Travel bloopers and real-life travel stories!

Sometimes things just don’t go as planned or you find yourself in an unexpected situation. We love to travel and we do it often, but that doesn’t mean that our vacations are always picture perfect. When you have kids, there are bound to be a few surprises no matter how prepared you think you are. We are a real family and as such have moments where things go sideways. We wanted to keep things real and document some of our funniest stories and epic travel mishaps that we have encountered along the way!

2017 Siena, Italy

Can you hold it?!!

In July of 2017, during our vacation in Tuscany, we stopped at a park in the afternoon in Siena. We had spent the day exploring Siena and we stopped at this amazing park on the drive back to our hotel. My son Heath was 3 years old at the time and had to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately there were absolutely no bathrooms to be found anywhere in the park or at the gas station nearby. This is what happened! Thank goodness I carry extra bags in my purse so we could take our “evidence” with us to dispose of properly. And thankfully there was no one else at the park to watch this happen!

read about our Italy trip here

2020 sun peaks, bc

Let’s try this trail instead!

In July of 2020, during our weekend getaway to Sun Peaks Resort in BC, we embarked on a bike ride from the village of Sun Peaks to Lake McGillivray. We were given directions to follow the wide trail from the village all the way up to the lake which was roughly a 45 minute bike ride. It had been a rainy month prior to our trip and the mosquitoes were out in force. As we passed a trail map ten minutes into our ride, Andrew decided that we should take a “shortcut” to get there faster and off into the trees we went. It was a horrible muddy trail all the way there, the mosquitoes were eating us alive and we ended up going way too far past the lake. The boys and I threw our bikes down and had a meltdown when we discovered just how far we had gone and how long it would take us to get back to the lake. All the while we are getting bitten by mosquitoes and my oldest son Holter was screaming for us to call Search and Rescue!!

read about our sun peaks weekend here

2017 turin train station

Andrew where is your camera bag?!!

We took a taxi from our hotel in Turin, Italy to the train station en route to Annecy, France. Andrew was in the front seat and I was in the backseat with our boys along with all of our carry-on bags and camera gear. We arrived at the train station in Turin an hour ahead of our train departure. We all got out of the taxi and made our way to the platform. Holter had to go to the bathroom so I waited with the bags while Andrew took both boys. Sitting there for a few minutes, I all of sudden realized that Andrew’s camera bag with his brand new drone was missing!! 

After many frantic phone calls to the hotel to see if we left it in the lobby, they managed to contact the taxi company for us and miraculously tracked down our driver. He was 20 minutes away and was just dropping off his passenger. He agreed to come back to the train station and meet Andrew at the entrance where he dropped us off and would give us back our camera as long as we paid his fare to come back to the train station.

Andrew literally made it back to the platform where our train was departing from with minutes to spare. This is the happy photo I took after he reunited with us, with camera bag back in his possession!

2017 siena, italy

Where is Heath?!!

In July of 2017, we were exploring the old city of Siena, Italy. It has narrow streets and during the summer months it is packed with people. This photo was taken just minutes before we lost Heath who was three years old at the time. We were walking back to my in-law’s hotel and entered the lobby. Inside the lobby we realized that Heath was not with us. For five frantic minutes I was paralyzed with fear that we wouldn’t be able to find Heath.

Thankfully we teach our kids that if they ever get separated from us, to just stop and stand where they are and we will find them. Once Heath realized he wasn’t with us and couldn’t find us, he stopped where he was and stood against the wall and waited for us. Andrew found him standing stoic, all alone. As soon as he saw his dad he burst into tears just like I did when he brought him back to me. 

read about our time in Tuscany here