WORST VACATION EVER?

Sometimes you REALLY need to plan a little bit, even if it is a spontaneous weekend trip

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Good morning. It is August the 10th, 2026, and straight from the highly cavinated studio. This is according to Willie B, and I, yours truly, will be your host for the next half hour. You know, one of the things that I always talk about on this program is you've got to plan your trips. Plan, plan, plan. Well, I've also told you that I love spontaneity when it comes to travel as well. It's nice to just jump in the car and no destination particularly in mind, just go. Now understand that when you do that, you could be setting yourself up for a weekend of chaos. And what I wanted to do, I had a longtime listener from Dallas. Uh, her name is Kelly, and she said a really good episode would be to hear your worst vacation and your best vacation. And I thought, you know, I've thought about doing that before, but I've never really had a bad vacation. I mean, I've had a lot of vacations where things went wrong. Don't I mean, don't mistake me on that one. That absolutely I have had vacations where things went wrong. That's just the norm. But not that the whole trip was ruined. And then I remembered. And this turned out to be a weekend that just I'd like to soon forget. It was two years ago, and they had a new casino up in Bristol, Virginia, the Hard Rock. And it was this huge complex that they had opened. And and man, it was just really neat. And I wanted to go check it out. And I thought, you know, there were some cool towns in between. It would be a great road trip. So we just jumped in the car on Friday afternoon after work and just headed out. No plans, no hotels booked, nothing. Oh, it was Father's Day weekend. Mistake number one. It was also the weekend of the races. The like the sports car races at in Martinsville. I didn't I don't follow racing, so I had no idea that that was something of mega popularity. I was wrong. So if when you couple not having made any reservations, Father's Day weekend, Martinsville races, and then there was one other town that had something going on, and I for the life of me cannot remember what it was. I just remember we stopped in somewhere and they're like, Well, we got the races going on, and we got and I don't remember what it was, but I was just like, wow, what a perfect storm. And I was like, we it it's Bristol is from where we are, is a little over four hours on a good day. So I thought, well, okay, we'll get there Friday night. We'll check everything out on Saturday, and then on the way home, we'll stop in a few of these little small towns like Mount Airy, where they had done the Andy Griffith show, etc. We headed out. I think we left home around 4.30 in the afternoon. I figured, well, that puts us in Bristol. By the time we stop and eat, maybe 9-9.30. We hit traffic. I don't know where it came from. I'm assuming Father's Day weekend, but we hit some traffic that was relentless. Needless to say, we finally made it to Bristol at around midnight. We tried to stop in multiple small towns and get a hotel because I was getting really tired. We had both worked in that day, and so we were looking, it was like, you know what, let's just go ahead and stop for the night, get something to eat, get a good night's rest, we'll get up early and drive on into Bristol. Every town we stopped in, regardless of size, from a small little quaint town up to some of the cities. No hotels. None. All booked. Mostly because of the races. Lesson learned. We arrived in Bristol. Like I said, it was around midnight or around 12 30, 1 o'clock, somewhere between somewhere there. Finally pulled into this one hotel. And I said, Look, I realize it's one o'clock in the morning. I'm absolutely exhausted. I cannot drive anymore. I've been to every hotel in this town. Do you have anything? I literally will sleep anywhere. I don't care if it's the janitor's closet. And she laughed and she said, Unfortunately, I don't. She said, I'm so sorry. She said, Everything is just booked. She goes, I wouldn't even begin to tell you where to go find a room within hours of here. I was like, Well, in the hours, I there's no way I could drive. I mean, I was exhausted. I couldn't keep my eyes open, and that's not safe to do. So I I finally asked her, I said, Well, because it's 1 a.m. I said, Do you mind if we just park in the back of the parking lot and just get a few hours' sleep in the car? And I said, Then I'll come in in the morning. If you have a room for tomorrow night, we'll just book for tomorrow night. She said, No, that's that'd be great. She said, just come see me in the morning and and we'll get you a book for for tomorrow night. That's okay. So we slept in the car. Now the car we had was not exactly designed for sleeping. And I'm gonna tell you, that was the most miserable about three or four hours of sleep I have ever gotten or not gotten in my entire life. We finally just we didn't wake up, we just finally set up out of just pure exhaustion, and we're just we're like, you know what, let's go somewhere and get some breakfast, we'll come back and get a hotel. And then so that's what we did. We went and got some breakfast. We came back to that hotel. Sure enough, the lady was kind enough. She went ahead and rented us a room, and she said, I went ahead and had them clean the room and have it ready. She said, We don't normally start check-in until 3 p.m. She said, but I was able to get one room cleaned, and she said, It's just one dollar. I said, I I don't care if it's a closet. So what we had to do because we were so exhausted, we went to the room and we slept. We didn't get up until three o'clock that afternoon. So here we had driven four plus hours and them because of traffic, and not gotten hardly any sleep whatsoever. Slept half of the day that we had originally planned to go do things, and so now the day was almost over, and we're rested, kind of, but there's not much time because we had to get up the next morning and drive back, drive back home. So we went and checked out the Bristol property, the Hard Rock Casino Resort, and it was it was really nice. It was it was nice to see, but we were still tired. I mean, we we hadn't had that restful night's sleep that we needed, and we're not exactly spring chickens anymore. So man, it was really taking a toll on us. So we were back in bed by probably around 9, 9.30 that night. So we had driven all that way just for basically a few hours, got up early the next morning and drove back home, stopped in Mount Airy for about probably two or three hours, and then made the rest of the trek home. That was the most miserable, uncomfortable, chaotic trip that we have ever taken. We still had a good time. We still saw some things that we hadn't seen before. We enjoyed seeing Mount Airy, uh, we enjoyed seeing the Bristol property, the hard rock. But we have never since then not gone anywhere, not even for a night, and not gotten at least hotel reservations in advance, because I'm not going through that again ever, and I don't I do not recommend it unless you're driving a motorhome where you can get some good sleep. I I don't recommend it. But there are vacations that have things that happen that if you describe them to some people, they would say that is an absolute horrible trip. Case in point, three years ago, we went to Jamaica and they had a hurricane. Dead hit. And you would think that that would have been one of the worst trips, but we made the best of it. And we had we had some friends there that we meet up with uh every year, and there was no electricity. They did have, however, have a really good generator, so they would have to refuel the generators during the day and and let them cool down, but they ran them at night for the restaurants and for the AC so that you could sleep, because it's July in Jamaica and it's hot. So most of the day you spent outside in the pool or under a shade tree or something. But the hurricane was a direct hit, it flooded the hotel, even on upper levels. Uh, we found ourselves helping vacuum out the water from some of the hallways and the rooms. Our floor, our room was on the fourth floor, and our room got flooded because the water just blew in past the windows. Uh most unrealistic thing I've ever seen in my life. But it was still a great trip. We had we sat in a room and played board games during the middle of the day. We helped vacuum, we came together as a community and came together and helped clean up the resort and clean up the water that was in the hallways. It was absolutely incredible. And so it turned out to be what you would think was one of the worst vacations, but it actually turned out because we made the best of it. Turned out to be one of the best vacations that I remember. But I'm gonna save the best vacation for next week's episode because I've actually got two different destinations that I'll I'll tell you about that were in my mind two of the best vacations that we've ever taken. But just always remember that if you're not going to plan, if you're not going to reserve rooms, if you're not going to do the things that we really should do when we're going to travel, be prepared for the chaos and try to do everything you can to turn that into something positive. Now, the trip to Bristol, I just, in all honesty, as much as I've thought back on that trip, I don't know what I could have done to uh turn that into a positive. I remember we went through one small town, and I have tried so hard to find that hotel because I wanted to look it up on Google and see what was going on with that, and it really wasn't a hotel, it was a motel. Now let me explain something to you. It was in the evening just at dusk. That could have had part of it, you know, a part of the problem. But this motel, it was hard to tell whether it was open or closed. Some of the rooms looked like they were in use. There were cars in front of them. There were some rooms that looked like they were under construction. Uh doors were open, plywood, saw horses, etc. But the entire hotel looked like one of those scenes out of a movie that if you pulled in and stayed, you wouldn't be checking out. It just it had that 100% creep factor. And I pulled into the edge of the driveway and we looked, and I said, and looking back on it later at night, I was like, I wish we had just take taken our chances. And my wife looked at me and she said, With our lives? I said, Well, maybe it wasn't as bad as it seemed, but in hindsight, you know, knowing that we didn't get any sleep, maybe a creep factor wouldn't have been so bad. But it did look like they did have some available rooms from the outside in. So I, you know, maybe in hindsight we should have given them a try. But it it was one of those places that I promise you, if you saw the picture of it and it being at dusk, you were just like, Yeah, no, I'd like to see tomorrow, even if I'm exhausted. So that's one thing I always tell you. You've you you not only plan by booking your rooms and making reservations of things ahead of time so that you can enjoy the trip that you're spending money on. You also want to look at the parameters and you want to, hey, is there any kind of races going on, or is there, you know, is it a holiday weekend? Uh, because all these things are gonna have factors, and you may go to a town that is in the middle of nowhere, my friends, and they have some kind of fair or carnival or festival or something, and it's gonna draw a lot of people, and the town is gonna be booked up, and there may not be another town within an hour or two. And let me tell you, I don't know about you, but sleep is not overrated. But I I will never forget that trip as long as I live, and it has taught me to always book a room ahead of time and check around to make sure what's going on in that town and surrounding cities, because it only takes once to have some kind of event like this, and then you're like, yeah, maybe maybe I should kind of check. So there is that. But you know, it's then you have trips like where you go to Jamaica and you have a direct hit hurricane, and we had to wanna wind up and stay two extra days because the airline made a mistake. This is how easy things can happen. I they we were told that there were no flights leaving Jamaica for at least a week, and we were like, we've already been here seven days. Uh so we're like, you know, we're staying to stay another week. But then we called the but they told us to call our airline, call your airline direct and ask them if they're going to be flying out. So I called Southwest and I said, Are you having are we having any issues with our flight going out tomorrow morning? And I was told what it was, give me your re your reservation number. So I gave that to them, and they said, Oh yeah, your your flight is not going. As a matter of fact, the last flight that we've sent out was yesterday, and there there are no more flights going out for at least two to three days, but call back each day just to check as conditions can improve. Okay, so we were told that we had some of our friends that were in the same group, and at dinner they said, Well, we're all packed. And I said, Where are you going? Well, our our flight said that we're we're leaving, we're on United. They said we're flying out. I'm like, How is one airline flying out and not another? So we kept thinking, we kept trying to tell them against it was hey, look, you're gonna take that hour and a half drive to the airport in Montego Bay, and you're not gonna go anywhere. And we would be wrong. They flew out and they went home. The rest of us were stuck for two more days, no electricity, and mid-July. But it was that. So we spent a couple more days in the pool and and hung out in the beautiful Jamaica, and so it really wasn't all that bad, other than my team at work said that I'm never allowed to go back to Jamaica because they're afraid that I'll get stuck and never come back. I said, Well, if that happened, it would be on purpose. But there's your lesson in knowing when to plan and what to plan. And I hope you'll take that advice under under heed, as uh trust me, you do not want the alternative of not being able to sleep. That is my worst two trips that I've ever had. Like I said, one of them turned out to be one of the greatest trips, but uh there is that. So always make sure you plan, plan, plan, plan, and research. So next week we'll talk about the best two vacations that I've ever had to date in my life. I'm hoping that this October puts both of them to shame, as it is a dream trip to Italy, but we shall see. Who knows what could happen on that trip. Uh, but next week we'll talk about two of the best trips that I've ever taken, and so that you can see even the best trips that we've had still had some faux pas and some incidents. Um they have still come home to haunt me till this day. So we will talk about that next week. I hope you have a great day. I appreciate you listening, every single one of you. And do not forget to caffeinate and conquer because you know that that's extremely important. And I will see y'all next week right here behind this big old mic. Have a great day. Bye bye.