Blogocentric Formulations

Day 24: "The hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming"

*Written as part of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" 

Day 24 Prompt: What is the most absurd or ridiculous thing that has ever happened to you while traveling?

If we're talking absurd in terms of expectations, the most ridiculous thing that's ever happened to me was when my wife and cousins and I went on a trip to Spain and thought the time change wouldn't affect us. We woke up at 4AM Los Angeles time (thinking we'd exhaust ourselves and sleep on the plane, which left at 11AM). Unfortunately, we were too excited to sleep, so we spent ten hours between two flights wide awake (at this point we'd been up for seventeen hours), and we landed at 7AM local time in Spain. We then proceeded to try and stay up for the entire Spanish day and readily agreed to go visit my cousin-in-law's parents' (with whom we were staying) school to see their play at 3PM. By the time 3PM rolled around, we had been up for 25 hours straight and were literally falling asleep at the play. I can only imagine how horrible all these Spanish parents were that such rude Americans came to see their children perform a play and were literally falling asleep in our seats!

But jet lag is hardly an "absurd or ridiculous" situation, so I think the travel experience that really takes the cake would be the year that my wife and I went to Vegas for Thanksgiving. We decided to forego the family obligations that year (see "Day 22: "There's No Such Thing as Fun for the Whole Family""  for a general understanding as to why ) and headed to Vegas to see a concert and spend a few nights at a fun hotel.

To fully appreciate this story, you have to understand that a normal trip to Vegas, even with moderate traffic in Los Angeles and Vegas... is a three-and-a-half to four hour drive tops. On a really bad traffic day if there's an accident or something, maybe five hours.

So we decided to beat the holiday traffic and head home early in the morning on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. While people were still enjoying their breakfast buffets and asking for late checkouts, we'd already be putting some miles on 'ol odometer. Unfortunately, we ended up taking a while to get packed up and ready to go, so we left around mid-day like everyone else.

Eventually, traffic ground to a complete stop. Like, people getting out of their cars and walking around the gridlocked highway kind of stopped. After waiting for two hours in the desert heat (this was during a time when I had a car with no air conditioning), things started rolling again and we eventually passed the cause for the traffic: a Japanese tour bus that had literally caught on fire. By the time we got there, all the passengers were (thankfully) out of the bus on the side of the road, but the bus was taking up one of the two lanes of the highway and was down to nothing but a charred frame. I have no idea how that happened, but thank goodness everyone was okay!

We went on for a few miles at normal speed, then hit another slowdown. Apparently one of the few stops along the long desert had some kind of commotion going on and traffic was backed up for miles and miles. My wife had to use the restroom and it took us over an hour to move the two remaining miles to the off ramp where she could use a restroom. We at least got to stretch our legs and see what the problem was (some overturned car or something), then prepared to go the rest of the home. The highway patrol officer at the on-ramp, though, diverted us to a detour, indicating that we couldn't use the regular on-ramp. That detour ended up looping everyone back onto I-15 going the other way (back toward Vegas), so we - along with several other irate motorists - had to drive 30 miles back toward Vegas, turn around at the first available off-ramp... then go 30 miles back through the miserable traffic in order to get back to the place we stopped to use the restroom in the first place.

After that, it was regular holiday stop-and-go traffic headed into Los Angeles.

Remember early on when I said a regular trip to Vegas was a 3.5 to 4-hour drive, maybe 5 with bad traffic? That night, the drive back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas took us over 10 hours. By the time we got into the regular Los Angeles traffic, my wife and I were literally so zoned out and dead that I don't think either of us spoke for an hour at a time. It was easily one of the most ridiculous, absurd travel situations I've ever experienced.