By: Kara Panzer
Summer travel: when it’s good, you leave your rich friends’ beach houses with a nice glow, refreshed and ready for the work week. When it’s bad, you have sun poisoning, you cannot remove the sand from your bodily orifices and your relationship hasn’t recovered from an argument at the mini golf course. Good travel judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Here are my worst travel decisions ranging from international meltdowns to wildlife encounters, provided for your entertainment and education.
1. The Beach
Beach vacations with my family tend to end in tears for at least two of our six members. It’s part of the process. This particular expedition began like any other: we arrived at the beach hating each other, but prepared to find love again in the restorative powers of the ocean. But something was not right. The ocean was red. “I’m not going in there,” I told my family.
“Why are you so uptight?” My family asked me. Just go in the water. Eighty-five percent of conversations on our trips turn into character attacks, but this is beside the point. I refused to go in the water and stayed on the beach getting 10th degree sunburn while my family splashed happily in the eerie waters. Red tide, it turns out, is an algal bloom; a heavy concentration of aquatic microorganisms. So yes, my family was swimming in a cesspool of zillions of little bugs. The point is that I was right, and they spent the next few days picking tiny insects off their bodies. Lesson number one: if the water is a weird color, don’t go in it. Also the smaller the quarters (car rides), the larger the rift that develops in your family.
2. Animal Friends
If you attended public school in Boston in the 70s, you may be under the impression that bison are extinct. This is not true, and every year in the South Dakota Badlands, some Yankee tool who thinks this is true gets themselves trampled by buffalo. In 1999, this was my family. If I’ve learned anything from Jurassic Park 3D, it’s to not interact with animals you thought were extinct. My mother had never seen Jurassic Park, so when she saw a herd of shaggy brown animals across the plain, she decided we should get up close and personal.
We approached at a solid clip, my siblings and I eager to interact with some serious wildlife. Could we pet them? They were just legit cows, right? We would find out. Much to our disappointment, they disappeared over a little hill as we approached. My mother made an executive decision to keep going until a giant minotaurine figure came over the hill and began to paw the ground aggressively. Time to turn around, my mother realized, but at this point her excitement had infected the rest of us, so we kept going, trying to take better pictures. My father also suffers from an underdeveloped sense of danger, so we were close enough to see the beast tossing its head in threat before my mother screamed at us to turn the “blank” around. The moral of the story is, stay away from wildlife unless you are a) hunting or b) filming a show for the Discovery Channel. My mother tried to approach the alligators last time we were in Florida so this may be an especially difficult lesson for animal lovers.
3. Budget Travel and Bus Rides
One weekend when I lived in Cairo my adventurous, journalist (ex) boyfriend and I took a little trip to the Siwa oasis. Public transportation in the Middle East is pretty fun when you are a young, blond, female, so I already hated life when we boarded the bus at 9 PM. People are yelling at me! People are touching me! Do something! We took our seats towards the back of the bus and as it pulled away from the depot realized the draft coming from the bottom was not going to stop. I spent the night awake as frigid desert air poured in and a man with tuberculosis behind us kept coughing like it was 1399.
The solution to surviving painful travel is to not be awake for it, and Dramamine is the way to do it- (unless alcohol is available.) I took many long rural trains and bus rides studying abroad in China and remember none of them because our program director encouraged us to take Dramamine by the handful. I am only partially brain damaged now, so it’s definitely worth it. This anecdote also emphasizes the importance of preparing for weather. The desert gets cold at night; it rains at beaches too! Packing a light blanket can make a big difference in long travel, and having some clothes you don’t mind getting dirty/rained on in is essential when you’re roughing it.
4. Renting Houses
There are used condoms and used pads on the floor: Use caution when renting a home! Especially if that home is unusually cheap and on Fire Island. It probably has crusty substance on everything and the owner doesn’t pay the electrical bill, and it may get shut off when you are there.
5. Sunscreen
For the love of God, wear it.
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