perfect. I get to the airport cool as a cucumber and then I start to notice that all of the clocks at the airport are wrong. They all say 10am when it is clearly 9am. I can't figure it out until, finally I do figure it out. It is 10 and my flight has already closed its check in.

I only travel with my alarm clock (no watch or phone) and apparently had only been using my friend's phone as a clock for the past 2 weeks which is why it never crossed my mind that it wasn't on the right time when I set it the night before.

I did make it to Greece, 11 hours and 250 euros later, just in time to miss the huge dinner celebration my Grandparents has arranged.

travis wrote:years ago visiting my parents in Maine while on winter break from college in Montana I had bought a cheap internet fare, r/t for like $200 in and out of small airports. I printed out the itinerary but failed to refer back to it knowing that I flew out on thursday the 12th at 10am. I get dropped off at the airport and say my good byes and go to check in. Theres no lines and i basically walk right up to the check in agent. She very kindly, after a little laugh, explains that my flight was on tuesday the 10th at 12noon! Hanging my head low I had to call my parents back and explain to them that my college education apparently wasn't working and I needed them to come pick me up. Searching for one way tickets and I couldn't find one for less then $500, and that was out of an airport 2 hours away, and it was a crappy red eye with 2 connections! So I borrowed dads car and signed my little brother up for a road trip, Maine to Montana, 42 hours non stop driving! Turned out to be a cool mistake though as I got to show my little bro around the mountains of Montana for 2 weeks.

At least you're a family legend. I bet your little bro was happy too!

Don't think I'm in the same league as most of these posts but here is my snafu anyway. In 2007 I was on an extended trip to Europe and was having a great time. I made it down to Sicily to look-up my grandfathers family. About my 3rd day there I was having lunch in a park and noticed a WC located a few steps down below the roadway. As I am willing to admit, I tend to be a kluts, most likely due to the body preceding the brain in most cases. Being almost 6ft. I did not clear the doorway which was impregnated with a thin metal strip. I blacked_out on impact, at least for a short while. Woke a bit bloody and really disoriented. Made it back to my B&B which was about 4 blocks and even managed to get my foot run over by a maniac on a scooter that turned in front of me. I was alone but knew it was unwise to go to sleep right away. The next morning I pulled out my map and realized that it could have been written in Greek since I could not understand a single thing. I figured I'd suffered a concussion since I had had a head injury some years before. I decided to alter my trip and start toward home, although not stressing too much. As time progressed I seemed to improve a bit. I made my route toward Barcelona and by this time felt better. I did notice that I could not read more than a single sentence in a book and recall what I'd read. but generally I could function. After a week in Barcelona I wanted to head to Toulouse, France, so I went to the train station and taking out my same map which I assumed was making sense at this time and asked for a ticket to Tolosa which I though was Toulouse. I recall seeing the sign at the station marked Tolosa. When I got out I was amazed at how small Toulouse seemed. I found the only hotel and checked-in. As the clerk spoke English, I asked only where I could find a restaurant and headed there.I seated myself and ordered by number still not suspecting anything unusual. But then I started noticing that the conversation around me was not French, but I could not say it was Spanish either. I reached over and picked-up a local paper and found the weather map, which could have been of the planet Jupiter. By this time I figured I'd really damaged the brain pretty badly. After paying I returned to the hotel and asked the clerk to tell me where I was on my map. "Well right here", she said,"In Tolosa". I said I thought it was Toulouse and she replied that I had an Italian map .The dialect had been Basque. The rest of the trip was uneventful but I think I've learned to slow down a bit these days.

This happened to my cousin, not me. She flew from Indonesia (Jakarta) to somewhere in US, with a transfer in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, she forgot to change her watch, and Hong Kong time is an hour ahead than Jakarta's. In short, she missed the flight. The wasted ticket was not refunded, and she had to buy a new ticket Hong Kong - USA. Quite a major expense.

In July 2009, my cousin and I had an early-morning Easyjet flight from Milan to Palermo. We arrived at Malpensa airport with what we thought would be enough time to check in, only to discover that the line was ridiculously long, the Easyjet counter was ridiculously understaffed, and that simply waiting one's turn in line is a ridiculous notion in some parts of the world.

So, we missed the check-in for our flight. Easyjet would not refund us, because it had been our fault for not allowing for enough time to get checked in. Their next flight out of Malpensa to Palermo was not until that evening, and was going to cost us something like 150 euros a pop. We ended up going to the Alitalia counter and finding a flight that left a couple hours later, for a comparable price. But we were still out 300 euros at the end of the day, at a point in our trip when we were starting to have to pinch pennies anyway.

Moral of the story: Always get to the airport early! EARLY!

EDIT: And then there was the time I did a cannonball off of a high rock in Santorini and nearly ripped myself a new one.

Such mistakes are common; twice during this past year once in China and once in Laos I bought the wrong ticket and got on the wrong bus and ended up going the opposite directions from I intended to go. In China because of attempting to say or pronounce the city of my destination instead of just pointing the English written towns name to the ticket clerk and in Laos just because no other bus was visible and as it was I had to walk away from the border crossing with China rather than be victimized by one of the few private transport hustlers who are waiting at every transport hub to gouge the new arrivals. In the past few years I've read the flight arrival time thinking it was the flight departure time , once missing the flight once missing my internet booking promo rate and having to pay regular airfare. Such is life on the road!

I had one of those non-refundable flights to catch and thought it would be ok to party the night before...I fell asleep and missed the flight...while I was sitting in the airport waiting for check in time...I was so so close and really annoyed.

I didn't miss my flight, but dang, this was dumb.

I only brought my crappy back-up, generic brand camera battery to Iguazu Falls. It was fully charged, mind you.

Forty minutes in....... battery dies.

Meanwhile, perfectly good name-brand camera battery idling at the hostel.

Sigh.

My mother had a flight to Australia (we live in NZ) it was an early morning flight, she had booked a shuttle to take her to the airport and set an alarm for the morning about 4 am... anyway at 5.30 she come into my room saying she had missed her flight. Turns out she woke when the alarm went off, didn't believe the time was right and sat there till 5.30 till she woke me.
I managed to re book her on a flight later that day for 150.00 NZ which is really not bad.
The sad thing was that she was going to visit a very close friend of hers that was ill, She arrived at the hospital at 3.30pm and her friend had passed away 20mins earlier.