Lucky Breaks in Travel

“A happy customer will tell five people about their experience, but an unhappy customer will tell 20.”

If you’ve ever worked in retail or customer service, you’re familiar with this maxim. The wording might vary and the numbers may fluctuate a bit depending on who’s doing the telling, but the central message is always the same: bad experiences loosen lips.

The same is true, I find, when recounting travel tales. Despite the injustice deeply felt and the expletives cathartically unleashed while in the throes of a bad travel experience, I’ve delighted in writing about them after the sting has worn off. Heck, I’ve dedicated a whole section of my blog to tales of travel misery and woe.

Read more: When Bad Things Happen to Good Travelers

Ditto for listening to travel tales. I’ll happily sit and listen to people talk about their adventures across the country and globe, but “the flights were smooth and punctual, the weather was great, and everything went off without a hitch” just doesn’t provide the same jolt to my amygdala as “we got stuck on the tarmac for eight hours, I lost my passport, and we had to evacuate the hotel.”

Dude, I lost my wallet and phone, missed my overnight train, and the tour guide ran off with my girlfriend!
Photo by Helena Lopes on Pexels.com

But the other day when I was rifling through an old notebook and came across a list of good things that happened to this good traveler, I thought I’d be like that rare breed—the loquacious happy customer—and shine a light on some fortuitous events for once. A few of these lucky breaks came directly on the heels of a bad experience, but let’s check the schadenfreude at the door, shall we? The positives are the star of the show today! These tales may not jolt your amygdala, but if you’ve ever come off a bad flight, gotten scammed by a taxi driver, dinged your rental car, or suffered from any other globetrotting misfortune, they just might restore your faith in travel.

The effect of listening to happy travel stories.
Photo by Los Muertos Crew on Pexels.com

Lucky Break #1: age 15

Prelude: Headed to Belgium for a month-long student exchange, I got trapped at O’Hare. Bad weather had grounded all flights. Chaos ensued, but fortunately for me, it was on the adult chaperones to sort it all out.

Lucky Break: After an unplanned night in a Windy City hotel, the airlines were putting displaced travelers into any seat they could find. The four of us from the exchange group who were going to Belgium all got split up, but on the bright side, I got slotted onto a plane bound for Brussels . . . in business class! Teenage me couldn’t take advantage of the free booze, nor did my awkward inner introvert enjoy the persistent conversational overtures made by my suit- and tie-clad seatmate, but I was smitten with the space, comfort, service, and food (I opted for the chateaubriand, a dish well beyond both my level of sophistication and my powers of pronunciation). No such luck awaited me on my return from Belgium four weeks later, but the widebody plane was so empty that the three other exchange students and I had whole rows of seats to sleep in—a harbinger of the lie-flat seats I would, years later, have the (alas, rare) pleasure of occupying.

Kinda like this
Source: travel.stackexchange.com

Lucky Break #2: age 28

Prelude: On our way to Belize for our honeymoon, we got stuck in Houston due to bad weather. Two and a half hours waiting at the gate and three hours sitting on the tarmac meant we missed our flight to the island of Ambergris Caye and instead spent a dinnerless night in the capital city in an eerie, cavernous, echoey hotel that had to have been the inspiration for Hotel California.

(This is where I could tell you how I lost my wedding ring while snorkeling on our honeymoon, and direct you to When Bad Things Happen to Good Travelers, Episode 3, but in keeping with today’s lighthearted mood, I won’t.)

Lucky Break: At the end of our trip we found ourselves back in Belize City to check in at the airport for our flight home. When we got to the front of the queue, we found that the ticketing agent was none other than Ellen, a woman we’d sat next to and chatted with amiably on the miserable delayed flight to Belize ten days earlier, unaware that she worked for the airline. After exchanging pleasantries, she remembered that we had been on our honeymoon and surprised us with a first-class upgrade home. Thank you, Ellen, wherever you are!

Not this Ellen

Lucky Break #3: age 34

Prelude: After taking the Chunnel from Paris that morning (the Chunnel being one of humankind’s riskier creations, no?, the collapse of which would force one’s medical examiner to list several simultaneous causes of death: drowning, crushing, and electrocution being the ones that spring most readily to mind), we were finishing the first of several days in London, wandering along the Thames after dark.

Lucky Break: Nearing the Tower of London, we noticed a crowed had gathered just inside the locked gates. As they moved en masse toward the fortress, we stood there grasping the bars, our faces pressed between like hapless inmates. A Beefeater approached and we asked what was going on. It was the Ceremony of the Keys, the ritual locking of the tower gates that has taken place every single night—without fail, even during the Blitz—since the 1320s. We must have charmed him somehow, or maybe he was just in a charitable mood, because he unlocked the gates and invited us in as his personal guests (under normal circumstances, the limited tickets must be booked far in advance and sell out quickly). A lover of English history, I got goosebumps bearing witness to the pomp and pageantry of the ancient rite, said to be the oldest ongoing military ceremony in the world. The morning at the d’Orsay and the evening at the Ceremony of the Keys—now that’s a good travel day.

Photos and talking are both verboten at the Ceremony of the Keys.
Photo by Ian Probets on Pexels.com

Lucky Break #4: age 35

Prelude: In the midst of a three-week, multi-state, 4000-mile road trip, we met up with The British Contingent [the husband’s brother, sister-in-law, uncle (the less common fun uncle, or funcle, not the standard avuncular uncle), and family friend] at the Grand Canyon. We tootled around there for a bit, then rafted along the Colorado near Glen Canyon Dam, and finally made our way to Vegas for a few days of noisy, neon togetherness before parting ways (and where, instead of getting to see a Cirque du Soleil performance, certain members of The British Contingent subjected me to the musical Mamma Mia, but that sad story is outside the parameters of today’s happy-go-lucky theme).

Lucky Break: Approaching the desk to check in at Mandalay Bay, we were told that a large conference had been booked, taking up many of their rooms and, as such, they were “upgrading” us to a room at The Four Seasons, which consisted of the top four floors of Mandalay Bay. Ignorant heathens that we were, our Scam Sensors went off—we thought they were trying to pull a fast one on us. We saw the room and it was nice. Not breathtakingly nice. Not penthouse nice. But really quite nice. Still, not having seen an actual Mandalay Bay room, we didn’t know if it was better or worse. Not having any other convenient options, though, we took it. Shortly thereafter, we were at a gambling table at the hotel’s massive casino, where we relayed the switcheroo to the dealer. “Oh,” he said nonchalantly, “The Four Seasons is where all the movie stars stay.”

“Ooohhhhhhhhhhh,” we exhaled together with dawning comprehension of our good fortune.

Suddenly wise to the authenticity of our upgrade, our whole perspective changed and we luxuriated in our new room (which included our first experience with ooh-la-la—but ultimately pointless—turndown service) and scanned the hallways (fruitlessly) for celebrities.

What happens in Vegas . . . gets written about on the blog.
Photo by u0141ukasz Kondracki on Pexels.com

Lucky Break #5: age 38

Prelude: On our only East-facing road trip to date, we were spending a few days basking in the European feel of Quebec City.

Lucky Break: One evening, stopping in an empty bakery after a long day of sightseeing, I noticed a pile of cash at the husband’s feet while he paid at the counter. I admonished him to be more careful and we quickly gathered up the money, mildly embarrassed by his clumsy gaffe. Later that night, back at our hotel room, we discovered it was $140, way more cash than he had been carrying, and suddenly realized it hadn’t fallen out of the husband’s wallet after all. The bakery was shut by then, and I don’t remember why we didn’t go back there the next morning. It might have been closed or, with a long drive to Maine ahead of us, we may have made one of our obscenely early starts (perhaps the bakery stop had been to pick up pastries for the road?—I don’t possess the journaling stamina to record that level of minutia). We felt guilty, but also recognized the foolishness of going around saying “Anybody lose $140?” Earlier that day, we had helped a Korean tourist find the street her hotel was on, so . . . karma?

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So you can see, good things do happen to good travelers from time to time. You can also see that I haven’t had a lucky break in over a decade.

I’m due, wouldn’t you say?

How about you? Have you had any lucky breaks in travel? Spread your good fortune in the comments below, especially if you kept any money you found on the ground, ‘cuz I’m suddenly feeling guilty all over again.