No amount of planning can ensure that your dream vacation will go off without a hitch. Bad weather, social strife, and just plain old bad luck can get in the way of a perfectly good vacation. But sometimes, things can really get out of line. TBS’s new sitcom, Wrecked, is all about demonstrating what a truly horrific vacation can look like as a plane full of passengers goes down, leaving them stranded on an uninhabited island and forcing them to call upon their meager survival skills to hilariously survive the elements.
These Reddit vacation horror stories may not take place on a deserted island, but they do show that some getaways can go from R&R to WTF faster than you can say “What did I just eat?”
Let’s start with Reddit user hiiammaddie, whose trip featured everything from seasickness to the worst possible zipline ride ever, maybe the one place in the world where you do not want Montezuma’s Revenge. At that point, don’t be surprised if you get abandoned in the Mexican wilderness.
Mexico: sun poisoning/sister got the sh*ts on a zipline in the middle of the Mexican wilderness with no bathroom for miles/went on a 3 hour catamaran (boat) ride, I got horribly seasick and threw up the entire time/spent 3 hours at the airport getting scammed into buying different tourist location packs
Cmdr-Keen paints a horrific tale that may put you off travel for good. Pro-tip: always be aware of where all raw sewage is located. Also, the buddy system isn’t always the most effective way to stay out of trouble. Sometimes that just means that the trouble will be doubled. And honestly, if you’re in a place that serves up liquor drinks near a roadway that is perilously close to a sh*t sea…maybe put up bumpers or a guard rail?
Was studying abroad in Thailand and went with a friend to an island (Koh Samui) for the weekend. Soon after checking into our dinky hotel, we rented motorbikes and cruised around the island, quickly getting lost on back roads. No big deal. We found a little tiki bar and drank the night away, thinking “we’ll figure out how to get home–eventually!!”
Fast-forward to about midnight. We’ve drank enough that motorbiking back to wherever-the-hell we came from suddenly seems like a good idea. It’s an island, right? Who gets lost on an island!? So we set back in the general direction of the hotel. After about an hour of zig-zagging around dirt roads, we passed something that smelled terrible and I turned back to make a sour face at my friend. In a flash, I went off the side of the road and smashed the motorbike off an embankment and into what I assume was a swamp.. of the town’s sewage. By the time I realized what happened, I was almost fully submerged and trying to account for my bodyparts, let alone wipe my face and mouth clear of the revolting slush.
I scrambled out, scratched, bruised, and shamed, but all in one piece. The motorbike was stuck half submerged, so we yanked it out and (somehow) got it running again, then limped back toward our hotel.
We eventually made it back to the hotel, must have been at least 3am. [post edited for length]
Here’s one former Reddit user who started out their vacation like a tried-and-true Griswold… and ended it like a bonafide jailbird. This terrible case of mistaken identity sent this vacation into nightmare territory. This just proves that you should consider running a background check on yourself after you book a hotel.
My wife, 4 kids and I planned on a cross country vacation to Yellowstone National Park. We had just purchased a new motor home and had the 2 week vacation of a lifetime planned… We stopped off in one state where I had not been in 20 years to visit family members. 25 miles from the state line we were stopped by State Patrol. They ran my name and found 15 year old warrants for my arrest. Did I mention, I had family in the state, but I had not been there for 20+ years. It was a Friday. They took me to jail and I ended up being locked up all weekend. My wife had never driven a huge motor home before and I had no idea what had become of them. While in jail I became FURIOUS and demanded to know where my family was. They ended up stripping me and locking me in a padded cell. The following Monday they finally released me. We cancelled our vacation, went back home and I ended up paying off fines for criminal offenses I never committed.
Sometimes, as AmandaJoye can attest, it is your own bad choices that ruin a perfectly good vacation. If someone says don’t leave the resort, don’t. Leave. The. Resort.
In-laws went to Mexico for their 25th anniversary, I specifically told them not to leave the resort or drink the water…they did both. Practically got kidnapped getting onto a boat alone with some locals who said they wanted to show them another resort, they ended up far away from their hotel and had to run miles to their resort after these people demanded money. Then when they got home they had diarrhea for two weeks from drinking the water.
Here’s one last nightmare story, though this one comes from Jason Tabrys, one of our editors, and not Reddit. Warning: The term, “pink vomit fountain” is going to stay with you forever if you read this.
When I was 13, my family and I went to Disney World with grand ambitions. We were going to see everything, but on my first night, I got a gnarly bout of chicken finger-inspired food poisoning, which sacked me for a day and a half. My father and sister went to Animal Kingdom and my mother stayed beside me in my own personal vomitorium, tossing me Pepto as I turned each glug into a pink vomit fountain.
At one point, after slowly coming out of the bathroom, my mother said that Goofy had stopped by with a card. I will never know if she was trying to be nice or if someone had actually come up dressed as Goofy to check on me, but I hope it was the former so that some poor bastard didn’t have to hear the noises that were coming out of me. It’s important that you know that I have only vomited on two occasions since that day twenty years ago. Not because luck or skill, but because I left almost all of it on the field at the All-Star Sports Resort.
‘Wrecked’ is an all-new new comedy series that can be seen Tuesdays 10/9c on TBS.
