International Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
S/O share your travelling/airport disasters
Reading about Potato Pie's shampoo episode made me curious... what fun (>hopefully) disastrous moments have you had during your travelling days?
Re: S/O share your travelling/airport disasters
Airports for me usually equaled lots of crying, missing bags, and weird layovers.
By far the most crappy time I had was when I didn't realize till two days before my flight that I flew into LaGuardia domestically but left from JFK for my international flight. It was not noted at all on on American Airlines website except for tiny initials for the airports. I had to rush to get a taxi and pay way to much for it! Stand in line for security again. I was lucky I didn't miss my flight.
Last September over 80 degrees in NYC and the JFK Delta terminal did not have the air running and the whole place was a construction mess. I had just spent the last four hours on my flight into JFK trying not to throw up. We were rushing that day too because we had 2 hours to clear customs and approve DH's visa then switch terminals and go through security again.
I guess all my bad experiences involve airports in NYC. We had trouble with getting baggage ticketed in Zurich when we left too.
2012 Reading Challenge
Now Nesting from Chicago, IL My nail blog:
I used to get search at every US, French, English airport I went to- including strip searches in the USA. I think this was due to the countries I had visited (due to my aide work) on my passport. Never a nice experience but I understood why but some guards are really really rude and inconsiderate.
I get searched every dang time. And I don't do the full body scans, so woo! Pat-downs! Bah.
Last time I flew into the US, I got pulled out of the passport check line to have my bags and my person searched by customs. They wouldn't let FI wait for me, so he had to go on ahead. When the guy searched my carryon, he pulled out my wedding planning notebook and was like "what's this?". I told him and he proceeded to *flip through it and look at the pictures*. It took everything in my power not to go "Any suggestions on centerpieces?" but I just shut up so I could get out of there.
How freaking arrogant!
When I flew back home before the wedding I didn't carry anything WR 'cause I was freaked out they would question me. Paranoid much?
I shipped a whole bunch of things via FedEx and spent 3 days stalking the tracking web page. >_<
I can't think of too many fun disasters. Just the garden variety: A few nights on airport floors, 15 hours stuck on a 757 that only has food/lavatory capacity for 8 hours, luggage broken into, etc.
The most amusing I can think of came up because of the Customs posts on Travel. We were visiting friends in San Francisco and brought some packaged reindeer sausage as a gift. Of course customs took it away, and when we asked why, it was because of foot and mouth, and the regulations said no ruminant animal meat from Europe. I was annoyed, so I asked what a ruminant is. The customs official didn't speak much English, so he was really struggling and actually put his hands up against his head to pantomime antlers. Then I asked if I could have brought whale sausage since whales aren't ruminants. He said it would probably be prohibited because they're endangered. I pointed out that Minke whales aren't even threatened, let alone endangered. He was very flustered, and by this point XH was getting impatient, so I had to leave it at that. I'm still tempted to take some Minke whale meat to the US at some point (fully expecting to give it up) just to play "Stump the Customs Official" again.
Similar to this, when I went to Norway to study (first time ever abroad and was alone) I arrived at a totally different airport than expected. How was I supposed to know the difference between TRF and OSL when I typed "Oslo" into the search engine? Oslo to me means Oslo, not BF Nowhere.
I had specific bus instructions and a pick up scheduled....for the totally wrong airport. It took me hours of navigating to get where I needed to be. I was terrified, freezing and exhausted.
One of the worst days of my life, actually. Very character building, to say the least.
Oh god! I give you serious props to navigate that situation.
2012 Reading Challenge
Now Nesting from Chicago, IL My nail blog:
We booked flights on Delta in a hurry when DH's grandmother passed away and we landed and left from two different Washington DC airports... that was a fun discovery at 2am.
We have horrible, horrible luck at Heathrow. The queues are always insane and they have lost our bags several times. Last time I flew back from Albuquerque via Heathrow so I was already 20+ hours into my travelling and there was no one working at the 'other passport' line at Heathrow. When I tried to go on the 'EU passport' line I got yelled at and I burst into tears. They had me wait, alone, while there was no one in the EU passport queue until the 'other passport' person decided to show up. I came close to missing my flight.
BFP Apr 2012, EDD Dec 19 2012 * twin h/b at 6wk, 9wk scan * Baby A lost at 12wks, Baby B was my rainbow born at 36wks
This was no one's fault but my own, but a friend and I were backpacking and we were getting a flight from Shannon to Paris. However, we arrived a day early at the airport because we had our days mixed up. We had no where to stay and not really any spare cash. We went to the local mall to kill time before sleeping in the airport, and we met a security guard who ended up inviting us to spend te night at his place with his family.
In the end, it turned out to be one of the best experiences of the trip.
We also ran out of money at the end of our trip so we spend 2.5 days living in the airport in Palermo. It is not a big or comfortable airport, and after 2 nights of sleeping on concrete and being together the whole time, my friend is lucky I didn't kill him.
Ouch, you ladies have some stories to tell...
I just remembered of the time my HS girlfriends and I went to Greece on our own. The one that was supposed to book the tickets for the boat ride from Brindisi to Corf? waited too long and when she finally did all the cabin seats were gone. We ended up spending the night on the deck trying not to freeze to death. To avoid having our luggage stolen we had to tie ourselves to it and formed a miserable, pitiful human cluster. We wanted to throw her off board.
I have a ton of travel/airport close-calls.
My first trip with now-DH was to the Bahamas a month after we started dating. On that 3 or 4 night trip, our plane almost landed on another plane, I got stung by a jelly fish, our hotel room got broken into two nights in a row while we were sleeping (the first night I thought I had dreamt it, the second night I woke up and asked the guy what he was doing), I forgot to bring my debit card and had to borrow $$ from now-DH, and the little boat we took to Paradise Island's engine caught on fire half-way there and we had to transfer to another one. Plus the office I was managing back in the states, yeah, I forgot to leave one of my coworkers with a key to get in.
I used to travel a lot for work and in a span of 3 months - my luggage was lost about 5 times - all with different airlines.
We were at the Tokyo airport when the big earthquake hit Japan last year - with our 8 month old. Not fun trying to sleep in the cold airport with about 300 other people in one room on the ground floor of the airport, without much to eat (they had crackers, peanuts, water bottles - all from the airplanes). Plus those aftershocks were pretty wild and lasted most of the night.
a girl from Hawaii, living the expat experience in India.