Mumsnet users share their best and worst travel stories with Arla BIG Milk

[JustineBMumsnet]

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Whether you’re going on a day out or on holiday, the journeys to your destination and back can make or break the entire trip. They help to determine if you have memories of a BIG adventure or a disappointing day. Arla would like to hear about your best and worst travel stories.

Here’s what Arla Big Milk has to say: “We know how important it is to get your little explorers out in the world around them, so we’ve partnered with Magic Light to bring you yearlong BIG Adventures. We’re also running an on pack monthly prize draw, available across UK grocery retailers, to give you the chance to win an amazing trip to Chessington World of Adventures Resort. Helping to fuel these BIG Adventures, Arla Big Milk is simply fresh whole milk that’s enriched with essential nutrients. So, if you want to join in on the adventure, come visit our site to explore activities for your Easter holidays.”

Do you have any travel stories that were memorable for all the wrong reasons? Perhaps you’ve experienced the misfortune of a child vomiting all over the back seats of the car or all over you following too many sweets? Perhaps you checked into your hotel and found that you’d got the date wrong? Have you had to fill time after your flight was delayed playing a dreaded game of eye-spy for hours on end?

Or, maybe you’ve been lucky in your travels and you managed to sleep throughout an entire journey, arriving bright eyed and bushy tailed at your destination? Perhaps you remember a journey where your children gave up bickering and actually liked each other for once? Perhaps you’ve been unexpectedly upgraded to first class or premium service and lapped up the free luxury?

Share either your best or your worst travel story on the thread below to be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a £300 voucher for the store of their choice (from a list).

Thanks and good luck!

MNHQ

Insight Terms and Conditions apply

Best - dreading a long drive to Belgium with our car hating little one only for him to all of a sudden be delightful (thought our car woes were cured but he kicked off for a whole only 15 minute journey the day after we got home...)

One of "worst" - forgot my toddler was holding a bottle of water (sports cap) driving down a duel carriageway he shouts ooops mess! Wet! Oops! I was hoping he'd only spilt a little then he threw the empty (previously full) 500ml bottle into the front of the car shouting "bin!". Everything was very very wet. It was a cold day too.

I was on an overseas placement when I was a student and my husband was flying out to join me for a holiday at the end. He got to the airport to get his connecting flight only to discover he'd booked for the wrong month! Fortunately there was space on that day's flight, but it was a costly mistake.

An 8 hour stop over at Qatar airport en route to New York- we hadn't quite envisaged hoe difficult and extra tiring it would be with the kids. It felt like we were there for days!

I have one very memorable trip for all the wrong reasons. After coming in to a bit of money, I thought I'd treat us all to a long holiday. Getting there was fine but I then realised upon arrival that this hotel was in the middle of nowhere and we couldn't just walk to the beach as I'd hoped. We had to get taxi's everywhere and after just a few days I was completely bored. There was nothing there. I know this sounds ungrateful but I really wished I'd booked somewhere with a bit more life. I felt I'd wasted my money, which I don't usually have much of!
To make it worse, our flight was massively delayed. Our dd really doesn't cope well when she's tired and at about 1am when they finally called us to get to the plane, she was sick everywhere :( all the other passengers were handing me napkins and there were no staff around anywhere to help. I just felt completely gutted about it all.
There was a silver lining though, I managed to get most of the cost of the holiday back after complaining!

Being stuck in a train station in France after I missed the last train

Our worst one was a trip to France - went to Eurotunnel and there were 2 hour delays. As boarding Eurotunnel DS vomits all over the back of the car covering his trousers, car seat and the floor on his side looks like a sick bowl. Then Eurotunnel says have a pleasant journey Poor DS then continued to be sick all the way to our destination. Thankfully DH cleaned everything.

Another holiday we flew to France and Easyjet lost my luggage and didn't find it for 2 days but just minutes before deadline for giving compensation. Then I got food poisoning for 3 days. That was a great week.

The nicest holiday we had was staying with a lady who looks after injured animals in Australia. The children got to feed the pademelon and possum, bottlefed an injured bettong and we saw her tree kangaroos bounce off up into a tree. One of the tree kangaroos jumped on me before realising I wasn't a tree

I'm not sure a tube journey counts as travel, but it was certainly my worst. Sat down, perfectly normal journey, arrived at destination (thankfully going home). Felt back of skirt: very wet (it hadn't quite seeped through tights but very heavy and wet).
The person next to me then said "yeah, I thought that seat looked wet when I got on". He had let me sit there and not said a thing. Everyone else in carriage just stared.
Honestly, I didn't even shut the house door before running upstairs to get into the shower. My commute home sat in what I assume was the contents of someone else's bladder.
Our many difficult journeys with the children, or awful toilets, vomiting, delayed journeys, none of them come close to it.

going to cadbury world and safari park for one night 2 days with national holidays with my 6 year old son and 14 year old daughter a holiday i would never forget my son and daughter enjoyed themselves very much the wafting of cadbury chocolate in the factory and a few bars to take home also the lovely ride we had together we even had our photo took also the gift shop was a joy we stayed in a travel lodge which was a lovely place to stay and we had a three course dinner that night and a lovely breakfast the next morning before we set off for the safari park these are the type of holidays you should treasure with your children as it was quality time and now they are a bit older its a time to treasure

I've hadn't a great 12 weeks scan and photos and have been wondering if there's ways to tell if it's a he or she!? Bit of fun really but I can't wait to find out

Holiday in Thailand, the day we should have flown home was the day that the airport was taken over by political protesters. We couldn't fly out for another week and when we did it meant a police escort taking us to a military airport. It was absolute chaos!
Never been so pleased to arrive back home from a holiday.

On our way to visit friends on afternoon DD decided to vomit in the car, when we arrived we borrowed a t-shirt from their teenage son for DD to wear and rinsed her dress but all we would smell all evening was vomit.

I got toilet paper stuck to my foot on a plane once. It was still stuck to the roll and I managed to unravel it all the way back to my seat....

Worst journey was on the ferry from Wales to Ireland and every single passenger was seasick because it was so rough.
The crew ran out of sick bags and if you did make it to the toilets you felt worse because they just stank of vomit.
Eventually I put my head on a table and shut my eyes until we arrived.

My worst journey was when my youngest daughter was around 18 months old and we'd gone to Disneyland in Paris. We drove and the journey there was perfect but the day we were due to leave she lost her last dummy and the only ones we could find had the cherry teat instead of the flat one. She cried non-stop for around 6 hours until we could find a dummy with the flattened tip :O

The best travel experience I ever had was when I won a competition to meet Tom Cruise at the premier of a new movie. The movie was being premiered in Dublin so a stretch limo picked us up at our home and took us to a private airstrip where we boarded a private plane to Dublin. At that end there was another stretch limo taking us to a swanky hotel in the city centre. It was seriously like being a movie star for a day. I loved the whole experience (and lets face it.... just meeting Tom Cruise would have been enough!!)

Worst travel nightmare was on a train from Aberdeen to London on Christmas Eve. Reserved seating proved to be pointless as the train was packed tighter than a sardine tin. I had to stand next to the toilet for 7 hours and it stank to high heaven. I ended up catching everyone elses colds, stomach bugs and spent Christmas day sick as a parrot. Never again.

We went to Prague, it was a beautiful city, go on a boat trip, it is a nice relaxing afternoon.

Long flight. Beautifully behaved baby. We land, air pressure changes don't agree with baby. She vomits all over me as we land. I have a change of clothes for her but not for me and I have to go through customs damp and stinky. Not ideal!

My mum And dad live in Spain. I used to visit once a year in the summer and when I had my baby boy I couldn’t wait to take him out there each year for a holiday. (Since then I have become chronically ill and can no longer do those journeys but that’s another story).

My husband and I took him on his first trip out there when he was 6 months, that was fine, but the next year at 17 months was a very different story,

The trouble is that my parents live in a small farming village in a very remote area of Spain, which means a five HOUR coach from the nearest city we could fly to. I was prepared, activities, snacks, everything....but my boy was having none of it and screamed the bus down for the ENTIRE five hours, tantrum after tantrum, everyone on the bus HATED ME, I couldn’t do anything and I tried so so so hard, it was hell on earth.

When I was younger, it was before we learn that my sister couldn't eat gluten/dairy or a lot of foods. She ate something that upset her stomach (aged 4) and made a horrible mess (I'll leave that to your imagination what the mess was!) all over the rental car. It was not a pleasant journey for anyone, especially her!

Our favourite holiday memory was catching an old diesel train on holiday in Hungary with our three children, we climbed aboard the train at a really old run down station near lake Balaton and out hour journey took us past fields and fields of large golden sunflowers, just rows upon hundreds of rows of the large yellow flowers gently swaying in the light breeze we had a small carriage to ourselves and our children called it the Harry potter train due to it’s old fashioned design. When one of the boys needed to visit the loo it was quite an experience as it literally was a case of opening a door and there being a hole out onto the track, of which the hole was probably large enough for a small child to slip through!! Needless to say they decided against any more visits to the toilet that journey. When we finally reached Budapest our destination for the day we were slightly sorry that we weren’t spending longer on our fun ride on the ‘Harry potter train‘!!

I remember moving from Germany to England when our son was only 9 weeks old; we didn't drive but moved using a combination of air and train. Looking back I'm not sure how we achieved it, I remember well the stairs in the railway station (the lift was out of order) and us trying to manage with a newborn baby son and other passengers helping too. I wouldn't do it again in a hurry.

My worst travel story was when I took my daughter to Mexico on my own. A few days in I got very bad food poisoning. I was so poorly. But tried to go to the pool every day for my daughter. It was hell. I just wanted to get home. The flight back was horrific. I couldn't leave the toilet because of throwing up. My daughter had caught an ear infection so was crying in pain and we were delayed 4 hours. We landed, my parents took one look at me and took me to hospital. I had salmonella and they said I was so dehydrated I was hours from death.

Having a bus accident in the middle of the African countryside. So scary.

You know those times when trains go wrong.... we were on our way and 30mins in then we stopped for almost an hour, they said the train in front had broken down and that we would have to wait. We then got pulled into a local station in the middle of nowhere and waited there. They then announced that the train was going back to its destination, and we went back to where we came from. A day out on the trains going nowhere wasn't what we'd had planned for the day!