Anyone had a vacation that went sour lately?

Two of my roommates and I decided to go on a road trip to the Black Hills over our Spring Break. It is about 10 hours from us, and we were going to camp and see as much nature and tourist attractions as possible (Wall Drug, here we come!)

Unfortunately, after weeks of planning and getting supplies together, we made it as far as the Badlands (about eight hours) when my car's transmission decided to die. After numerous tries to get AAA to tow the car, numerous offers of help from strangers (thank you so much for your generosity!) and numerous phone calls to parents, we ended up getting the car to a town nearby and camping overnight in the Badlands, a frozen desert wasteland.

The next day, my dad drove eight hours to come out and rescue us. We did end up seeing the sights because my dad took a few days off work to chauffer us around (for which we thanked him profusely), but it was basically a disastrous attempt at our first non-family road trip.

Makes it kind of hard to think about doing something fun on our own ever again... but at least we saw the Corn Palace.

Oh man, Mayaserell, bad luck but I sometimes find that it's things like that that give you a more exciting time (in hindsight perhaps ) but I must say I've never ended up in a place called the Badlands either. That's an encouraging kind of name!

And yay for the day for your Dad - great of him to do that for you and your mates

I know! I was so lucky to be bailed out.

At least it's a great story to tell our friends. I gave the abbreviated version- it actually takes about an hour (with sound effects) to tell the whole darn story!

Oh boy, I have, but not recently, (as I haven't been for ages). But two trips to Israel long ago opened my eyes to the dark side of holidays, where up till then my association was mostly with pleasure.

The first trip was supposed to be for a few months, arranged by our friend who'd moved out there from locally. After 3 nights sleeping on various floors waiting for my billet, the friend finally admitted the family had left the country for a funeral and could no longer accomodate me, and he was unable to find anywhere else, and after less than a week I had to go home.
The second was a week into a two-week holiday not far from the last visit near Tel-Aviv. My father became ill and we had to spend two days queuing for a new flight as the doctor said he had to go home. The staff spoke little English, the taxi driver didn't come at 4.30am to collect us for our flight, we had to take the first taxi that joined the hotel rank which (after being the only slow cab in the whole of Israel) got us to the airport just in time to check in. I developed a temperature on the flight home, and arriving back on New year's eve, was told by a friend they had three parties to go to, and I was ill in bed with the flu.

Not all of these incidents ended in disaster though. I was staying with a penpal in Denmark for a week, on the third day she woke up with flu and said I had to go home. I rang home and my grandpa heard the call, who happened to be visiting, and said 'I've never been to Denmark, meet me in Copenhagen airport tomorrow'. We then spent a week in the best hotel there, travelled all over the place including two day trips across to Sweden, I drank loads of the local lager and we got on very well. This was before the Israel trips, and as a result of them I became a bit of a holiday cynic. It didn't stop me going altogether, but did make me a lot more wary...