Thinking about Meadowhall, what's the longest time you've been stranded somewhere?

[chomalungma]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50341846

Overnight in a shopping centre?

I spent 3 days in Pittsburgh airport many years ago because of snow. Apparently is was the North American Blizzard of 2003. The only food we could get was from the restaurants. Couldn't leave the airport at all and the hotels were all full near us. The person I was with was not my cup of tea either.

But I am sure other people can easily beat that.

Not exciting but about 8 hours in Edinburgh airport. The annoying thing was, I couldn't hear the tannoy announcements properly. I ignored them and so missed out on free food and drink. Had bought my own.

About 10 hours on a broken down coach on a school trip. We managed to limp into the pub car park in a nearby market town before the bus finally died. We were kept on the bus the whole time by one or two teachers, only being allowed off to be escorted to the pub toilet and back. Meanwhile, our teachers took it in turns to have drinks in the pub and get food for themselves from the chipper while we got nothing. Eventually, a replacement coach arrived and took us back to the school. We were supposed to have been back by 5pm but it was nearer 2am when we returned. Mind you, we were still expected to turn up for school that day at 9 am.

Around 8 hours on a train as the train ahead of us broke down. If it had broken down 10-15 minutes later, it would have turned off the main line and we wouldn't have been stuck. That and they re-routed other trains coming after us so that they passed us using the other line as we looked on enviously.

5 days in southern Spain when the Icelandic volcano erupted.

Ok, stuck may be a slight exaggeration! We were pit up in the hotel by the tour operator FB and I'd gone on holiday SC! The weather was nicer than it had been for the 7 day holiday. We had 3 extra days.

But we had to travel down to ferry port in France by coach which took ages.
Left with 1 hour warning. Travelled to northern Spain. Hotel overnight. Early call for breakfast but drivers refused to leave as contradicted their hours. Back into bed for another 3 hours. Then travel to France. Ferry over and coach to Gatwick. Then got train home and my dad collected me from station and took us home.
Had barely slept for over 48 hours and arrived home evening time. Had to be in work the next day.
Should have been back 3 days previously. Lovely boss called all of us who'd been in same situation in and said we'd receive full pay for extenuating circumstances.

Cairns, 1990- not in itself a terrible place to get stranded; but I went to spend Xmas there as a backpacker, having met up with a friend who lived on a yacht in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, harbour. I got there from Brisbane by train (24 hours!). Anyway, we stayed in a motel in Cairns- just as a cyclone was bearing down on us.

First couple of days was fine, rained every afternoon (tropics, remember, high summer); but as Cyclone Joy intensified to a 5, and her trajectory became even more apparent, potentially crossing the coast at Cairns, Cairns began to close down. Eventually, having taped the windows, filled the bath with water, made sure we could drag the mattress into the bathroom; helping chuck all the poolside furniture into the pool; with most of the staff leaving (we had to raid the kitchens to eat! About half the guests were stranded like us), we had to batten down the hatches as the electricity failed (thus air-con), then the water supply failed- and the police, via battery radio were warning us of the flood danger of where the motel was, and where the evacuation centre would be .... and wait as the wind increased.

The radio was a godsend. They put on a loud warning noise each time they were about to make an update, and you could track the cyclone using a handy map inside the back of the telephone directory!...

We were stuck indoors for 2 or so days, you daren't go out for fear of decapitation from flying corrugated metal sheets, etc.... the cyclone sat off shore for a couple of days then began to drift south (as all the old timers predicted it would), crossing the coast half way down to Brisbane a few days later as a Category 2.

But the rain! It threw it down for days. And everywhere flooded to mid shin deep.

Mate had to head home; but all the airlines had removed all their planes from the area, having been caught out by Tracey in Darwin; so there was a huge backlog of booked passengers, so no chance of me getting a plane back to Brisbane.

Ten days later I was able to leave, by train, but the journey took over two days (54 hours, I recall) as we had to go inland to Longreach, then down to Brisbane. Much of the journey was more or less at walking pace as the train was axle deep in flood water.

Luckily I was 28 at the time! But my friend's yacht had sunk in the same cyclone .

@lastqueenofscotland I've done 6hrs at Aberdeen and it nearly broke me (and my two v young children). Jesus, how did you manage 8?

In a lift with a care home resident (who was in a wheelchair) from 11.15pm until 7am..... the sleep-in person couldn't be woken by alarms and there was no other staff - just about 25 other residents!!!

Three days at Toronto airport during a snowstorm. No hotel rooms so slept on the floor in the airport lounge. Got upgraded to .1st on the flight home!

Recalled another one. Aged 17 or 18 I worked in Southern Germany, in 1980, so flights were far too expensive to and from the south of England, so we used to get the boat-train, as it was called. It would take 24 hours or so; train from Munich or Ulm, up through Germany overnight, across Belgium, knackered as the train filled with (wet) cross, commuters, to Ostend, where we got on a ferry to Dover, in itself a long way back then (7 or 8 hours), and functional, not flash, and full of smoking, drunk Dutch lorry drivers.

Then a storm blew up; everyone was throwing up but - we got to the entrance of Dover harbour, but, due to the storm, couldn't enter it, so we tossed up and down for another 8 hours in a blocked toilets, vomit spattered ferry, before we could get in and land. Then had to wait for the train to London, then get home.

I was exhausted!

I got stranded for 6 hours in Birmingham in the snow in about 2003. I was a student nurse and on placement the other side of the city. At about 2pm it started snowing, my mentor gave me the choice of going on the train then or waiting for a lift with him. I waited for the lift which was a huge mistake. The whole city was gridlocked.

I also got stuck in a pub on the outskirts of Birmingham city centre for about 3 hours. It was after the London bombings when everyone was on high alert. There had been a scare and Birmingham city centre had been evacuated on a Friday or Saturday night. They missed this one pub which is tucked away by the canal. By the time police got to us they wouldn't let us leave as it would mean going through the centre. I can think of worse places to be stranded (and thank goodness it was a false alarm).

6 hours standing beside a broken-down bus at the roadside in Kenya. In the boiling heat and with not enough water.

Six hours in Philadelphia airport back in 2008. I'd forgotten to tell my bank I was going abroad so when I'd used my card a few days previously to withdraw some more cash, they'd blocked it! My phone ran out of battery and I only had six dollars with me; I spent the whole flight home panicking about how I was going to get back from the airport to the town where I lived with no money and no phone!

Luckily my card worked once I got back to England so it was okay in the end, but it was a LONG six hours in the airport.

Aged 17 got stuck in Guayaquil in Ecuador for 24 hours or so. Our flight was cancelled due to a volcano erupting. Iberia put us up in a 5 star hotel and gave us food and telephone vouchers so we could call home.

The chauffeur who collected us from the airport was not best pleased to have to load 13 stinky teenage girls and their teachers plus all our kit onto his pristine minibus.

We sat in the most amazing hotel rooms watching the TV news - there were riots in the city that night (political issues) and we could hear the guns in the distance. We had done 5 weeks trekking around the country and I hadn't got a single mosquito bite. I got bitten half to death in that hotel room! We hadn't had decent food or hot water for over a month so, despite the mosquitos, we were so grateful!

Has anyone seen the musical Come From Away? About the people who were stranded in a small Canadian town when their planes were grounded during the 9/11 attacks closed US airspace. Initially some of them were stranded on the actual planes on the ground for hours and hours then eventually let off and stayed in the town.

Oh and a train from London to northampton that accidentally came into Northampton on the middle rail so they couldn't open the doors to let us off. The train had to travel back to MK and then we had to hang around for ages whilst they organised taxis to take us back to northampton (late night, our train was the last one of the evening).

Got stuck in a lift in New York for four hours, at the time we didn’t consider CCTV, when I think about I hope it was never ever viewed.

I grew up in Pakistan and would travel alone to Pakistan in the summer holidays, one year my flight was diverted and we landed in Germany. I was only 10 and I don’t actually remember what airport it was. I was there almost 18 hours as bad weather had cancelled flights into some of the London airports which had a knock on effect on all flights.

We were in what seemed like a huge room, but it would have just been a lounge. The staff wouldn’t let me out so I couldn’t go and do anything. I remember being fed bread with chocolate sprinkles on.

3 days snowed in at Gatwick in the snow of 2010
Never got to go on holiday but made it into then news

Just under a Week in Norway due to ash cloud. Eventually got home by mini bus to Amsterdam (24hrs) and then train from Amsterdam to Lille. Taxi Lille Dieppe 🤪 and then Calais because the taxi driver thought we could go on the commercial
Ferry 🙄
Then foot passengers to Dover and then driven
home from there

Another lift imprisonment one:

Stuck in a tiny lift with my then manager for 90 minutes. She was claustrophobic and blamed me for breaking the lift as "Everybody knows you should never have more than one person at a time in here!" I was discussing some work matter with her as we walked along and followed her into the lift which the got stuck between floors. She sobbed the whole time while I did my very best not to ask who got to eat who if it came to it. Things were never the same between us after that although all my colleagues were relieved that it was me stuck in there with her and not them given how highly-strung and neurotic our manager was at the best of times.

Oh, and a hallway.

I got trapped for a couple of hours in the entrance hall of the shared house I lived in. We had the downstairs flat and a couple of young women had the upstairs one. One of the women had her bag snatched right outside the front door earlier that day so had called a locksmith, got the lock on the front door changed and given a new set of keys to one of my flatmates.

He'd gone off the get more sets made when I'd arrived back from work and couldn't get in but the other woman from upstairs was just leaving so I went inside telling her to lock the door behind her as I'd be able to enter our flat in any case. Only, being all security conscious all of a sudden, my flatmate, him with the new keys, had locked the lower mortice lock which we never used up until then. So much so that I didn't even have a key for it on my key ring.

So there I was locked in a hallway in the middle of winter with one of those timer push-button light switches which lasted about twenty seconds. I tried wedging some paper into it so I could read my book but it couldn't keep the light on and leaning on the switch was too awkward. Eventually, one of the women from upstairs came home and I could wait in comfort in their flat. At least it broke the ice and we became better neighbours to one another.

6 days in Bangkok when the Icelandic ash cloud stopped flights. Ironically I'd wanted to visit for years, but hated the place so much I was looking into taking trains back via India and goodness knows what else just to get away

Fortunately the KLM flight finally took off as scheduled (some didn't) but by that time I'd have gladly sat on the wing if it meant leaving

QOD I was the opposite in Gatwick 2010. Having been caught in volcanic disruption 8n April we flew to Lapland for day in December. Last plane out before airport shut. About to begin descent into Gatwick that night and diverted to Glasgow!

Also got stranded outside a ferry port in France the storms of 94. Only 1 hotel room available and they wouldn't let all of us in so me and my mum stayed at port. It's not 24 hours and so got kicked out in morning with another family and we all sat in a concrete hole in wall while storm raged around us. We were lucky though as it shut at 11pm but the security let us stay until 4am when staff came in (had to kick us out then or lose their jobs)

4 or 5 days (I lost count) in the mid-80s when we lived in a remote cottage and it snowed. DD was a baby and was sick. By the time we could get her to hospital she was shockingly dehydrated.

A few hours on a train in New St Station, while the police responded to an IRA bomb scare.

Not sure why they kept us on trains because all the platforms are underground. If there had have been a bomb, we would have been buried.

And we used to get snowed in the tiny village where I grew up for days and days. The longest Powercut we had was 5 days, in about 1992. The longest snowing in (over a week) was 1981.