Bad Trips

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Furryanimal

Y gath o Gymru
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Wales
Recall a trip you went on that really wasn't very good.As in journey of course....
 

This is not for the squeamish ok.....

The worst trip of my life was on a friend’s boat, along with my boyfriend and two strangers, I’m a bad sailor and before too long ended up in the toilet being seasick, so bad I had to just stay there, after a while my stomach started to ache and without going into detail I ended up not knowing which end to stick down the pan, I thought I was dying and felt so bad I wished I was, I didn’t think things could get any worse until I went to flush the toilet for the umpteenth time and it wouldn’t work......

I was totally mortified as the boat owner had to come in and try to fix it, we finally reached our destination and I spent the whole day dreading the return voyage.....
 

I remember when I was about ten I was on a Christmas vacation with my family and we were in northern New Mexico in the Eagle Pass area heading back to Colorado. It was getting late but dad thought he'd go ahead and drive the five hours or so to get home. A bunch of teenage boys showed up and actually tried to run us off the road, they bumped our back bumper once, they were laughing and driving closer and closer to the side of the car. I remember the drops offs were steep and my sister and I were huddled up in the back seat crying. My dad finally stopped, had mom trade places with him, he got out of the passenger side, opened the trunk and got out his rifle that he always carried with him. He loaded and aimed intending to shoot out the other car's radiator. They took off. Dad literally rode "shot gun" the rest of the way home while mom drove. My sister and I hung on to each other while looking at all the side roads afraid they would still be around. I haven't ever been back on the road since then and I NEVER drive at night. Horrifying.
 
When we lived in Colorado, we decided to take a road up the side of a mountain in Golden, Colorado to Buffalo Bill's "supposed" gravesite (Wyoming officials say the gravesite is in their state). So, as we driving up this road, along the side of the mountain, and about 1/3 up, my wife takes a quick look down and says, "Honey, at the next "pull-out", turn around and go back down. No way I can do this." Very shortly after that, there was a "pull-out", I turned in, looked down and said "Yep, can't go any further." We went back down and never tried it again.

Funny thing is...….again, while living in Colorado, drove up Trail Ridge Road, in Rocky Mountain National Park, to the Summit at 12,183 feet. The highest paved road in North America that can be driven. My wife cried twice while we were driving up, but once at the top, she absolutely loved the view. On this road (Trail Ridge) there is no guard rails and I told her "keep your eyes either closed or straight ahead. Don't even look to your left, which we were at "tree top". While at the Summit, we could look down in a small valley and see Bull and Cow Elk grazing. Crossing over the Continental Divide, as we were coming down, we seen a Moose Cow and her calf. Quite the trip, but not nearly as scary for us as going up the other mountain by Golden.
 
ClassicRockr said:
When we lived in Colorado, we decided to take a road up the side of a mountain in Golden, Colorado to Buffalo Bill's "supposed" gravesite (Wyoming officials say the gravesite is in their state). So, as we driving up this road, along the side of the mountain, and about 1/3 up, my wife takes a quick look down and says, "Honey, at the next "pull-out", turn around and go back down. No way I can do this." Very shortly after that, there was a "pull-out", I turned in, looked down and said "Yep, can't go any further." We went back down and never tried it again.

Funny thing is...….again, while living in Colorado, drove up Trail Ridge Road, in Rocky Mountain National Park, to the Summit at 12,183 feet. The highest paved road in North America that can be driven. My wife cried twice while we were driving up, but once at the top, she absolutely loved the view. On this road (Trail Ridge) there is no guard rails and I told her "keep your eyes either closed or straight ahead. Don't even look to your left, which we were at "tree top". While at the Summit, we could look down in a small valley and see Bull and Cow Elk grazing. Crossing over the Continental Divide, as we were coming down, we seen a Moose Cow and her calf. Quite the trip, but not nearly as scary for us as going up the other mountain by Golden.
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Boy, that brings back some memories. I drove that back road up to Buffalo Bills grave several times when I was a teenager....it's a real test of driving skills. The road up to the summit of Mount Evens, is a beautiful drive...and I've even run into snow up there is the Summer. The bad part of that drive is meeting a busload of tourists going the opposite direction...there is barely room to pass. The Best (or worst) drive I ever took in the Rockies is the back road from Golden to Central City. It's a one lane road, and there are cutouts every 1/4 mile, so if you meet a car coming the other direction, one or the other can stop, or back up, to let the other pass....now, THAT is a scary road.
 
Wow CR, I understand. My biggest memory of some of them are the big sand bar things they built along the sides of the highways to help stop vehicles when their brakes go out. I wonder if those are still there.
 
Hearing some of these stories reminded me of our poor choice of taking highway 666 over the mountains to get from interstate 10 to interstate 40. looked a little twisty on the map. Well here's the story I found out after the white knuckle ride over that stretch of road. This was in our 38 foot motorhome with a 24 foot trailer in tow. :eek:

Route 666 rides the rugged eastern seam of Arizona from the Petrified Forest, south, across the Zuni River, through the Apache National Forest, and into the mountain mining towns of Clifton and Morenci. Unlike the straightforward, gentle passage of retired Route 66 ("America's Highway"), U.S. 666, its descendant, is tortuous, wild, and as strange as its name. In little more than one hundred miles, the surrounding altitude ranges from twenty-nine hundred feet to more than eleven thousand feet. With some four hundred twisting curves in one sixty-mile stretch, the road has sent more than its share of travelers crashing off cliffs. If, as Nat King Cole sang, drivers get their kicks on Route 66, they take their risks on 666.

I don't have a lot of pictures of this journey... way too dangerous to stop and snap photo's. I guess I should have had a clue when you had to go through a dirt tunnel at the beginning that had a clearance of 12' 7" and that was in the center. :eek: I inched through and stayed in the center while listening to the roof airs and antennae's scrape the ceiling.
 

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dkay said:
I remember when I was about ten I was on a Christmas vacation with my family and we were in northern New Mexico in the Eagle Pass area heading back to Colorado. It was getting late but dad thought he'd go ahead and drive the five hours or so to get home. A bunch of teenage boys showed up and actually tried to run us off the road, they bumped our back bumper once, they were laughing and driving closer and closer to the side of the car. I remember the drops offs were steep and my sister and I were huddled up in the back seat crying. My dad finally stopped, had mom trade places with him, he got out of the passenger side, opened the trunk and got out his rifle that he always carried with him. He loaded and aimed intending to shoot out the other car's radiator. They took off. Dad literally rode "shot gun" the rest of the way home while mom drove. My sister and I hung on to each other while looking at all the side roads afraid they would still be around. I haven't ever been back on the road since then and I NEVER drive at night. Horrifying.
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I don't care what anybody says, it's always good to have a gun handy in case you run into some wacko. Your story reminds me of something that happened on the trip my mother and I took out west when I was 15. It was also in New Mexico. We were out on a lonely stretch of road and a car full of Hispanic looking guys started following us. They followed but they wouldn't pass. And my mother got terrified. And she told me to "get that gun out". She had gotten me this single shot .22 rifle for my 15th birthday with 6 books of S&H green stamps. It was in the back seat of the car. So I got it out and loaded it. The Hispanic guys finally passed out and one of them yelled something at her, I think they were just mad because she was driving so slow. Anyway, they were gone but I was still holding my trusty .22 pointed at the floor of the car, with my finger on the trigger. I'm not sure what it was, I guess we hit a bump in the road or something, but I heard a pop as apparently I put enough pressure on the trigger to fire it and it put a neat little hole in the floorboard of the car. My mother really went nuts on me about that. She thought I'd probably ruined the car by hitting something vital underneath it, but no harm was done other than that neat little hole in the floor. It's funny to look back on it now.
 
dkay said:
Wow CR, I understand. My biggest memory of some of them are the big sand bar things they built along the sides of the highways to help stop vehicles when their brakes go out. I wonder if those are still there.
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When I was in Wyoming in the mid 90's, and driving up the I-25 towards Sheridan, I seen them. These were for both big rigs and cars/trucks.
 
Here is a photo I took, standing in a "Outlook" area next to Trail Ridge Road, just below the cloud level. That road way down is how we got to where we were for the photo.

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I can't handle being on roads with steep drops near the edges - no view is worth the anxiety.

Yikes on your story, Trade! Good thing you didn't shoot at them, especially since they apparently weren't out to do you any harm.
Your experience could have had any one of a number of really bad endings.
 
Back in the early 70's a group of us were going out to cast net mullet. This was in Clearwater Florida. It was about this time of year because that's when the mullet school up and it was at night because that's the best time because then the fish can't see the net coming. Plus we were going to build a fire on the beach and drink some beers and whatever. That was back when Caledesi Island, where we were headed, was still separate from Clearwater Beach and had not been made into a State Park. There were about 12-14 of us, I forget which and we had two boats. I was in the lead boat which I think was an 18 footer with a 60 or 65 hp outboard. That's small by today's standards, but not so much for back then. We were running it wide open and my buddy's dad was steering it by a big lantern like flashlight he was holding. Long story short, none of us saw an unlighted concrete channel marker until we were right up on it. So we hit it at full tilt and it tore about a three foot in the left front whatever you call it. Right away the boat started filling up with water and we all jumped out. It rolled over but didn't sink all the way. There was a good section of the bottom showing out of the water. I scrambled up on top of that because even though the chances of getting attacked by a shark were almost zero that word "almost" was not good enough for me. Several of the others got minor scrapes and bruises but nothing serious. Within a few minutes the number two boat picked us up. That gave us 12-14 people in the smaller boat which had it riding pretty low in the water so we just had to putter on back to the launch real careful like. And that was the end of that fishing trip.
 
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