Entry Two: Our Holiday Disasters

Today I’m back with another installment of The Travel Diaries, where I share insider stories on my personal experiences when travelling. Rather than just sharing my favourite places, I bring you along to the highs (and lows) of my trips, and the people I meet along the way. If you haven’t read the first post yet, you can do so here, where I spill all on my time in Paris!

When it comes to vacations, most of us love to plan. From your hotel to your car hire to your day trips, the majority of us will leave the house with a plan in place – and we’d expect it to go smoothly. But what happens when it falls through?

That’s right. Today I’m going to be sharing all on what went wrong on my family vacation to Corfu – and how we turned it all around.

Problem One

Picture this: You’ve been travelling for hours. It’s 35 degrees outside, and you’re melting, and your feet are screaming at you to flop into bed. You’ve been up since 4am – you’re tired, you’re hungry, but you’re excited for everything to come.

Until you arrive at your hotel and it all comes crashing down.

Well, my family and I didn’t have to imagine. It was our reality. Our hotel wrote down our dates wrong – and we had nowhere to stay for three nights. Turns out written confirmation can only go so far…

What do you do when the place you’ve been staying with for years messes up, and can’t pick up the pieces? You fix it yourself.

Solution One

Learning your accommodation has fallen through is not for the weak. Yes, mistakes happen, but you’d expect them to be rectified, right? Unfortunately our hotel settled at making one phone call before calling it a day.

Thankfully, we managed to sort it ourselves. My dad and sister spent a couple of hours wandering around our resort, going into every hotel and asking if they had any rooms. Luckily they were able to find something – two rooms on the opposite side of the strip, but hey, at least we had somewhere to stay! It was only for three days – it was manageable. The rest of the holiday could only go up from here…

Problem Two

Or so you’d think. Three days later, we dragged our suitcases back to the hotel, ready to check in at 1:30pm (as told) and finally get into our room. But I think you can guess where this is going.

Our room wasn’t ready. It wasn’t ready by 2, or 2:30, either… In fact, by the time we got in to our room it was nearly 3pm. We were waiting for nearly one and a half hours.

Solution Two

Honestly, our approach for this was to keep on pestering them – but, when we asked how much longer it would be, a member of staff just asked if we wanted him to whip the maids, which was obviously extremely disrespectful.

The cleaners were still in there when we were eventually let in, and I felt so bad for them! The management’s organisation was not their fault, and I’m sure they felt incredibly awkward, too.

It’s safe to say that by this point we’d decided not to return to the same hotel the following year.

Problem Three (And Four)

And then came the main event! After finally settling into our hotel the previous night, we were excited to put our streak of bad luck behind us once and for all… Starting with our hire car.

And for a while, everything was great! Sure, the satnav took us down this strange, gravelly road winding up the mountains, but it was an adventure. Until, well, it wasn’t, and the car broke down.

I genuinely thought we were going to be stuck there for hours. The road was completely out of the way of everything else, and the tires were hitting the gravel and sending dust flying everywhere, and we were well and truly stuck.

By some miracle, though, we got out of it – until we didn’t. Because, what would you know? We got stuck again.

Only, this time it was 10 times worse. We were on the top of a mountain – if my sister looked out of her window she could see the sheer drop below.

The worst part? We were only six feet away from the main road.

It sound stupid now, but I genuinely thought we were going to die up there. I had this awful vision of the car rolling off and us being like that one family you see in the news. I even sent a goodbye message!

Solution Three (And Four)

But, thankfully, it wasn’t needed. We got out of it – somehow. My dad came up with the idea of using the car mats to help us get up (the first time) and we accelerated up that road like there was no tomorrow.

But the second time? That was a little trickier… Because it was nearly impossible for us to get out of the car, we were so close to the edge. One wrong move and we’d be crashing down that mountain!

So my dad did what he could – reverse and accelerate, reverse and accelerate, reverse and accelerate. It may have taken a couple of tries but we got there in the end, and it gave us a hell of a story to tell when we came home.

And clearly the holiday gods had decided we’d been through enough – because, what would you know, the rest of our holiday went smoothly.

Conclusion

So there you have it! Three major problems my family and I ran into during our vacation. I hope it gave you a bit of a laugh – because I know, looking back now, it’s something I will laugh about for years!

In all seriousness, though, hopefully this also showed you that even when things go wrong you can still have a great time. Yes, we ran into some difficulties, but we still ended up having an amazing time – in fact, it might just have been my favourite time we’ve ever visited. I’m really grateful for all the awesome experiences and beautiful places I saw!

What happened to you during your travels that was a total nightmare at the time but is something you laugh at now? Let me know in the comments!

Until the next adventure,

Ceri x