Okay, so I’m not the most original in coming up with post ideas, as I’ve seen other bloggers post their worst moments of the year too. But I can guarantee you that all of my travel faux pas are genuinely my own. Sometimes the Instagram photos begin to make traveling look like hopping from one flawless beach to another, but I promise you it’s not. There are so many mishaps in between.
Here (in no particular order) are my worst travel moments of 2017:
Mariehamn, Finland. I took the ferry from Stockholm, Sweden to Turku, Finland, stopping overnight in Mariehamn. On the cruise, I met two enthusiastic Swiss women who were about to embark on a weeklong kayak trip out of Mariehamn around the Åland Islands. Their approaching adventure added to my excitement about this visit.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of place you can visit in 24 hours, which is what I had planned. And my hotel (the cheapest option on the island, besides camping) was like four km (2.5 mi) from the port, meaning I essentially carried my 5 weeks worth of stuff for the entirety of my time there.
Not really the worst thing to happen to me traveling, but the short stopover in Mariehamn felt like a waste of time and a bad start to Finland after my amazing time in Norway and a great visit to one of my favorite cities, Stockholm. I’d like to try Mariehamn out again this summer and do the kayak tour thing. Maybe then it’ll go better.
The Worst Bike Trip Ever. I think you’ve heard this one before. Right here. Basically, I didn’t know anything about going on a long distance bike trip and I did everything wrong.
It. rained. a. lot. My knowledge of bicycles is zero. I was not in shape.
It was a rough four days and 300 kilometers from Berlin to the Baltic Sea.
DeutscheBahn troubles. Sometime in October I went to Ingolstadt, Germany for the weekend in the aftermath of a terrible storm. Lots of trees had been blown around and the tracks were blocked in many places. My train began with a two hour delay. Along the way, it was announced that the train would not be going to its end destination, but only as far as Erfurt (about halfway to Ingolstadt).
I attempted to sleep in the train station, but hadn’t prepared for spending a large amount of time in what felt like freezing conditions. I spent more time shivering on a bench hugging my backpack than sleeping. The next morning I took the earliest possible connection to Würzburg and changed trains there before finally arriving in Ingolstadt.
If that wasn’t enough travel woes for one weekend, on the return I waited in the rain for my midnight bus back to Berlin. I was able to sleep on the way, but when I awoke at quarter to seven, just before we should have been arriving at the bus station in Berlin, I realized we were still more than 2 hours away! This delay turned into 3 hours and I missed my first 2 (almost 3!) lessons at school. At least the visit to Ingolstadt was nice.
Cetinje, Montenegro. So my plan for Christmas break is usually: show up and see what happens. This can sometimes backfire (as you’ll see more of below…). While in Mostar, Bosnia, I decided that I would go to Kotor, Montenegro for several days, using it as a base for day trips around the coast of Montenegro. Although Google maps says driving from Mostar to Kotor is about 3 hours, the bus trip is actually nine hours. NINE. HOURS. So there goes one day.
I decided to make the most of the next day and got to the bus station just before 8am in hopes of hiking up Lovcen, the tallest mountain in the area. Although there is a bus scheduled for shortly after 8 to Cetinje, the man at the counter told me this bus would not be running today and that the next bus is after 10am. This next bus then showed up late and was delayed getting to Cetinje because of road construction.
When I did finally get to Cetinje, I began walking towards Lovcen (there is no bus to take you to the park at this time of year because Winter). After a short while, I realized the following:
- It’s already past noon
- I have no idea how far it even is from here to the park
- Actually, I don’t even exactly know how to get there
- There’s no chance of me really hiking to the top of this mountain today
So instead, I checked out the monastery in town, walked by a few “important buildings”, and headed back to the bus station, too defeated to care about the museum or two that might be worth seeing in Cetinje.
Of course, the returning bus was also late, most likely due to the road construction. Once we were almost back to Kotor, the bus stopped in the road behind several other vehicles. Then, the driver turned the bus off. I assumed this was to wait for passing traffic coming from the other side. But the driver began explaining to one of the passengers how to open and close the bus door and proceeded to exit the bus with all of the men, heading to the café across the street.
What is going on?
About an hour later, everyone was back on the bus, and we began moving towards Kotor again. I’m not really sure why the whole road was closed for over an hour… but it was. And I had wasted a second day in Montenegro sitting on a bus.
Turku, Finland. Okay, really my time in Turku was the best time I had in all of Finland. And I had the coolest AirBnB/couchsurfing host ever – Mika. I got to hang out with him and his friends on his boat for the day during the Tall Ship Races. Even cooler, I got the opportunity to try wakeboarding for the first time.
How is this a terrible travel moment? Wakeboarding is hard! You spend most of the time being dragged through the water before you figure out how to stand up. While I have a cool looking video or two of me standing up on the wakeboard, that was only after swallowing half of the frigid Baltic Sea. Even though I could barely roll over in bed the next morning because I was so sore, I don’t regret this “bad moment” for a second.
Plitvice Lakes, Croatia. I literally spent 3 weeks trying to get here. This park was on the top of my list when I arrived in Zagreb to begin my 21-day tour of the Balkans. After just the day in Zagreb, I spent about a week in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro. Once I was back in Croatia, I began trying to find a bus connection to Plitvice Lakes (not having actually planned anything). There were connections from Split (too far away) and from Zadar (only once a day, around noon, and 3 hours long). Even if I did go there and tried to spend the night, there weren’t any hostels open at this time of year.
Annoyed with the lack of winter tourism in Croatia, I escaped to Slovenia for a week before returning to Zagreb for my flight back to Berlin. And here it was. My last golden chance to get to these beautiful waterfalls. There was a bus at 5:30 in the morning that would get me there in time for the park opening with a bus in the evening to get me back to Zagreb all in the same day.
On the bus were two other women I had met while traveling in Slovenia! We spent the day together in the park. Even though half of it is closed in the winter, we still got to see pretty much everything we wanted to. We should have brought more snacks with us though because the café served worse food than my high school cafeteria. But it was an otherwise really great day! It ended up being worth the trouble of figuring out how to get there and made for a fantastic last day to the trip. I guess technically, not being able to get there was a terrible travel moment of 2017, but finally getting to see the waterfalls could be a highlight of 2018!
Alright, some of these (most of these?) are due to my lack of planning. But some of them are plain unforeseeable. Because of all of the things that go wrong, the things that go right feel that much better! These travel troubles can teach you a ton. They make for great stories and make your travels unforgettable!