Vacation misadventures

When people return from summer vacation, some bring back pictures and others arrive home with a load of cheap souvenirs. But many travelers get more lasting pleasure out of the stories they have to tell.

Sometimes what goes wrong on a vacation makes a better story than what goes right. It’s great when everything works out exactly as planned, but there’s nothing like a mishap to sweeten the tale.

For example, Deb McGauley of Santa Rosa likes to tell about the time she went swimming with her husband at a beach on the island of Maui, and she got swept off her feet by a rogue wave.

“I was tossed and flipped like I was in a washing machine, not knowing which way was up,” she recalled. “I just held my breath and thought my ticket was up. Then I was deposited roughly onto the sand on my hands and knees. As I was catching my breath and started to rise, I was face-planted by another wave.”

That’s when a young boy came to her aid, and casually mentioned the local nickname for the swimming spot McGauley had chosen - “Breakneck Beach.”

When we asked readers to share their memories of vacation mishaps, we got a lively assortment of haphazard little sagas, some of them scary and others with a touch of humor.

“I was on a bus tour in rural Viet Nam, and as we were passing through a small village, the bus got a flat tire. The bus driver said it would be a couple of hours, and I took the opportunity to explore,” wrote Bill Singer of Santa Rosa.

“In one house, there were several people crowded around a TV, singing songs in Vietnamese. When they saw me, they invited me in to sing,” Singer added.

“I did my best, without knowing the tune or the lyrics. I did a terrible job, but we had a good time laughing about it.”

Moscow mishap

Over time, through retelling, vacation stories come to be known by short, informal titles all their own. Jean Wong of Kenwood, likes to tell about “the time I set my hotel room on fire in Russia.”

Wong and her husband were staying at the Cosmos Hotel in Moscow, “which featured a bumpy mattress, brackish green-gray running water and a mold-encrusted bathtub. There was no Mr. Coffee-type appliance to boil hot water, but I - the ever-prepared American - had brought a water-immersion heater with a European adapter. You simply put the heating element in the cup and plug it in. In fact, I brought two, just in case,” she wrote.

The trouble started when Wong, still half-asleep, put one of the heating elements into a cup, but mistakenly plugged in the other one, the end of which was lying on the carpet.

“The flames eagerly spread, getting dangerously near the curtains,” she recalled.

“I screamed at my sleeping husband for help as I stomped on the fire with my thin slippers. Amazingly, we got the fire under control.”

The fire was barely out when grim-looking hotel managers were at the door, launching an immediate series of interrogations and investigations. Wong wildly imagined being detained by the authorities, and tried to guess how much she’d have to pay in damages --$1,000? $5,000? $10,000?

Finally, one of the managers firmly demanded, “You must go down to the desk and pay $50.”

Spanish surprise

Sometimes, a vacation mishap can take a suddenly serious turn, as it did for Sandy Metzger of Santa Rosa, as she walked down a crowded street in Madrid, Spain, with her husband, Bud, half-a-dozen paces ahead of her.

“I felt my arm being tugged and turned around to find three twenty-something men yanking at my shoulder bag,” she remembered.

“People side-stepped to avoid our struggling scrum. As the men shoved me, I fought them and yelled for my husband, who ran back, and in the melee, lost his glasses.

Suddenly, one guy pulled out a knife and sliced the strap of my bag. The three men scattered in different directions, with one hanging on tight to the purse.”

When the distraught couple finally managed to check in at the American embassy, they discovered they had parked their rental car in the wrong place, as they noticed a tow-truck driver about to haul it away.

Speaking in her best “school Spanish,” and armed with the local police report she’d filed on the mugging, she begged - and bribed - the driver to release the car.

“‘Gracias, perfecto,’ he intoned, neatly folding the bills into his shirt pocket as he rolled our car down the truck’s tilted flatbed,” Metzger wrote.

Donner disaster

A good vacation story doesn’t necessarily require an exotic locale. Unexpected things can happen, even closer to home.

Susan Hiatt of Santa Rosa recalled driving over Donner Summit in the Sierra with a full set of camping equipment including a small portable potty, complete with holding tank.

“There was a huge explosion,” she wrote.

“It was immediately clear that the change in altitude led the contents of the holding chamber to explode.”

Single mom Carol Figoni of Windsor found misadventure hauling a boat behind a camper truck, taking her kids and their friends to Lake Berryessa.

“I was feeling really proud of myself for how smoothly everything was going,” she wrote. “I was thinking, ‘I can handle this without a man!’”

Things went wrong when she parked the truck, and tried to unlock the camper at the back.

“With all four kids standing there watching and waiting to unpack, I put the key in the camper shell lock and turned it, and the lock came out,” Figoni said.

After a long struggle, Figoni forced the camper shell open, her son repaired the lock, and the group gamely went on with its camping and boating vacation.

“We did learn that starting a barbecue with potato chips doesn’t work very well,” Figoni wrote, “after I realized I had brought paint thinner instead of lighter fluid.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com.