We are in Nairobi, Kenya. We arrive at the airport three hours before our flight and we know we are in trouble.
We are heading to Rwanda to go Gorilla trekking, a top-of-the-bucket list stop. The check-in area has about 200 people, in some type of line, that weaves all around the airport. All dressed in white HazMat suits and all pushing luggage carts loaded to the brim. After about an hour of trying to find any order is this chaos we make it to the first counter. This is when we realize that one of our passports was left behind at the hotel. We are not making this flight. There is only one more flight that we could possibly make that day. If we miss that flight we don’t make it to our slotted permit time for the trekking.
We call our guide and he offers to go retrieve the passport. We start to figure out how we can buy these tickets. None of the travel websites work. We can’t complete the purchase but the price goes up every time we try. Eventually, we ended up walking to another terminal and getting a handwritten ticket from some guy behind a sliding drive-thru window. Somehow, that was enough to get on the plane! We made the flight and arrived in Rwanda a few hours late and about $1,000 USD lighter than planned.
That is as bad as it has ever been for us when traveling. But we do have more stories…
Another on the list of “nightmares” was when we took a cruise from Barcelona to Dubai and the suitcase will all of our dressy clothes and most of our shoes didn’t make it to Barcelona. Or the next stop, or the next. We were reunited with it two weeks later, the day after we got off the ship in Dubai. The best part, we never had to dress up for dinner and could wear flip-flops for the entire cruise.
Kelly’s lost suitcase at the start of a wine tour in Italy with a group of friends also makes the list. Kelly spent her first day in Florence wearing some of my clothes. While her bag had quite the globetrotting experience. When it showed up a few days later we had to look up the airport code “PEK”. How does a bag going from the US to Italy end up in Beijing?
Some of the bumps ended up being silly enough to be funny. The four hours we spent taking COVID tests in tents in the Serengeti come to mind. We were with a great group of people and laughed about it as we watched the wildlife off in the distance. I think we took nine COVID tests on this trip but this one was the most fun.
Some are sad. We were on one of our first long trips during my semi-retirement. We had just visited the Galapagos when we found out my grandfather had passed away. We still had weeks to go in our trip. We made the decision to fly home but bought a round trip ticket back to South America. That decision to both fly back for the funeral and to return to the trip we planned was transformational. It helped us understand that family comes first and that adaptability is so important to travel. We came back and hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu, slept of a riverboat on the Amazon river and met some great new friends.
Kelly will kill me for writing this but I cant wait for our next travel mess!