‘Turd in the pool!’ SLO County residents share their most embarrassing vacation memories
Now that California has lifted most coronavirus pandemic restrictions and more than 70% of the state’s eligible residents have received at least one COVID-19 vaccination, it’s time to paaaarty.
It’s also time to take a trip, if traffic congestion and packed airports are any indication.
However, hitting the road gives us many more chances to commit those blush-producing travelers’ gaffes — mortifying mistakes that can linger in our memories for decades.
I recently asked my online pals, many of them San Luis Obispo County residents, to share some of their most embarrassing vacation experiences. Although some folks responded with stories, other respondents let me know that that topic was unequivocally off limits for them — which I certainly understand.
While I’m willing to reveal a few of my own distressing blunders here, others will never see the light of day in print.
A couple of incidents from a single trip are still indelibly branded in my memory.
Six of us, ranging in age from 8 to our 50s, were vacationing in New England and Canada.
The experience was so chaotic that we wound up leaving home without a lot of our luggage, including our changes of clothes.
When we arrived at our destination — tired, hungry and still in our already grubby travel attire — we requested a restaurant recommendation from a gas station attendant.
We didn’t realize until we were inside the restaurant that everybody else there was wearing black-tie dinner clothes, in keeping with the formal dining room’s white damask tablecloths and velvet drapes that cascaded down to the marble floors.
Of course, we started to giggle, trying so hard but unsuccessfully to be quiet. Then 16-year-old John knocked the ornate silver cream pitcher off the table, and our giggles became unstoppable, howling belly laughs.
I’ll never know why those horrified, nose-in-the-air people didn’t throw us out.
A few days later, now more properly clad thanks to some shopping, we stopped at a nice Italian restaurant.
Being half Sicilian, I’ve always talked with my hands. Enthusiastically.
It doesn’t translate well when one hand is holding a fork barely skewered through a meatball.
That was bad luck for the poor lady across the room! We paid for their meal and the cleaning cost for her dress.
Travel gaffes must be in my DNA.
A few years later, Mom, my aunt Kate and I were vacationing in Wyoming when the luggage trailer we were towing disconnected from the car — bounding merrily down the road and spewing everything from lingerie and maps to potato chips.
A handsome cowboy in Stetson hat and boots ambled up and drawled, “Looks like y’all could use a hand.”
Kate and I watched 10 days later as he and my mom were married for what turned out to be the second time. They’d had a secret ceremony two days earlier.
That secret was revealed when the minister said to my new stepdad, “Oh, Mr. Herrington. You’ve forgotten your hat … again.”
Vacation faux pas and travel nightmares
Here are some of the travel nightmares and vacation faux pas my online friends shared.
How about walking into the wrong hotel room during the Montreal World’s Fair, as Beverly Smith did?
Or “getting on the wrong Metro in Paris,” France, and ending up in a dark, quiet, train car, as Nancy Zinke did.
“I sat and prayed,” she said, “until an employee walked through, opened the door for me, and pointed me to the right car.” Zinke described the ordeal as “possibly the longest 20 or 30 minutes of my life.”
Arlene Hartman said she “was on a fishing boat, and I snagged a person’s catch across the other side of the boat. We were both reeling our lines in, pulling back and forth under the boat. The guide finally came and cut my line.”
Gregory Randall shared a painfully sad story about dropping to his knee on the San Simeon Pier to propose to his girlfriend in 2009 — and then dropping the ring through the pier’s deck boards to the surf below.
Despite days of searching by him and a host of volunteers, the pricey ring was never found.
Mary Ann Meyer said she was “speeding through Wyoming,” when a state trooper pulled her over near Thermopolis. After checking her license, he “demanded $120. Cash. On the spot.”
Meyer thought he was joking, so “I laughed and said to him, ‘What’s the matter, you don’t have any money for dinner?’ He made me get out of the car with my hands up and said I would be taken to jail if I didn’t pay up.”
So, they did.
“I never went speeding through Wyoming ever again!” she said.
Roger May was at the Ulm, Germany, home of his wife Ingrid’s parents, trying in his broken German to explain how she’d fallen off her dirt bike in Big Sur, bruising the inside of her left thigh.
“They were wonderful people, but very proper,” he said.
When he mixed up the words for bruise and hickey, it caused “a little bit of a situation,” May recalled. “Ingrid finally got them calmed down and told them what really happened.”
Jennifer Wharton of Cambria was camping outside of Yosemite National Park with her 1-year-old and 3-year-old children.
Wharton said she kept having to admonish her youngest child: “Stay away from the fire, Emma.” “Emma, don’t eat dirt.” “Emma, come here!” “Emma, stop!”
Jennifer recalled that “as we were leaving, other campers were walking by and saying, “Bye, Emma!”
Peg Hulsey of Colorado remembers a family vacation in Las Vegas. The plan for their entire final day was to lounge about in the hotel pool, “enjoying each others’ company … savoring the sunshine,” she said.
They’d all just gotten into the pool when she swam past something biological that definitely shouldn’t have been there.
“So,” she recalled, “this loud-mouth granny hollers ‘Turd in the pool!’ The poor lifeguards have no choice but to blow their whistles and empty the pool, FOR THE REST OF THE DAY! There went our last vacation day! Ruined.”
Mike Lyons of Cambria and his partner were driving through France, and had booked into a remote, top-notch hotel.
Lyons was proud of having studied the French language, so when the “menu listed ‘rognons de porc,’ which I was SURE was a pork cutlet or chop,” he ordered it.
“Wrong!” he recalled. His entrée was “delivered on a plate as if in a coroner’s lab … two perfectly formed pork kidneys, steamed, in their original shapes, ready for dissection.”
“I could not even touch the food (and) sent it back to the horror of the waiter,” Lyons said. “Maitre’d zoomed to our table for a lecture about what a delicacy it was. Nothin’ doin’, bub … That was the last of my pretensions about reading menus in French, fer sheeeer.”
He added, “I think I had a baked potato that night.”
Solvang resident Bill Etling, brother of former Cambrian editor Bert Etling, wrote that he “woke at dawn and ran a looong way to catch the glorious pink fingers of daybreak amidst the tortured spires of Utah’s Bryce Canyon.”
Then, he “got home to North Carolina and realized it was black-and-white film.”
As I told him, his priceless gaffe was almost as bad as getting home after an important photo shoot and realizing there was no disc in the digital camera.
Want to share your own mortifying vacay moment? Email me at ktanner@thetribunenews.com.
