“Live life with no excuses, travel with no regrets.”

Oscar Wilde

Sometimes the travel events we remember most are the mishaps, oddities, eye-openers or scary things. My life has had its share of those.

Mishaps

After touring with my two sisters visiting us in Italy, we packed the car for a trip to Greece. Somewhere on the Autostrada heading for the ferry between Brindisi and Patmos, their luggage flew off the roof of our car and we never found it again. 

On an Easter Sunday visit to a Croatian beach, we locked the keys in our car. Most places were closed. A local family helped to jiggle the window down and their young son was skinny enough to reach through and retrieve the keys.

On my husband’s first day of work at his new job in Italy, he exited our hotel to find that our car had been stolen from its parking spot directly in front of the hotel lobby. He spent several hours at the police station before reporting to work.

After a flight from New York to Istanbul, Turkey, we learned that our luggage was lost and one of our credit cards had been hacked at JFK. The luggage turned up several days later. The credit card was replaced, but not in time for use on our trip. Luckily, we had another card.

Some mishaps were health related and required doctor or pharmacy visits—a skin rash in St. Thibery, France, mal de schiena (lower back pain) in Rome, Italy, a meniscus tear on a ski slope in St. Anton, Austria, getting achy and feverish after a hot tub dip in Val d’Isere, France and a fat lip for my son after running and tripping in a restaurant in southern Italy.

Oddities

Thanksgiving is a very American holiday and when one is in a foreign country, the day is marked only in touristy hotels in major cities. Prato, Italy, where we found ourselves one year, is an old textile center and not touristy, so our T-day dinner was not traditional. In fact, our meal was unusual even for Italians, because the only restaurant we could find open was Chinese.

We saw some rather macabre catacombs (Catacombe dei Capuchini) with many bodies preserved, fully dressed and hanging in upright positions in Palermo, Sicily. The most memorable, however, was not standing but lying in a glass-covered coffin. It was that of Rosalia, a two-year-old girl in lifelike condition, despite being dead for almost a century.

Eye-openers

Eye-openers can be conversations you didn’t expect to have. For me, one happened in a Warsaw, Poland restaurant (prior to the wall coming down). An East German guy asked us why we were there when we had the freedom to travel to so many wonderful places beyond his reach. He was bitter because he had few choices, all of which were confined to the Eastern Bloc countries. 

A request from Morocco shocked me with the revelation that an everyday product in the U.S. was a scarce commodity there. My husband and I hand-transported 1,000 bars of hotel-size soap to a health clinic in a small village so our nurse friend in the Peace Corps could provide anti-bacterial care for wounds and minimize germ contamination.

A late-night arrival at JFK resulted in a long wait for our 6am connection to Boston and showcased the dire straits of homeless people who sought refuge in the nearly deserted terminal.

Scary Things

Our honeymoon in Venezuela included a hairy plane flight between Canaima and Caracas. The attendants gave us complimentary alcohol and then proceeded to stuff leaks in the plane with toilet paper.

When we passed through (then) Czechoslovakia on our drive to Poland, we stopped in Prague, only to find out our visas were one-way. We spent half a day in a government office filling out paperwork and hoping we’d be able to re-enter the country on our way back.

On leaving Poland, our car, with our children asleep in the back seat, was subjected to a complete search late at night. We had an “unofficial” painting bought from an art student in Krakow instead of a government store, so we were on edge.

After a harrowing detour on a high mountain road skirting a volcano in Baños, Ecuador, we were making a windy, steep descent into town when our rental car lost its brakes. 

Finally, we survived an earthquake in Naples, Italy. It could have been worse; we were at a soccer game near the epicenter only hours before.

As trying as those events were, my travels have also included amazing, surprising and sweet moments.

Amazing

Amazing moments for me have been many, like walking amidst blue-footed boobies on Isla de la Plata, Ecuador and having an outdoor bed massage on a beach in Koh Lanta, Thailand. 

Many amazing experiences have involved food— a dinner in a former camel caravan stall in Sarajevo, in what was then Yugoslavia, flying in to have lunch in a jungle camp near Canaima Falls, Venezuela, a complimentary bottle of sherry, almonds and chocolate at a parador near Huelva, Spain and enjoying giant, grilled shrimp at an oceanside inn in Figueira da Foz, Portugal. 

France didn’t disappoint in the amazing meals department either— a spectacular fish platter (Plateau Prunier) in Bayonne that was as large as the table, an eighteenth-century costumed, holiday dinner party in a French castle near Paris and a Michelin-starred dinner in a Beaujolais cave.

Surprising

We’ve had some surprises along the way. A Parisian waiter defied the French reputation for rudeness when he noticed I left my purse at a café and tracked me down on his motorcycle to return it.

In the largely Muslim country of Morocco, we encountered a painting of the feminist Betty Friedan in a museum in Agadir.

The teenage daughter of an Italian friend had a picture of American singer Jackson Browne in her bedroom at their vacation home in Sapri.

The manager of the hotel we stayed at in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam gifted me with a lovely white wool scarf on the day we left.

Sweet

My husband and I, both of retirement age, were sitting together at the edge of a fountain in Madrid, Spain when a local photographer asked to take our picture for a love-themed contest.