What would you consider a #travelfail?
My family recently returned from a two-week vacation to Europe with our teenagers. We are no strangers to feeling under the weather while taking a trip, and this excursion was no exception.
About four days into the trip, my daughter got sick. That day, half of the family didn’t get to visit Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral, but otherwise her recovery did not derail us.
In my blog about the day my daughter was sick in Barcelona, I asked myself (in a tongue-in-cheek way) if I consider eating at American restaurants in Europe a #travelfail. At the end of the day, I decided it was not. Even though she was sick, I didn’t consider that her sickness was in any way a failure. It just wasn’t. I was way more concerned about the potential missed culinary cultural experiences from eating at so many hamburger joints.
Speaking of sickness on a trip, in 2013, our family took a 32-day road trip around the country. We called it “The Odyssey in the Odyssey” because, yes, we drove it in our Honda Odyssey. We started at home in Washington DC and took a counter-clockwise lap around the country, through 21 states, all the way up to South Dakota, west to the California coast and back via Texas. Phew! The day after carrying my eight-year old daughter on my shoulders for twenty minutes, my back froze and we had to halt our trip where we were (Arizona). Instead of driving up to Bryce Canyon in Utah, I slept while my hubs and the kids swam in the hotel pool and did whatever. This was about 20 days into the trip. While this messed up our original plans for a couple of days, again, I hardly consider the forced rest a #travelfail. It was what we needed to do!
What would you consider a #travelfail? For me, it’s more about food than missing sightseeing due to sickness. Have you ever had something go amazingly wrong on a trip? What happened and why? What about photos gone wrong on a trip? I’d love to hear your stories.
bylisatully 
I know the feeling. Me and my wife love traveling but trying to travel with 4 small kids is challenging. It always seems that ultimately, they are the ones that call the shots and me and wife are always missing sites that we wished to explore because we have to sacrifice our fun to make sure they are happy and content on the trip. Cheers. Happy travels.
Little kids can certainly alter plans! Especially if you have four. You are brave for taking on travel with so many kids in tow, but you are right that you have to keep them content. Otherwise nobody is having fun. I’ll never forget going to Disney for the first time when my kids were toddlers–we rode maybe three rides all day and all my husband and I did was feed them to keep them happy. It dawned on me that I wouldn’t get to ride any the cool rides (like Space Mountain or Runaway Train) during our trip. The good news is it’s an evolution! Eventually you’ll get to visit those sites (or different sites) when the kids get older.
Falling down a staircase because you tripped on your own pants and manage take out two lovely old British ladies while visiting England. #travelfail
I hope it wasn’t a stone staircase down from a towering turret in a castle. It sounds like the only thing that was hurt was your pride (and maybe an old lady’s hip?). Remind me to keep my pants short enough to make it down old world stairs!