Horror holiday stories

[Tooconfused12]

Posting in AIBU for traffic. Currently holed up in a hotel abroad - lovely weather, people playing happily in the pool outside and good vibes all around. Apart from the fact that both my kids have successively succumbed to the worst stomach bug I’ve ever known them to have - one after the other. Hours of compulsive vomiting, reaching, diarrhoea and now general malaise. I’ve just sent DH off to the supermarket to find antibacterial spray, and other hardcore cleaning products. I am sat here, for the fourth day in a row on the balcony watching other people have a holiday. I’m so gutted for the kids.

I was recalling all the holidays we’ve been on as a family for the past 7 yrs or so and I honestly cannot remember a time where no-one either puked, had the runs, or some other awful dehabilitating virus that fucked it, if not completely then for a good majority of time. Then we all get better the morning we go home. Please come and tell me your godawful holiday stories as I can read them today in between the vomiting and remember that I’m not alone

Mother in law passed away home in England, we were in Turkey, was easter weekend and couldn't get flights home for a few days, trying to keep going for the kids, oh and was 4 days after my birthday, which we were woken up to by the kids violently vomiting, went on for over a day, worked through all towels, bedding etc reception kept promising us more, they were across the way from us and had to keep going across to chase up. Poor cleaner made a fortune from us in tips though.

Honeymoon in the Dom Rep hundreds of years ago. My DH had d&v for days. I was unsurprised, the buffet table was overrun with ants and starlings. I have no idea why we booked 2 weeks in the Caribbean, neither of us particularly like sunbathing or the sea 🤣

Went to Paris for a weekend, took the Eurostar, stayed at a lovely hotel, but we’d been looking for puppies and my pil had sourced some and stayed at ours looking after them and all we wanted to do was go home 🤦🏼‍♀️

Two instances spring to mind.....pre kids, pre marriage, we were in France and my husband (them boyfriend) was unwell, so I left him to it in the hotel room (give him some privacy). We thought it was the burger he'd eaten the night before........several hours later when I only just made it back to the hotel room before being violently unwell with D&V we realised it was more likely that we had the norovirus that we (later) found out was doing the rounds!

After we were married, our first proper abroad family holiday with the kids, one of the kids came down with the worst case of chicken pox I've ever seen. DH had to stay behind in America with her as she wasn't allowed to fly....they came back home about 4 or 5 days later (travel insurance was great though)!

This is small compared to most here - but the poster upthread who stayed in a B&B and the owner asked how much she was ....

has reminded me of when DH and i went up the country to buy a car. We booked a travelodge for one night to ease the journey.

When we got there the travelodge was an absolute DIVE! A dump. A horrible hole of a place in a cracked concrete wilderness behind a load of bushes and fallen down wire fencing next to the slip road off a big duel carriageway. We arrived in 2 cars (we'd picked up new one) and walked into the filthy reception. Barely awake guy behind a thick sheet of duty glass shoved our key at us and waved his arm in the general direction of some grimy stairs.

The room was as basic as it gets. Double bed, telly in a table one hard chair and a box of tissues ...

Well we sat on the bed, fiddled with the telly, checked our car paper work and so after 30 mins we thought we'd pop out together to get some KFC and went back downstairs.

As we passed through the foyer the guy looked up and said ''bye bye. key?''

😳😳

I turned all Hyacynth Bucket and said ''THIS is my HUSBAND and we are going out to dinner!!!!''

In the moment i was soooo offended 🤣🤣
When we returned with the KFC i gave him a hard stare ......

Getting montezumas revenge in Mexico!
Thankfully we (dh before he was dh!) were in a room with a (rudimentary) en suite as my insides were just falling out of me all night!
I was begging for the quick release of death it was so bad, I blocked up the toilet with my diarrhoea and not-then-dh had to deal with it.
Thankfully by the morning I had no poo left inside me and I was ok to go for a short walk by the afternoon. We were both really careful so not sure what did it.

Undo these days I have terrible guts and always end up w diarrhoea towards the end of a holiday now 😔

We did the allocate in arrival thing 3 times in the 90s. It was so cheap! Twice we got lucky and once it was a bit crappy- we ended up dragging the mattress in to the lounge bit (self catering) as our bedroom was so noisy all night from the bar!

Mumsnet needs an 'Oh no!' emoji!

Dh caught a bug last year presumably from timing on the ferry, came down with it 3 days later, 3 days later I caught it…. Except it was a road trip by motorcycle and coughing riding pillion is horrible. Thankfully we hadn’t booked accommodation so diverted to a hotel in the mountains for a few nights t&t which was nice. This year I’m taking masks!

On our honeymoon, my husband felt unwell and got a rash that I told him was a heatrash from his backpack. Turned out to be shingles, but only diagnosed back in the UK when he'd endured an 11hr flight, If we'd had it checked out abroad, travel insurance would have probably covered our costs until he was well enough to fly.
I once got off a train in the Netherlands to check with the guard that it was stopping at the airport - he agreed it was, and said "but you've missed it" as it started to pull away, and he wouldn't let me jump on. I'd left all my possessions, including passport and money with my friends, so had to skulk around the station until the next train, then hide on it until I could get to the airport and reunite with my friends.
The worst, though, was an ill-advised coach trip with my mum when I was a teenager. We'd had some not-terrible holidays on previous years, and agreed to be adventurous and go to Eastern Europe in a tour. It was 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster. Many of the other tourists had cancelled over worries about nuclear contamination, which was lucky as we'd just crossed the border into East Germany, when the suspension on the coach broke. Apparently there was no chance to fix it, so we all had to sit on one side of the coach to enable it to still run. I saw nothing of the 3 days in Czechoslovakia as I got food poisoning - my mum treated me with starvation and brandy, and left me feverish in the hotel room. When I recovered I mostly enjoyed the rest of the holiday: communist Poland and East Germany were so interesting, and different from '80s England, except for lack of sleep due to my mum's hideous snoring. Oh, and the driver & guide were smuggling cigarettes and alcohol - there were rolls of dollars behind a lot of the ashtrays on the coach, and I was worried that we'd be pulled over at one of the many borders we went through, where there were already long delays and fierce-looking armed guards.

You poor thing! I’m so sorry for your experiences, particularly being attacked by your so called friend!

ive been called a Jonah a harbinger room because every single flight bus or train that I board / am booked on will be late, cancelled, or suffer an accident or emergency of some kind. I was booked on a flight from Luton in 2023, and of course hackers infiltrated the air traffic control and all flights were cancelled/ grounded.

A man died of a heart attack on another flight from Portugal upon which I was booked, I felt pretty terrible about that even though there’s no reason for me to feel that way.

I got evacuated from a train in the middle of bloody nowhere (great chesterford, apparently only fields of sheep there and no phone service)

another train going through Enfield clipped a vehicle that had misjudged the crossing signal, huge trauma caused to the train driver who was taken to hospital.

so yea, it sucks being a curse

@ohyesido a curse that is exactly how I feel! It is a running 'joke' albeit not amusing at all that when I have gone somewhere and if I have come home without drama that drama will follow somehow for example one year a Spanish Island, nothing went wrong. The day after we got home 80% of the hotel got food poisoning in the AI restaurant we had been eating at every day ourselves, then the roof of a restaurant we had been in three nights prior caved in killing 2 people and then they had flooding and a few other things (Palma Mallorca a few years back for clarity on it). I cant even think of some of the coincidental things but every time we go somewhere and no chaos for us then honestly something bad happens after we leave. It is scary. I haven't gone abroad in quite some time now because I am starting to wonder if I really am some kind of curse.

Was that the one near Avenham Park? Or the Clare...

1980s holiday to Majorca, sat in the lounge/bar of hotel with another couple we got friendly with, when my husband (now my ex) looked up at the ceiling and said it was moving. He then said we better move. Just as we did, the ceiling came down very close to where we’d been sat.

1980s again, Gran Canaria holiday, been there about a week when I started with an awful stabbing pain in my stomach. Lovely Scottish lady who had a gift shop in the hotel foyer sorted out a doctor to come see me. 2 ladies arrived, one supposedly the interpreter but I had no idea which was the doctor. Was told I had gallstones and that it was best to get me in hospital to remove my gallbladder. I cried and said no, can it wait until I go home, got prescribed some really strong painkillers and something else (which when I saw my own GP when back home said they had rhubarb in them!) and basically laid in bed in the room for the rest of the holiday. We were on half board but the lovely Scottish lady arranged for all my meals (now full board in my case) to be brought up on trays by staff. Everyone was so caring, the rep even got me a better seat on the plane home. (On seeing my GP when back home he thought I’d had appendicitis, arranged for a scan to check my gall bladder and it showed that I’d never had gallstones! So thank goodness I didn’t agree to the operation!)

2006, Rhodes holiday. 4 cases between us (me, my husband (2nd) and 2 teenage daughters) and 3 cases were left behind at the U.K. airport. Largest case got on aircraft with us which had both daughters clothes in. Me and husband had only the clothes we travelled in. It took 3 days for the cases to arrive, we had to buy underwear, swimwear, t-shirts, shorts, sandals etc plus toiletries. We did get our money back from the insurers but was a horrible start to the holiday.

2024, on holiday in Cumbria, on the coast. Husband taken ill on our final night in holiday cottage, had to call for an ambulance. He was taken to hospital and I had to pack everything to be out the next morning by 10. He rang me next morning to say they wanted him to stay in an extra night for checks. Luckily I’d booked a night’s stay in a B&B to extend our holiday slightly, it was a BH weekend and otherwise I’d have ended up sleeping in the car! Finally found out he could go home while I was attempting my B&B cooked breakfast (couldn’t eat it as I was so stressed), and picked him up on the first leg of our homeward journey. Was so glad to finally get home.

Majorca a few years ago. We succumbed to the sickness (and diarrhoea) one by one. I ended up cleaning up most of it, as dh was "too ill". A low point being: me on the toilet head in the sink with no top on and my then toddler thinking that was a great time to breastfeed...

We had maybe 3 days of the weeks' holiday with everyone well! Didn't get to use the hotel pool and spent much of it keeping away from people in the sea!

@Holidayhellarama, oh god! Can see why that would have you feeling cursed. You've just reminded me that on that same Majorca holiday, the day or two after we left there was a bloody awful storm right in the area we were staying. No-one died luckily but there was a fair bit of destruction.

DH took DS skiing in Italy one year. DH let DS go on a toboggan on the last day of the holiday and DS managed to crash into the barrier and catch his head in it. He was helicoptered off the mountain due to suspected concussion and spent the night in hospital.

They've been skiing together most years since 2017. No more tabogganing though!

Going to cut this story short- Went on holiday to Turkey, 5 star hotel turned out of be the worst hotel I have ever stayed in. My OH got sick and I requested a doctor at reception. The doctor came for 3 days in a row giving injections and giving medicine. Day 4 OH was hallucinating so I asked for an ambulance. Turns out the doctor the hotel was fake and my OH spent 3 weeks in intensive care before being medically flown home. We will never know what he is was being injected with but was told he wouldn't have made it through the night of we hadn't called an ambulance.

I am meant to be booking a holiday today(

My parents constantly globe trotted with us and we had no childhood security at all and were always on planes. They decided to move abroad again just before my O levels so I missed all of my exams.
I never go on holiday now Im rooted in my home with my cats and have no desire to go anywhere. This is my best life.

@FirstWorldProblemSolver

At least one of us gets sick every single time we go away, to the point where we say 'it isn't a holiday unless someone gets sick'.

Yep that’s my saying too. With kids, going on holiday is just an away game isn’t it.

@Laiste

Oh my goodness 😳 Just shows you what must go on in those mucky out of the way Travelodges 😬

My parents:

• booked to go to Yugoslavia and war broke out (cancelled)
• booked to go to LA and there were riots (they still went)
• booked to go to China and there was a SARS outbreak (postponed)
• booked to go to Egypt and there was a terrorist attack (cancelled)
• went to Mauritius, DM snorkelled too far out to sea and had to be rescued, and ended up with really bad sunburn

It was a standing joke in our family to avoid anywhere my parents booked!

Oh and we dragged whinging teenage DD round Pompeii in 40° heat when she had a slight rash. Turned out it was shingles. Oops!

Booked a villa with a private pool and amazing views as a massive treat. It rained constantly, day and night for the whole week. There were red weather warnings coming through on my phone. I may as well have thrown £3.5k in the bin.

@Bulbsbulbsbulbs

That’s too bad 😔

Holiday with best friend ages ago to Ibiza. She was single, I wasn't. She flirted with anything that moved. She got together with one guy in a club & left me with his mate. When the club was closing we looked everywhere for them & couldn't find them anywhere inside or outside. I finally got a taxi back to our hotel & luckily the friend accompanied me back safely. Was woken around 7am by friend hammering on the door wondering why I'd abandoned her! Hmm I don't think so