Everything That Could Go Wrong on a Trip

… And it happened to my mother.

Lock the keys inside your suitcase.

Leave ALL of your boarding passes and hotel confirmations at home… on another continent.

Get a new boarding pass printed at the airport, check in, go through security and somehow lose your pass between the boarding line and the plane door.

Get a new boarding pass printed at the airport, and lose it before you even get to security.

Set the alarm and forget to turn the alarm to ON.

Set the alarm but forget to adjust the time to the new time zone.

Arrive in Athens during a transportation strike.

Let the “gladiators” at the Coliseum hassle you into posing for pictures with them and then get charged 10 Euros.

Get on the train to the airport only to realize you needed a special ticket to get off at the airport. The fine for violating is about 200 Euros.

Get off the train to buy the right ticket only to realize the next train doesn’t come for another 25 minutes and you need to be at the airport.

Pay 7 Euros to ride to the top of Lykavittos hill only to realize there’s just a restaurant at the top.. no ruins. The view was pretty though.

Rent an ATV only to realize you can’t read any of the street signs, don’t know where or go to get gas and don’t know how to restart said ATV. I honestly thought I had really broken something and I’d need to find spare ATV engine parts to fix it before I handed it back over to the rental company. Fun adventure though…

Some other mishaps that happened without my mother:

Pay 70 Euros for a bottle of wine on your first dinner out in Paris.

Try to jump out of the cab before you’ve actually reached your destination. My specialty.

Pack all jeans, boots and an umbrella for a perfectly warm and beautiful weekend in London.

Ride the metro all the way to the end of the line because no ones paying attention.

Run into class an hour late because you forgot France also has daylight savings time, just on a different day.

Almost not get let into England because you have no idea what the address is where you are staying.

(Don’t) Stay out all night before a 7 a.m. train ride to Menton. Or, do.

Gamecocks in Paris. Only 5 more hours til our train departs..

Nearly miss your connecting train back to Nice because you went on a 2-hr turned 4-hr hike because no one set up the rides back into town.

Pound drinks at an open bar because, as you’ve learned in college in the US, open bars don’t last. Apparently this isn’t the European way..

Try to request songs with the DJ. You will either A) get inexplicably carried out of the club by a bouncer B) get a rude response for requesting “Birthday Sex” in honor of your friends bday, or C) get booed by Frenchies for requesting “I’m on a Boat.”

Birthday Sex

Sneak Comte into Versaille. As tempting as it is to always have Comte for a snack, after a few hours your purse is gonna stank.

Sneak a baguette into the Louvre. Your bag will be full of crumbs for a week.

Try to sneak a handle into the bars. You and all your friends will be refused at the door. DO, however, sneak in mini beers. They are easily chugged and disposed of in the bathroom stalls.

Not that I know any of this from personal experience…