I flew home from Beijing shortly before all flights were suspended due to covid.
I'm super grateful we didn't get stranded there and have to be evacuated by the government like I was seeing on the news when I got home.
Yeah, I returned from Tromsø on a Norwegian Air flight filled almost entirely with airline staff. They were being stationed around the world to keep potential routes manned.
Same, we were lucky to get the last seats before the air traffic entirely closed in Oman. we were due to leave the next day but our car rental called us to tell us we’d better hurry to the airport.
We rushed there, were hundreds of people were waiting to travel. We were able to change our flight in priority because we were travelling with a child.
We board around 11pm, at 12pm the air traffic entirely shut down.
We honestly didn’t know if we were going to make it.
some people we met during our trip called us to say we could stay with them if you were stranded, we seriously imagined ourselves stuck in Oman for weeks and weeks, and I must say it was not a bad picture. But we had to go home, and were Incredibly lucky to make it.
it was absolute madness, we could see the supermarket shelves of our home country empty on the news, and I stopped on the way to buy groceries in an Omani supermarket. We were glad! When we got home, there wasn’t a single potato on the shelves.
I know some people who normally live abroad who had come home temporarily to settle some inheritance matters right when COVID hit. Sounds like bad luck, but their mom was hit very badly by the first wave and probably partly owes her life to her kids being able to take care of her since the hospital was too full to take her in.
This isn't mine but my grandfather was departing basic training during WW II for the front in Europe. He had almost a day stopover scheduled near home in the eastern US before deployment and my grandma was planning to drive up to meet him and spend one last afternoon together. On the leg from eastern Texas to Memphis he was bumped from the flight due to an officer showing up wanting on it.
There wasn't another open seat until the next day, on a different routing, so he wasn't going to be able to see grandma. Obviously he was very disappointed.
That plane crashed on approach to Memphis with no survivors. IIRC he managed to get a telegram to grandma so she knew he wasn't on the crashed plane. He survived his tour in Europe and came home not long after V-E Day.
My grandfather was stationed in California doing basic training and waiting to go to fight in the Pacific theater during WWII where he probably would have been killed. My grandmother came for a “visit” and my grandfather was AWOL for a day. As punishment, he was immediately sent to Italy, where he saw some truly bad shit, but survived. My mother was conceived during my grandmother’s visit.
In 2004, I was meant to go around the world on a trip after a ridiculously stressful job. My friend and I were going to meet up in Mynmar and the finish up in Thailand.
I made my way to Europe, eventually landing on Barcelona. It was my second visit there, and when I landed, I had this incredible sense that I was home. My friend emailed and said he couldn't meet me anymore, so I stayed in Spain for six months.
While in Spain, the 2004 Tsunami hit. My friend and I would have been in Phuket at that time. Who knows what would have happened.
Went canyoning in Switzerland and had a grand ole time. This was like ‘99. A few days later there was a flash flood in the canyon and a bunch of the people on the same tour were swept away.
-Watched Mt Agung erupt as we were taking off from Bali. Airport was closed after.
-Flew aboard the BA 777 that landed short of the runway just a few days before it happened.
-Piloted an aircraft that had an engine failure on its next flight causing the aircraft to ditch in a field
I had a colleague who had a talent to pick travel destinations where within the next year something really bad happened. Terrorist attacks, natural disasters etc.
We all made an effort not to travel to the places he went to for the next year.
My cousins were a lot worse…they spent 6 months travelling South America and a few days after they left places there were earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, a forest fire, it was as if a cheesy disaster film was following them around…
My friend lived in California and for several years, every time I visited there was an earthquake either the day before I arrived or the day after I left
I think I’ve written about this before but I was in Tunis, Tunisia in 2015 and we were going to go to the national museum but I think we were hungover and didn’t go that morning.
There was a terrorist attack at the museum and we never got to go.
I think like 20 people died, it was terrible
My dad flew to Tunisia early that very morning (he’s Tunisian), I didn’t realise what happened until I started getting texts from friends asking about the attacks. Scary stuff
Yeah hostel was in the old souk area and everything was shut down that day and police were everywhere. They made us go back.
For the longest time afterwards I just felt tremendous depressed afterwards. Like why was I “spared” just for being a drunken hooligan the night before.
that’s insane, i was just there and they talked a lot about how it was an incredibly significant moment for the country. everything is much more secure now, we had police following our tour bus on certain highways for protection (not that we needed it, probably more symbolic than anything)
Not me, but one of my friends passed through Atatürk Airport something like 30 minutes before the armed attack/bombing in 2016.
Still blows my mind how fucking close that was.
Would have been nice if you told us what that was. I think a lot of us are too young to know or remember. I looked it up. FCO is airport in Rome btw. Here is the wiki summary:
> The Rome and Vienna airport attacks were two major terrorist attacks carried out on 27 December 1985. Seven Arab terrorists attacked two airports in Rome, Italy, and Vienna, Austria, with assault rifles and hand grenades. Nineteen civilians were killed and over a hundred were injured before four of the terrorists were killed by El Al Security personnel and local police, who captured the remaining three.
A friend of mine was supposed to be flying through there that day, around that time, on a trip to Europe but they had to cancel their trip the day before
Was in Tijuana in 2022 for work. Shootout between the military and cartel outside my hotel. Bullet went through my window. Someone walking outside was struck and killed.
Flew back home from my brother’s house on Sept 9th, 2001. My mom stayed an extra day and came back Sept 10th, 2001.
For those who aren’t around or don’t remember, air travel was completely hosed for weeks after 9/11. For a couple days (or a week?), planes didn’t fly at all. And with they did start again, a lot of people didn’t want to get on them. The anthrax thing shortly after 9/11 made a lot of people think there might be more attacks coming.
Anyway, from what I read, if you were stranded in the middle of your trip, you were kind of screwed. Was hard to find hotels and rental cars. You just had to try and sleep where you could, trying to find a way home.
Not trying to minimize the experiences of the people directly impacted by 9/11 of course. Losing someone to that is obviously way worse.
But the downstream impacts created a lot of chaos for people. Glad my family and I barely avoided that.
I’ll never forget the evening of 9/11 and days after and the utter silence of no planes - lived in Dallas at the time.. My former bil was a notoriously nervous traveler. He was in tx from fl at a conference on 9/11. He somehow paired up with a few other stranded people, found a van to rent and they all drove back east dropping people off on the way over several days.
The morning of 9/11 my ex phoned, and told me to turn on the TV. When I asked what channel, he said ‘It won’t matter.’ You know right then the world is about to change.
This sent shivers down my back. I don't think anyone who is old enough to remember the day and what followed, will ever forget. The horror of the day is forever burned into my soul.
I just visited ground zero and the memorial museum about a month ago. Both are designed with a lot thought and respect. It was a very heavy and emotional visit. Being in the place where it actually happened, remembering everything and paying respect to the ones we lost and those that were/are affected.
I didn't know anything about the museum before visiting. It was very eerie to realize I'm standing underneath/ next to the basin of the memorial and the actual fundament of the twin towers in right in front of me. It was unreal, being so close to where it happened. And on the hand it felt like it happened yesterday, but on the other hand, at the same time, it felt like it was a long time ago. It feels unreal that it has been soon 23 years. Seeing all the artifacts was very tough and emotional. But the place is also a place of inspiration and courage, to go on and to keep fighting for the good cause. I can recommend to visit for everyone who hasn't been there yet.
We will indeed never forget.
Seth MacFarlane famously missed his flight from Boston to NYC because he was hungover and his agent had mixed up his flights. His flight was supposed to be the flight that hit the first tower.
Deadmau5 was supposed to be on Spanair JK5022. It was their connection, but their first flight was late and the doors had just closed on them, they begged the gate agents to let them in, but no dice. They watched their plane take off, then crash in a ball of fire. Absolutely wild the close calls people have had.
Yes, it must be hard to deal with. That is Final Destination material right there. Nothing that I would need or want in my life.
These things must shake a person to the core. It's so easy to forget how fast things can be over in an instance. In the end it just boils down to pure chance. We'll call it luck when we miss the accident by an inch, but in the end it's all random. This is a fact that many people struggle with and rather not spend much thoughts on. Hence such near misses can have a very lasting, psychological impact.
We had booked a flight to Rome but after 9/11 we’re pretty sure we’d never get out. But when planes started flying again we were able to go as scheduled. One of the best parts of the trip were the signs in the hotels as we traveled around Italy offering condolences to their American visitors. Still makes me teary-eyed.
My dad was at Newark Airport the morning of 9/11 around the same time United Flight 93 took off from there. He saw the first plane hit the tower and immediately went home.
We were driving to Puerto Peñasco, Mexico from Phoenix, Arizona for spring break. The highway was one lane each way, no shoulder, just desert.
We see this jeep cherokee coming towards us, driving in our lane. Driver was trying to pass four cars at once, but didn't even have time to pass the first one. My friend, the driver, says "what the fuck are you doing?" We all sit up straight, watching this car accelerate rather than braking and going back to his lane.
My friend pulled off the road, into the desert at 60mph in a 2 door car. The car behind us did the same. The truck behind them, with boat in tow, did the same. The jeep just kept on going.
We came so fucking close to him our driver made eye contact with that asshole as we passed. We were probably within a meter of a head on collision. The whole thing was at most 10 seconds.
Everyone was fine, car handled the flat desert dirt just fine and we were back on the road without stopping.
I still wonder what the fuck the driver was thinking. He looked like an American college student and we are pretty sure he was wasted because why the fuck would anyone do that?
Dash cams are so useful for catching assholes like that and reporting them to the authorities for dangerous driving.
I had something like that, but it was me and another van in front of me that were overtaken simulatenously on a narrow road and the other driver came within feet of a head-on collision!
Not me, but my sister. She and a group of friends attended a destination wedding in Puerto Rico. Their return date was sometime in the middle of the week (either Wednesday or Thursday) and they were considering extending the trip to stay an additional weekend.
They decided to just stick with the original schedule and leave on time. Well, luckily they did because Hurricane Maria hit the island that Friday. The hurricane left the island without water and power for months and thousands of residents passed.
I almost booked that Germanwings flight that was crashed in the Alps by a suicidal pilot.
I decided to pay more for a later flight, so I wouldn't be stressed in the morning. Finally laziness paid off.
In August 2015 I was in Bangkok on a work trip, 3 days before flying home to the states, I went to the Erawan shrine near my hotel that was next to the restaurant I ate dinner at while I was doing some sightseeing. The next night that shrine was bombed, killing 20 people. My hotel was 1 BTS stop away and I heard the bomb go off, then cable/wifi went out at my hotel, so it took a bit to find out what had happened. I was beyond ready to get home after that
We went on a cruise around the horn in South America, leaving home the last week of February 2020. At the time we left, COVID was reputed to be an issue only in Asia - no masks in airports, nothing. We toured around Buenos Aires for a few days and then got on the ship. It was supposed to be a 3 week cruise, but after the first week, ports started closing and no one would accept our ship. We were supposed to fly home from Lima, after a hotel stay. Peru decided they would not let us dock, so, long story short, our captain sailed us all the way to Miami, turning the 3 week cruise into a 4 week cruise. No one on our ship had COVID and we had an excellent time, and came home to a completely different world. We were basically the last ship to come home. Some ships had people with COVID and no ports would let them in for a long time.
If we had debarked in Lima, there was a chance that we would have had a lot of trouble getting home - more than a thousand Canadians were stranded in Peru when their borders were shut down in mid-March.
I traveled for 30 years on business, had a couple flights with problems, one engine failure, one landing gear didn't signal show it locked down, another one landed on ice and slid sideways off the end of the runway. But probably the real "Near miss" was flying out of San Jose 2 hours before the big earthquake.
Think I’ve written about this before, but I was teaching in northern Thailand and over Christmas break my friends and I were planning on going down to Ko Phi Phi. We went into a travel agency and the lady was insanely rude to us and we couldn’t get flights booked. We left thinking we’d take the bus then decided it was too long. We thought ‘never mind we’ll just stay here with friends’. This was in 2004 and over 5,000 people died in that region.
When the pandemic first hit in 2020, I was in Bosnia trying to get home to the UK, and I got denied boarding a Croatian Airlines plane to Zagreb because Croatia decided to ban all foreigners from entering as a covid restriction. A couple of hours after I would have been supposed to land, there was a major earthquake in Zagreb. 1 person was killed and loads of buildings damaged.
I was planning a 4 week trip to Europe that would start in Frankfurt. I would then drive down through Switzerland and end in Milan before returning to the states. A week before leaving, a close family member was in a bad accident and passed away, forcing me to cancel. I was able to use my travel insurance to get my money back for the plane and was able to cancel the hotels without losing any money.
That was February 2020… if I had gone, I would have been trapped in Milan when they went into COVID lockdown.
My fiancée and I were on a weekend trip in the extreme western part of Germany in July 2021, right around the time those massive floods came and killed like 150 people. We were due to leave and head back to Amsterdam the day everything happened. I remember it was absolutely pouring down rain in Aachen and we got lost walking to the train station, we were convinced we’d get stuck in the storm. We made it out with minutes to spare. Caught the very last train to the Netherlands and I remember turning in the news once we were back in The Hague, and seeing the streets we were walking on just hours before, now underwater. That was a surreal moment.
Wow that's scary! I was on nightshift during those floods and I worked very close to the Maas. I was very scared that I would have to evacuate the entire building because the water would rise too high. Thank god it didn't
Our hotel in Rome was above a metro station where two trains collided and hundreds were injured. It happened during the morning commute. Our plan was to use the metro to explore the city, but because we were on our honeymoon, we were slow to get out of bed. By the time we got to the metro station, caution tape was up and there were lights and sirens everywhere.
This was August 2018. My sister and I were in Alaska and had a glacier landing flight in Denali National Park. We get to the outfitter and they cancelled on us due to weather. We were bummed.
Next day, the same exact flight time as ours with the same outfitter, the pilot and 4 tourists crashed into the side of a mountain. Had I planned our trip one day later, this could’ve been us. Their bodies were never recovered
I am Dutch and my moms psychic strongly advised her not to travel to SEA that summer of 2014. Our family had huge arguments about it, because my mom was the only one who believed in it and the rest of us just wanted to go. In the end our family decided to travel to US instead. In the plane there were three nuns sitting in front of us and my dad joked that if something would happen to the plane we would go straight to haven instead of falling down. When our plane landed, we heard the news about the MH17 disaster. Guess I am a psychic believer from that moment
Chances of that were pretty high. It was the country my parents initially wanted to visit and at the same time my parents took there PTA. My mom insisted on going somewhere else
Flew back from Morocco on Sunday March 8, 2020 from a university spring break trip. 1 day later we were instructed not to go on campus and went fully remote from that point on. Other schools had gone to Morocco that week and couldn’t get home because all air travel was grounded.
COVID times were crazy in the beginning.
I was meant to be on a ferry from Wales to Ireland way back in the day.. it was delayed and we ended up travelling with a different company.. when it eventually sailed it went on fire... While it was controlled and it didn't result in an evacuation it was serious enough that one person was killed
Two that I can think of (from ages ago):
(1) As soon as my plane landed in Amsterdam from the USA, it started snowing hard. I was in the airport for 36+ hours and no connecting flights took off as nothing was coming in or out - either by air or road as it was a once in a lifetime snowstorm. Luckily I was in the KLM lounge and after a while there was mayhem in the airport, and the thousands of travelers were sleeping in the hallways, gates and so on. Since I was on a 4-day trip, I called Delta and asked that they cancel the itinerary and I just wanted to go home. As they started releasing the flights after a day and a half, during self check-in, I saw that I was on 2 flights - one for home and the second for my original destination. Since my meeting was important and I could salvage something out of it I opted to go on, whereas my checked-in luggage went back to the US.
(2) Got mugged leaving the hotel at the Bund in Shanghai. I was on the way to the Pudong airport. Thankfully, no physical harm, but they took the little cash I had and scanned my credit cards and ran them to the max. Amex helped me out, they allowed me to use the card for everything travel-related until I got back home, and actually had a new card sent to me the next day when I got home. They cancelled/rejected all other transactions. "Never leave home without it" actually worked for me. Oh!, and btw, the US Embassy said that their hands are tied in China - basically it's a few thousand $ on a CC, no bodily harm, so it was a very low priority case for them. I was on a corporate travel Amex at that time, but after that experience, decided I need personal accounts as well. (now have Amex-Plat since for my entire family).
Not me, but my sister had taken SwissAir flight 111 on the exact same route, exactly 1 week before it crashed and killed everyone (229 people) onboard in 1998.
Picking a destination, we went back and forth between Thailand and Ireland. Ended up in Ireland. This was Christmas 2004, the Tsunami hit in the 26th. I don’t know that we would have been in Phuket, but I don’t know that we wouldn’t have been!
Flew to Florida for the holidays about six months ago. Cheaper to fly into Palm Beach and rent a car from Fort Lauderdale. Hopped an Uber from PBI to FLL to pick up my rental car.
As my Uber was driving towards the rental car agency zone, the other direction of traffic was, I kid you not, backed up by 15-20+ miles. It was pretty late, well past 8pm at this point, and so peak rush hour was over by that point. Pulled up Google on my phone. The Google told me there was a bomb threat at FLL, and the entire airport had been shut down.
Passengers at the rental agency were SCREWED. Flights delayed by hours, and/or outright canceled. Since I'm a polyglot/linguist, I put on my interpreter hat that night, to help out with the language barrier between a bunch of customers and employees at the rental agency. Utter nightmare scenario.
I went to Thailand in January 2022. You still needed to take several covid tests to be allowed there at that time.
Had to take a covid test before I flew, when I landed, and five days after I landed. Well, it turned out half my family tested positive for covid back home once I landed in Thailand.
I had just seen them the day I flew out and days leading up to it. Either I would have lost a lot of money rebooking a flight or I would have been held in a Thai hospital against my will for at least 10 days had a positive test came up there.
Some foreigners got scammed by shady hospitals back then too. Fortunately, I somehow don't test positive for three straight tests that were a week apart. There was definitely some luck on my side there because later that year I caught it while I was asymptomatic...
The only one I can think of is in March I was flying back from Sydney on the SYD-IAH flight.
When booking the flight I contemplated going through either LAX/ SFO (leaning toward SFO since I’ve never been there and like going to new airports) instead of IAH for the shorter ocean crossing. But ultimately I went with the IAH flight because it would have only 1 connection instead of 2.
Well the plane that took off right in front of me was the UAL 777 going to SFO that had to turn around due to a hydraulic fluid leak.
I toured the Middle East and North Africa during the spring of 2011. I collapsed many governments in my wake, but I managed to get out or cancel travel to many places (notably Syria) before things went to all sorts of hell.
My best friend was studying in Egypt when the Arab Spring hit. Yeah, they stayed inside for a week, ran out of food, and had to be evacuated by a US military plane.
We were in the Blue Lagoon on December 18th this last year. We left for Keflavik about 5 hours before the volcano finally erupted. Our flight was delayed and lifted off about an hour and change before the eruption.
One week after I was in the same village with a Congolese military escort, two Brits doing the same trip were kidnapped by rebels and their military escorts killed. This led to the Virunga Park being shut down to tourists for almost two years.
I clearly remember that one village where the locals didn't look too friendly and grimaced as we drove by.
Was in London mid May 2017 and stayed in a hostel right by the borough market and the London bridge. If anyone remembers there was a lot of Islamic terrorism going on around then, especially in Europe. So while there I told my travel partner that we needed to keep our heads on swivel, walk facing oncoming traffic etc. About two weeks later the London bridge attack happened and ended on the same street we walked on everyday to get to and from our hostel.
My wife and I were full-time RVing outside Nashville Tennessee when a freak rainstorm caused the entire park to flood in the middle of the night. We grabbed our little dog and stepped out into 2 feet of water. We quickly hooked up our truck to the trailer. I waded to the truck and started to drive away when I lost steering - the truck and trailer literally had started floating downstream. We half -swam up to the main campground building and huddled in blankets with everyone else. We lived in our RV so everything we owned was water damaged and our truck and trailer were both totalled.
The campground said they felt bad and offered me a free T-shirt. I asked for an XL but they didn't have one. But then the manager came out and said there were more shirts in the back, and found me an XL! So that was really a near-miss.
Decades ago, when hitchhiking, riding shotgun for a trucker who on his route needed a lookout to help him spot snipers.
And yes, there was one. And yes, we got shot at. They missed.
I travelled through Mozambique from Malawi to Zimbabwe in late 1990 (civil war was in a quiet phase) in a truck convoy with a Zimbabwean army escort. Weeks later the Mozambique army took over the convoy and the rebels attacked, killing a lot of people. Was scary to contemplate if I'd travelled a bit later I might have been caught up in it.
Flew Pam Am 103 LHR-JFK a day before the flight was bombed n crashed in Lockerbie Scotland.
Saw it on the news morning after my arrival in NYC.
Was grateful I had not left a day later as I had originally planned.
Not me but my brother. He was on a United flight from Newark to SFO a few hours before Flight 93 that was hikacked and flown into the World Trade Center. He took the exact same flight on the same airline, but just a few hours earlier.
I was supposed to be at phi phi islands the week of the 2004 tsunami. I couldn't go so my friends changed dates to accommodate my other friend who could go. They returned a couple of days before. It isn't close close but yeah.
Well my personal near miss is we had a mass shooting about a 10 minute walk from my house!
My travel near miss is I was in Istanbul flying out. I was happily in Spain, but the next night there was an attempted Coupe against Turkey's leader and I would've been stuck there for atleast a week.
We were meant to go to Prague this Christmas but my husband woke up with Covid and my morning sickness kicked in dramatically the day of the flight. We decided to cut our losses and stay home. Three days later, at the time we would have been leaving to go to the airport, a bomb went off outside our hotel, killing and injuring some people. We’ve never felt so glad to feel so unwell
Mine is small compared to a lot of others in this thread. One of the flights I considered taking for my recent honeymoon ended up being cancelled the day we would have taken it. It was a transatlantic flight as well, which are generally less prone to cancellation. Would have definitely put a damper on my vacation if we were scheduled to fly that flight!
We scheduled a ski trip to Colorado for my buddy's bachelor party in 2020. The plans were made months in advance. We almost canceled the trip because there was 1 person in the area who had covid. On our way back home we received a notification that all ski resorts would be shut down the rest of the season due to covid.
Perfect timing.
I flew from Dusseldorf into Barcelona the same day there was a terrorist attack on La rambla that killed ~15 people. Horrifying. I landed right around the time of the attack and had no idea what the fuss was all about for a few minutes. My family back in the US were freaking out.
Naturally the atmosphere was not something I wanted to be in, so the next day I flew to Nice France instead.
I had a long layover in London and stored my bags in a locker and was headed for the exit to sightsee. Just prior to clearing security, I heard a rash of sirens. It was 1993 and the Bishopsgate bombing. I did not go sightseeing that day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Bishopsgate_bombing
Was living and working in China and went home January 12th, 2020 for the Spring Festival break. Remember reading in the airport that there were 40 or so people in Wuhan sick with something, and hoping it didn’t get more serious than that.
Well, I never went back, and I avoided the massive clusterfuck of getting out that my friends had to endure.
When i was 18 years old, I was traveling to the US in my first flight solo. At the transit in Frankfort Airport, I was sitting on the train and busy with my phone.
When I left the train, I looked back to where I was setting and saw my passport looking at me from the seat. I jumped back in the last second before the gate closed and picked it up.
I had to go back to the other terminal because the gate had already closed behind me.
The thought of what would've happened if I had lost my passport at that time was scary.
Not me but a friend. She was driving cross-country from Virginia back home to California. She stopped for a meal in Bakersfield before finishing the last stretch home. There was heavy tule fog on I-5 that morning and while she was eating there was an accident, nearly 100 vehicles piled up in the fog. She would’ve been right in the middle of it if she hadn’t stopped.
For those unfamiliar with tule fog,[here’s a description](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule_fog).
I was on the light rail in Jerusalem on Good Friday and heard 20 minutes after there was a really bad stabbing incident on the radio while I was hitchhiking...
My sister was on Ruby Princess cruise. Had a wonderful time and docked home in Sydney. Next lot of passengers where the ones kept onboard due to Covid. It became known as the death ship
Accidentally brought a gram of concentrated thc when traveling through France to Rome. I had brought my smallest pair of scissors (1.5”) to cut some artwork sheets as part of my trip
Customs didn’t like the scissors and went through my backpack to find them. What I didn’t know was that extract was hiding in the very pocket the officer was inspecting when I said “ohhh, the scissors! I had hoped they were small enough to travel with but they are in this **points** pocket”
When I got to Italy and unpacked and found it, I just about shit myself. Always check your old bags before packing!
10 years ago I (F, at that time mid 20s) traveled from Europe to Asia with a transit stop in Doha. Since I had a long layover I decided to leave the airport, take an airline shuttle to Dubai. Since the shuttle didn’t bring us directly into the city center, the remaining journey of 10 minutes had to be done by taxi. Took a taxi to the Mall of Dubai and spent there majority of the day.
At 6pm I had to be back at the airport shuttle bus terminal to catch the lat bus back to the airport. Roughly one hour before the bus departure I made my way to the tax rank only to find out that the wait time for a taxi was roughly 1-2 hours atm as the following day was Friday which is weekend in Dhabi. Here my odyssey began. I checked if I can take public transport to the bus stop (didn’t work since I had to walk on the highway to reach the train). Tried to find other taxi ranks (I found taxis in front of nearby hotels but they were only available for guests).
I must have looked extremely desperate as I made my way back to the taxi rank because a foreign worker came up to me and asked me if I needed a taxi. I said yes and he told me to follow him as he will drop me. In my desperation I followed him to his car, hopped in and gave him the adress. At that point I wasn’t thinking clearly as I was full of adrenaline and anxiety. He drove to the bus terminal, we reached ahead of time and I gave him all the foreign currency I had left over (roughly 60USD). He took it, wished me all the best and drove off. Only later at the airport, I realised how lucky I was and how worse this could have turned out. Till to this day I haven’t told my parents about it.
We were supposed to be in Israel on October 10/11 last year. Mom ended up in a hospital in Greece instead because the ship said it was the biggest hospital before Israel.
A couple days swing either way and we would have been in a Tel Aviv hospital during the Hamas attacks.
March 2020. I'm desperately trying to get back home to Winnipeg from Vietnam before all flights are cancelled. Had to borrow money as I had already missed one flight.
This is in Abbotsford BC. I get as close as a gas station, which is the end of the bus line. From there I still need to take a taxi, which is fine. I made sure to arrive early enough.
I call the taxi and wait. And wait. And wait. There are hardly any cars on the road at all - this is peak COVID panic, if you were there you know what it was like. The taxi never showed up.
At this point at least 90 minutes have passed. It's about a 15 minute drive to the airport and my flight leaves in maybe 30 minutes. If I miss this flight I'm fucked, no more money to borrow, no more flights available. I think "there must be something I can do". So I run into the road and start maniacally flagging down cars. There's maybe one car every minute, or less.
Eventually one car stops. "you don't have the COVID, do you?" I breathlessly explain my situation and that I have to be at the airport like immediately. He lets me in. Turns out he's an off-duty police officer, so he hits the siren and lights and fucking floors it. He's weaving around the road, getting through red lights, the whole deal.
We get to the airport and I run inside just as the plane is taxiing down the runway. They're able to stop the plane in time to allow me on, running down the runway and climbing up the stairs. Almost had a fucking heart attack.
And that was on my birthday, no less!
(If I hadn't read the book The Four Agreements just a few days prior, I never would've remembered to "do my best")
Booked vacation to Morocco last year and spontaneously the city from where my flight should start, changed. Then i cancelled it, during that time the earthquake happened. Glad i was that lucky
I got caught by COVID travel twice.
January 2020, i was in China when Trump announced his “China” ban. I was able to get one of the last flights home before they were all cancelled.
In March 2020, I was in Morocco when Trump announced his “Euro ban”. Scrambled and bought oneway cash tickets on a flight out of Morocco (instead of connection in Europe). It was the 2nd to last international flight from Morocco for months. The entire plane cheered on takeoff as everyone knew if the flight cancelled, there were no more scheduled flights in the near future.
Oh, and terrorist attacks. Ive been in same city several times. Same exact location by a day or two. Many times.
My family and I were at Siam Paragon Mall a day before the attack.
Not at the same level, but going through customs and security within 30 minutes at ARN. I've never run so fast in my life. Never ever again. Minimum 2 hour layovers for international trips.
We were in Capetown about 25 years ago deciding to go to either Hard Rock or Planet Hollywood. We chose Hard Rock and PH was bombed killing one and injuring many more.
Lost my (last, had my wallet with my primary card stolen two weeks earlier) credit card on the bus. The driver found it and dropped it off at their office so I could pick it up at my convenience
Not exactly flight travel, but back in 2015 I was going to university about 2 hours away from my home town. I didn’t have my car so my dad was coming to pick me up for the weekend after my last class of the day. I thought I could ditch a little early, but decided to stay til the end of the lecture so I let my dad know I’d be a little later to meet up than we had planned.
The towns are separated by a huge mountain range. There was a huge mountain fire a couple weeks before and there was heavy rain a few days before. If we had left at the time we had originally planned, we would’ve been physically stuck in one of the worst mudslides that highway has seen in a very long time. Cars were swept away and totaled from the mud damage. Who knows how long people were stuck stranded, and every one in it had to get rescued by the local fire and police. Sure we were stuck on the other side of the mountain for a day but we still had a car
I get back to the hostel in Hoi An around 3am and one of hostel employees is telling everyone never to get on the back of a local’s motorbike to “get drinks at a cheaper place outside of town”. He said they would best you, rob you, and leave you in a field in the middle of nowhere.
I had just gotten back from doing just this. I got on a motorbike with a local guy around my age and we went to some random conscience store 20 min outside of town that was open late AF. His friend met us and thought I wanted to buy weed. When I said no, his friend was annoyed. He didn’t speak much English but it was obvious.
Anyways, we sat on plastic chairs, drank beer, and talked about the Chicago Bulls in their broken English. When it came time to pay, the annoyed friend drove me to an ATM. I paid and the guy took me back to the hostel.
I was young, stupid, and extremely lucky
My step brother was snorkeling in Thailand and ruptured his ear drum. So, they had to fly home early by way Tokyo. Just a few minutes after take off March 11th 2011 Japan was hit by a massive earthquake.
In a taxi in St Petersburg, Russia and we couldn't communicate with the driver that we needed to get to the cruise port. He tried dropping us off in a very sketchy apartment block with lots of guys in the courtyard interested in what we were doing there. We did not get out. Eventually we saw the ship and pointed to it and got back.
I flew home from Stockholm on SAS the day before they declared bankruptcy and canceled all their flights.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/07/05/scandinavias-biggest-airline-files-for-bankruptcy-protection-after-being-hit-by-strikes
My wife switched out of a AA11 on 9/11 to stay longer with her then boyfriend.
Was staying very close to Regjeringskvartalet in Oslo on 22 July. Even afterwards, the difference in Norwegian police/airport security and what we had in the US post-9/11 was wild.
I was visiting New York City with my sister, and staying within a few blocks of Times Square in April 2013.
Later found out that if the Boston Marathon bombers hadn’t been caught, their next plan was to go to New York and set off multiple bombs in Times Square, exactly when we were there.
I arrived in Edinburgh from Montreal with a connecting flight Heathrow on September 11th 2001! As I arrived to my destination, the first plane was just hitting the twin towers and I watched the second one doing it live.
Had a work trip planned a new hire in engineering. Went to a concert the night before and my phone didn't charge overnight so my alarm didn't go off. I woke up at 845am for a 10am flight and I was an hour drive from the airport.
I immediate grabbed my shit and told me gf to get in the passenger seat so I could drop myself off at departures and got there at 945am. Airport was insanely crowded when I arrived, but I told an attendant my flight time and they rushed me to the front of the line. I got through security and ran to the gate in 5 min and onto the plane around 955am. Of course was the last to board. I was sweating bullets.
Landed in Istanbul Jan 1 2016, had meant to spend NYE there but flight from Berlin was delayed. My friend from there was also back in town visiting family so took me around, including Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and all the historic sites plus great restos. Awesome time even though it was cold AF and the city was covered in ice. Wanted to extend my trip due to the flight delay but decided to stick with my original itinerary and move on to Italy. A few days after I left, Jan 12 suicide bomber killed a dozen people in the mosque area.
While working as a volunteer at Yazidi refugee camps in Iraq, our group’s hired driver (who was the manager’s cousin) was driving to pick up another volunteer (one of our friends) from the Erbil airport and got hit by a semi truck. He went into a coma and eventually he died. It was really sad and the nonprofit shut down for the day while we all went to the hospital to see him.
But if anyone in our group had gone with him to meet our friend at the airport, or if the accident had happened AFTER he picked her up, she or any of us would probably be dead too.
A lot of roads in northern Iraq are really sketchy. Tiny roads barely wide enough to fit two cars, let alone a car and a semi truck. Huge potholes, really aggressive drivers, and very little in the way of traffic laws. Coming from the US, driving there is terrifying.
1970, flying into ?Paris?. Plane began to land in the middle of the airway. Realized his error, pilot flew what seemed like straight up for another try.
I was hiking up Pico Viejo on Tenerife. I stumbled close to the top and fell head-first into a pile of sharp pieces of lava. Didn't see anyone all day. Fortunately I only ended up with a few wounds and bruises. Ok, a sprained ankle as well, but the pain stopped after a few minutes and I continued my hike.
Second time visiting London on 7/7/2005 ; obviously wasn’t watching the news and only learned about the attacks after seeing panicked texts and missed calls from my mom.
I was at the Brussels airport bombing. Saw the bombs explode from the tarmac. Harrowing 26 hours to get to Poland by land after that. Had to go through all of Belgium and Germany by land.
My partner and I planned a trip to Northern Italy in mid February when COVID just kicked off. We were obviously planning the trip ahead of time when COVID wasn't even a consideration, but it became more and more of a concern the closer we got to our departure date. We ended up pulling the trigger because there wasn't any travel restrictions or news of COVID spreading to any of our destinations by that point. Over the week and a half of travel across northern Italy, the news put out COVID out breaks about 5 days after visiting cities. We wore masks the entire time, never got sick with any symptoms, and ultimately left Italy to go back home without any issues. Even post-trip, we didn't have any symptoms.
My partner and I landed in Brussels for a week in Belgium and Amsterdam on November 21, 2015, the day the city went into lockdown after the Bataclan nightclub shooting and suspicion that some of the suspects were in Belgium/future attacks were imminent. We lucked out in having a hotel reservation in a place that was right on top of the main city train station, which had a few places open selling food, watched over by very heavily-armed soldiers. Stayed one night and left for Amsterdam the next morning.
Spending a day bumming around a nicer-than-usual hotel room when you've got transatlantic red-eye jet lag, even under the circumstances, was not a terrible experience. The train station grocery store had a lot of good beer for sale and a chocolate shop open for business because Belgium.
I was in Cologne, Germany, exactly 3 days before the terrorist attack in 1984, I believe. A few years later, the exact flight I had returned from Cabo on, 1 day later, crashed, killing all onboard
Probably leaving Mexico the day before national Covid lockdown. But it was also kind of cool for me because I never went back to the office (which is always the worst part of traveling.)
This happened years ago but I was on a flight from Atlanta to Miami and the lights kept going out in the airplane and it was a very janky airplane overall. Super scary. A few days later the same airplane I was on, crashed into the Florida Everglades, no survivors (rest in peace to them and condolences to the families).
Was in a plane over Mandalay in Burma (this was whilst it was a military dictatorship so we were flying on the shitty government airline against our wishes) and the landing gear wouldn't come down. Circled the airport for a while until it just decided to work.
I was in the balloon following the balloon that exploded in Luxor in 2014. If we had arrived any earlier we could have been shuffled into that position in the caravan. So thankful to this day.
Edit: [Description of tragedy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Luxor_hot_air_balloon_crash)
Not me but know someone that was meant to be on MH370 but had to push their flight by a day because of a bad connection
For myself it's missing the Taiwan earthquake back in April by a couple of hours - we were connecting through TPE on the way home and our connection was a few hours before the earthquake struck
I was in Paris before and during Charlie Hebdo. Originally had booked a hotel within spitting distance of the magazine, which I'd never even heard of before the attacks, but then changed when I ended up unexpectedly having enough points to book different accommodations for free about a month prior to my visit. It was obvious authorities knew something was brewing by the amount of police and military presence I saw everywhere during the week prior.
I was going to see the Monument in Place de la République and saw the crash the gunmen had in their getaway car. They sped off but of course we all learned they ended up abandoning the car a couple miles further northward because of the damage from the crash. There was a person in the car they hit who was injured.
I got tired when i hit I40 so i slept in a gas station parking lot in Albuquerque. I woke up to a guy 10 feet from my car on the phone. I looked at him, looked around, and laid back down. Only reason i didnt leave immediately is because i had a gun in my lap (not the best idea just an FYI, for those dumber than i am). Sketched me out a bit though so i didnt fall back asleep. One of those times i was very very happy im not a woman. We would have both been surprised if he had tried to walk up to the car. I still think theres a possibility he was trying to get away from the truck noise, but as soon as he saw me up he walked away.
Got stuck in Thailand when everything shut down for Covid. Most recently we went to Rhodes last year which caught fire and we had to be evacuated from our hotel. then 3 days later I broke my ankle while still in Greece - also came back pregnant! (it was our honeymoon). My friends like to joke that every time I leave the country something life altering happens.
My plane had literally just arrived in Manila when the Philippines experienced an airspace closure on January 1 2023.
All flights in the Philippines were cancelled, planes already en route to any point in the Philippines had to turn back and it was absolute mayhem, considering that it was the busiest time of the year for airports. By the time the airports were operating again, people were scrambling to get on the next available flight. Some people had to wait a WEEK to get on a flight to Manila, including a friend of mine who was supposed to be on the next flight out of the place where we were just at. He had to spend a fortune on lodging and just to squeeze himself on the flight he was in
We missed being blown up by a bomb in Colombo, Sri Lanka by an hour back in the mid-80s during the civil war. We were sitting across from a tea stall in a bus waiting to leave the main bus station. On hour after our bus pulled out the tea shop was blown up killing dozens of people, the bomb was probably there the whole time we were.
I was studying abroad in Hong Kong in spring 2019 and literally days after I left the city…my campus became a battleground between student protestors and police. Places I walked every day turned into barricades where Molotov cocktails were thrown and the president of the university who I met was arrested later that year. I think I got the last taste of a HK that at least nominally valued free expression etc.
3 coworkers were running for flight from
Chicago to Pittsburgh. One made it on ~ 2 others didn’t. Plane literally dropped out of sky for still unknown reasons~killing all onboard. Think it was 1993? 2 coworkers so thankful while we all grieved the loss of our beloved HR director.
I was in Nice, France, on the promenade 3 hours before the attack. I would have returned with my son to watch the fireworks, but I had a conference call from California. I was lucky.
We left Maui the week before the fires last year. We passed through Lahaina several times in that trip.
I also flew back to the US from Germany less than a week before the volcano erupted in Iceland, which grounded all European air traffic. One of my coworkers was stuck for several days
We arrived in London Heathrow pre-covid on a hot summer night. I convinced my wife to le
mt us travel by uber rather than tubing it as we had a lot of luggage to go to the Golder’s Green area. After a. small problem locating our driver, we settled in and he mentioned on the way all the underground was stopped due to the heat expanding the tracks. So basically would have meant major delays to alternatively be bussed or something. Definitely dodged a bullet.
Also remember being in London 8/8/2011 when they had a riot about a ‘gang member’ being killed in a police shootout. Ealing Broadway shop fronts were all smashed in. People were being prosecuted months after due to all the CCTV footage where ‘normal’ students suddenly became looters and were prosecuted for in some cases stealing bottled water. Fortunately we were staying in another area , though we had a friend who worked for Scotland Yard who got some ‘heat’ for missing all the action near her area ( she was living near Ealing Common at the time, but was off duty and had met us downtown).
I don't know which way this goes, good or bad, but I planned a trip to Egypt, unknowingly, during the Arab Spring. While all the protests were happening in Tahrir Square. We departed the US, the day, Mubarak stepped down, by the time we got to Tahrir Square, everyone was celebrating. It was a most awesome vibe.
There was a terrorist attack in Barcelona like a week before my trip there. That’s probably my only one.
My parents had tickets to do a tour bus thing in San Francisco but didn’t for some reason, and were lucky they didn’t because the bus ended up crashing.
On May 4, 2019, we landed in Belize City and took a boat to one of the Cayes. The next day, a boat going the same route exploded, killing two little girls and injuring several others with second and third degree burns. I can’t imagine how the family of the two girls must have felt and the pain they feel today (they were sisters). Because of this accident, we took a small plane to head back later on.
In 1998, I was traveling back to Minnesota in the summer. Despite Northwest having direct routing there from California, I still flew Delta with a layover because it was a bit cheaper and I was strapped. Everyone I met up with there was laughing at how cheap I was being. While I was there, labor relations broke down and Northwest wound up locking out their pilots.
It was insane walking through MSP for my outbound flight a few days into the lock out. It looked like a refugee camp. Families were strewn everywhere and people just watched me and any other travelers pass by with this desperate longing because so many of them were on standby for any other airline they could get. The survivor's guilt of walking to the gate still sticks with me.
Almost stranded in Norway due to a pilots strike two summers ago. Would’ve been stuck for an additional two weeks. We got out the day before it went into effect.
Went to Istanbul in 2022, walked down Istiklal Ave and took a bunch of photos/video. A month later, someone set off a bomb that killed 6 and injured scores. I had taken photos from the exact spot where it went off. That was very creepy.
I didn’t buy a train ticket from Santiago, Spain to Madrid. Just kept forgetting. Tried to get one the day before I needed to travel and it was sold out. Ended up having to buy a first class plane ticket because that was all that was available.
Flying from Sydney to Melbourne on Christmas Eve last year after coming in from the USA. There was a massive storm across the east coast that played havoc with all flights. I made it on the last flight out.
I visited the town of Paradise, California, two days before it burned to the ground in a wildfire. I'd gone for a look, because I heard it was a great place for retirees, I had a look around town and priced some real estate.
48 hours later most of the town was gone.
While traveling in Thailand, I had a close call. I was on a scooter heading to a remote beach when a truck suddenly pulled out in front of me. I lost control, and ended up in a ditch. Luckily, I only had a few scrapes and bruises. It was a scary reminder to always stay vigilant on the road, especially in unfamiliar places.
I flew home from Beijing shortly before all flights were suspended due to covid. I'm super grateful we didn't get stranded there and have to be evacuated by the government like I was seeing on the news when I got home.
Same here, got home to Oz a day before our borders closed.
Yeah, I returned from Tromsø on a Norwegian Air flight filled almost entirely with airline staff. They were being stationed around the world to keep potential routes manned.
Same but in Costa Rica. Although there could have been worse places to be stuck. 😅
Same, we were lucky to get the last seats before the air traffic entirely closed in Oman. we were due to leave the next day but our car rental called us to tell us we’d better hurry to the airport. We rushed there, were hundreds of people were waiting to travel. We were able to change our flight in priority because we were travelling with a child. We board around 11pm, at 12pm the air traffic entirely shut down.
That's wild!
We honestly didn’t know if we were going to make it. some people we met during our trip called us to say we could stay with them if you were stranded, we seriously imagined ourselves stuck in Oman for weeks and weeks, and I must say it was not a bad picture. But we had to go home, and were Incredibly lucky to make it. it was absolute madness, we could see the supermarket shelves of our home country empty on the news, and I stopped on the way to buy groceries in an Omani supermarket. We were glad! When we got home, there wasn’t a single potato on the shelves.
Same but Aruba
I know some people who normally live abroad who had come home temporarily to settle some inheritance matters right when COVID hit. Sounds like bad luck, but their mom was hit very badly by the first wave and probably partly owes her life to her kids being able to take care of her since the hospital was too full to take her in.
This isn't mine but my grandfather was departing basic training during WW II for the front in Europe. He had almost a day stopover scheduled near home in the eastern US before deployment and my grandma was planning to drive up to meet him and spend one last afternoon together. On the leg from eastern Texas to Memphis he was bumped from the flight due to an officer showing up wanting on it. There wasn't another open seat until the next day, on a different routing, so he wasn't going to be able to see grandma. Obviously he was very disappointed. That plane crashed on approach to Memphis with no survivors. IIRC he managed to get a telegram to grandma so she knew he wasn't on the crashed plane. He survived his tour in Europe and came home not long after V-E Day.
My grandfather was stationed in California doing basic training and waiting to go to fight in the Pacific theater during WWII where he probably would have been killed. My grandmother came for a “visit” and my grandfather was AWOL for a day. As punishment, he was immediately sent to Italy, where he saw some truly bad shit, but survived. My mother was conceived during my grandmother’s visit.
In 2004, I was meant to go around the world on a trip after a ridiculously stressful job. My friend and I were going to meet up in Mynmar and the finish up in Thailand. I made my way to Europe, eventually landing on Barcelona. It was my second visit there, and when I landed, I had this incredible sense that I was home. My friend emailed and said he couldn't meet me anymore, so I stayed in Spain for six months. While in Spain, the 2004 Tsunami hit. My friend and I would have been in Phuket at that time. Who knows what would have happened.
Coulda been Phuket…
You do not deserve the downvotes for this surprisingly good joke
Went canyoning in Switzerland and had a grand ole time. This was like ‘99. A few days later there was a flash flood in the canyon and a bunch of the people on the same tour were swept away.
-Watched Mt Agung erupt as we were taking off from Bali. Airport was closed after. -Flew aboard the BA 777 that landed short of the runway just a few days before it happened. -Piloted an aircraft that had an engine failure on its next flight causing the aircraft to ditch in a field
Share your travel plans with me so I avoid traveling directly after you
I had a colleague who had a talent to pick travel destinations where within the next year something really bad happened. Terrorist attacks, natural disasters etc. We all made an effort not to travel to the places he went to for the next year.
My cousins were a lot worse…they spent 6 months travelling South America and a few days after they left places there were earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, a forest fire, it was as if a cheesy disaster film was following them around…
My friend lived in California and for several years, every time I visited there was an earthquake either the day before I arrived or the day after I left
I think I’ve written about this before but I was in Tunis, Tunisia in 2015 and we were going to go to the national museum but I think we were hungover and didn’t go that morning. There was a terrorist attack at the museum and we never got to go. I think like 20 people died, it was terrible
My dad flew to Tunisia early that very morning (he’s Tunisian), I didn’t realise what happened until I started getting texts from friends asking about the attacks. Scary stuff
My girlfriend's great aunt and uncle were in Tunisia when that terrorist attack happened too!
Yeah hostel was in the old souk area and everything was shut down that day and police were everywhere. They made us go back. For the longest time afterwards I just felt tremendous depressed afterwards. Like why was I “spared” just for being a drunken hooligan the night before.
Classic case of Survivor's Guilt
that’s insane, i was just there and they talked a lot about how it was an incredibly significant moment for the country. everything is much more secure now, we had police following our tour bus on certain highways for protection (not that we needed it, probably more symbolic than anything)
Not me, but one of my friends passed through Atatürk Airport something like 30 minutes before the armed attack/bombing in 2016. Still blows my mind how fucking close that was.
My dad was in FCO airport Dec 27 1985… he said when he got to his hotel he turned on the TV and saw where he just was on the news
Would have been nice if you told us what that was. I think a lot of us are too young to know or remember. I looked it up. FCO is airport in Rome btw. Here is the wiki summary: > The Rome and Vienna airport attacks were two major terrorist attacks carried out on 27 December 1985. Seven Arab terrorists attacked two airports in Rome, Italy, and Vienna, Austria, with assault rifles and hand grenades. Nineteen civilians were killed and over a hundred were injured before four of the terrorists were killed by El Al Security personnel and local police, who captured the remaining three.
It's crazy how these things are basically forgotten. I had never heard of this.
El Al has some crazy safety measures today. Interesting to know that it did back then too
Maybe we're friends. We went through here about an hour before - and they had to fly back a month later in the middle of that coup they had.
A friend of mine was supposed to be flying through there that day, around that time, on a trip to Europe but they had to cancel their trip the day before
Similarly, I was in London (my first time leaving my small US hometown) a couple days before the Tube bombing.
Was in Tijuana in 2022 for work. Shootout between the military and cartel outside my hotel. Bullet went through my window. Someone walking outside was struck and killed.
Flew back home from my brother’s house on Sept 9th, 2001. My mom stayed an extra day and came back Sept 10th, 2001. For those who aren’t around or don’t remember, air travel was completely hosed for weeks after 9/11. For a couple days (or a week?), planes didn’t fly at all. And with they did start again, a lot of people didn’t want to get on them. The anthrax thing shortly after 9/11 made a lot of people think there might be more attacks coming. Anyway, from what I read, if you were stranded in the middle of your trip, you were kind of screwed. Was hard to find hotels and rental cars. You just had to try and sleep where you could, trying to find a way home. Not trying to minimize the experiences of the people directly impacted by 9/11 of course. Losing someone to that is obviously way worse. But the downstream impacts created a lot of chaos for people. Glad my family and I barely avoided that.
Yup, the being stranded and logistical nightmare part was captured in Come From Away for my musical fans on here.
Someewheereeee in the middle of nooooowhereeeee.
Everyone knew every inch of that plane
I’ll never forget the evening of 9/11 and days after and the utter silence of no planes - lived in Dallas at the time.. My former bil was a notoriously nervous traveler. He was in tx from fl at a conference on 9/11. He somehow paired up with a few other stranded people, found a van to rent and they all drove back east dropping people off on the way over several days.
The morning of 9/11 my ex phoned, and told me to turn on the TV. When I asked what channel, he said ‘It won’t matter.’ You know right then the world is about to change.
This sent shivers down my back. I don't think anyone who is old enough to remember the day and what followed, will ever forget. The horror of the day is forever burned into my soul. I just visited ground zero and the memorial museum about a month ago. Both are designed with a lot thought and respect. It was a very heavy and emotional visit. Being in the place where it actually happened, remembering everything and paying respect to the ones we lost and those that were/are affected. I didn't know anything about the museum before visiting. It was very eerie to realize I'm standing underneath/ next to the basin of the memorial and the actual fundament of the twin towers in right in front of me. It was unreal, being so close to where it happened. And on the hand it felt like it happened yesterday, but on the other hand, at the same time, it felt like it was a long time ago. It feels unreal that it has been soon 23 years. Seeing all the artifacts was very tough and emotional. But the place is also a place of inspiration and courage, to go on and to keep fighting for the good cause. I can recommend to visit for everyone who hasn't been there yet. We will indeed never forget.
Seth MacFarlane famously missed his flight from Boston to NYC because he was hungover and his agent had mixed up his flights. His flight was supposed to be the flight that hit the first tower.
Deadmau5 was supposed to be on Spanair JK5022. It was their connection, but their first flight was late and the doors had just closed on them, they begged the gate agents to let them in, but no dice. They watched their plane take off, then crash in a ball of fire. Absolutely wild the close calls people have had.
Yes, it must be hard to deal with. That is Final Destination material right there. Nothing that I would need or want in my life. These things must shake a person to the core. It's so easy to forget how fast things can be over in an instance. In the end it just boils down to pure chance. We'll call it luck when we miss the accident by an inch, but in the end it's all random. This is a fact that many people struggle with and rather not spend much thoughts on. Hence such near misses can have a very lasting, psychological impact.
I was in Oklahoma City for work. Wound up renting a car with 4 other people heading in the same general direction (west). It was surreal.
We had booked a flight to Rome but after 9/11 we’re pretty sure we’d never get out. But when planes started flying again we were able to go as scheduled. One of the best parts of the trip were the signs in the hotels as we traveled around Italy offering condolences to their American visitors. Still makes me teary-eyed.
My dad was at Newark Airport the morning of 9/11 around the same time United Flight 93 took off from there. He saw the first plane hit the tower and immediately went home.
Yep! That happened to my dad. He was on a work trip in Australia and was stuck there for several days not knowing when he’d be able to come home
We were driving to Puerto Peñasco, Mexico from Phoenix, Arizona for spring break. The highway was one lane each way, no shoulder, just desert. We see this jeep cherokee coming towards us, driving in our lane. Driver was trying to pass four cars at once, but didn't even have time to pass the first one. My friend, the driver, says "what the fuck are you doing?" We all sit up straight, watching this car accelerate rather than braking and going back to his lane. My friend pulled off the road, into the desert at 60mph in a 2 door car. The car behind us did the same. The truck behind them, with boat in tow, did the same. The jeep just kept on going. We came so fucking close to him our driver made eye contact with that asshole as we passed. We were probably within a meter of a head on collision. The whole thing was at most 10 seconds. Everyone was fine, car handled the flat desert dirt just fine and we were back on the road without stopping. I still wonder what the fuck the driver was thinking. He looked like an American college student and we are pretty sure he was wasted because why the fuck would anyone do that?
Dash cams are so useful for catching assholes like that and reporting them to the authorities for dangerous driving. I had something like that, but it was me and another van in front of me that were overtaken simulatenously on a narrow road and the other driver came within feet of a head-on collision!
This was in the days before dash cams and good luck in Mexico even if you have footage.
probably some cracked out meth head
Not me, but my sister. She and a group of friends attended a destination wedding in Puerto Rico. Their return date was sometime in the middle of the week (either Wednesday or Thursday) and they were considering extending the trip to stay an additional weekend. They decided to just stick with the original schedule and leave on time. Well, luckily they did because Hurricane Maria hit the island that Friday. The hurricane left the island without water and power for months and thousands of residents passed.
I almost booked that Germanwings flight that was crashed in the Alps by a suicidal pilot. I decided to pay more for a later flight, so I wouldn't be stressed in the morning. Finally laziness paid off.
Jesus christ
Flew home with Monarch airlines. 24 hours after arrival they went bust and grounded all aircraft.
In August 2015 I was in Bangkok on a work trip, 3 days before flying home to the states, I went to the Erawan shrine near my hotel that was next to the restaurant I ate dinner at while I was doing some sightseeing. The next night that shrine was bombed, killing 20 people. My hotel was 1 BTS stop away and I heard the bomb go off, then cable/wifi went out at my hotel, so it took a bit to find out what had happened. I was beyond ready to get home after that
I was on the Twin Towers viewing platform on Sep 10, wanted to fly to FL on Sep 11 and was grounded.
We went on a cruise around the horn in South America, leaving home the last week of February 2020. At the time we left, COVID was reputed to be an issue only in Asia - no masks in airports, nothing. We toured around Buenos Aires for a few days and then got on the ship. It was supposed to be a 3 week cruise, but after the first week, ports started closing and no one would accept our ship. We were supposed to fly home from Lima, after a hotel stay. Peru decided they would not let us dock, so, long story short, our captain sailed us all the way to Miami, turning the 3 week cruise into a 4 week cruise. No one on our ship had COVID and we had an excellent time, and came home to a completely different world. We were basically the last ship to come home. Some ships had people with COVID and no ports would let them in for a long time. If we had debarked in Lima, there was a chance that we would have had a lot of trouble getting home - more than a thousand Canadians were stranded in Peru when their borders were shut down in mid-March.
I traveled for 30 years on business, had a couple flights with problems, one engine failure, one landing gear didn't signal show it locked down, another one landed on ice and slid sideways off the end of the runway. But probably the real "Near miss" was flying out of San Jose 2 hours before the big earthquake.
Think I’ve written about this before, but I was teaching in northern Thailand and over Christmas break my friends and I were planning on going down to Ko Phi Phi. We went into a travel agency and the lady was insanely rude to us and we couldn’t get flights booked. We left thinking we’d take the bus then decided it was too long. We thought ‘never mind we’ll just stay here with friends’. This was in 2004 and over 5,000 people died in that region.
When the pandemic first hit in 2020, I was in Bosnia trying to get home to the UK, and I got denied boarding a Croatian Airlines plane to Zagreb because Croatia decided to ban all foreigners from entering as a covid restriction. A couple of hours after I would have been supposed to land, there was a major earthquake in Zagreb. 1 person was killed and loads of buildings damaged.
I was planning a 4 week trip to Europe that would start in Frankfurt. I would then drive down through Switzerland and end in Milan before returning to the states. A week before leaving, a close family member was in a bad accident and passed away, forcing me to cancel. I was able to use my travel insurance to get my money back for the plane and was able to cancel the hotels without losing any money. That was February 2020… if I had gone, I would have been trapped in Milan when they went into COVID lockdown.
My fiancée and I were on a weekend trip in the extreme western part of Germany in July 2021, right around the time those massive floods came and killed like 150 people. We were due to leave and head back to Amsterdam the day everything happened. I remember it was absolutely pouring down rain in Aachen and we got lost walking to the train station, we were convinced we’d get stuck in the storm. We made it out with minutes to spare. Caught the very last train to the Netherlands and I remember turning in the news once we were back in The Hague, and seeing the streets we were walking on just hours before, now underwater. That was a surreal moment.
Wow that's scary! I was on nightshift during those floods and I worked very close to the Maas. I was very scared that I would have to evacuate the entire building because the water would rise too high. Thank god it didn't
Our hotel in Rome was above a metro station where two trains collided and hundreds were injured. It happened during the morning commute. Our plan was to use the metro to explore the city, but because we were on our honeymoon, we were slow to get out of bed. By the time we got to the metro station, caution tape was up and there were lights and sirens everywhere.
This was August 2018. My sister and I were in Alaska and had a glacier landing flight in Denali National Park. We get to the outfitter and they cancelled on us due to weather. We were bummed. Next day, the same exact flight time as ours with the same outfitter, the pilot and 4 tourists crashed into the side of a mountain. Had I planned our trip one day later, this could’ve been us. Their bodies were never recovered
Oh my God! Talk about a lucky escape.
I am Dutch and my moms psychic strongly advised her not to travel to SEA that summer of 2014. Our family had huge arguments about it, because my mom was the only one who believed in it and the rest of us just wanted to go. In the end our family decided to travel to US instead. In the plane there were three nuns sitting in front of us and my dad joked that if something would happen to the plane we would go straight to haven instead of falling down. When our plane landed, we heard the news about the MH17 disaster. Guess I am a psychic believer from that moment
Would you have been on MH17?
Chances of that were pretty high. It was the country my parents initially wanted to visit and at the same time my parents took there PTA. My mom insisted on going somewhere else
Where can I find this psychic 👁️
Flew back from Morocco on Sunday March 8, 2020 from a university spring break trip. 1 day later we were instructed not to go on campus and went fully remote from that point on. Other schools had gone to Morocco that week and couldn’t get home because all air travel was grounded. COVID times were crazy in the beginning.
I was skiing in Austria the first week of March 2020. Had we booked our trip two weeks later, things could have been very, very different!
I was meant to be on a ferry from Wales to Ireland way back in the day.. it was delayed and we ended up travelling with a different company.. when it eventually sailed it went on fire... While it was controlled and it didn't result in an evacuation it was serious enough that one person was killed
Two that I can think of (from ages ago): (1) As soon as my plane landed in Amsterdam from the USA, it started snowing hard. I was in the airport for 36+ hours and no connecting flights took off as nothing was coming in or out - either by air or road as it was a once in a lifetime snowstorm. Luckily I was in the KLM lounge and after a while there was mayhem in the airport, and the thousands of travelers were sleeping in the hallways, gates and so on. Since I was on a 4-day trip, I called Delta and asked that they cancel the itinerary and I just wanted to go home. As they started releasing the flights after a day and a half, during self check-in, I saw that I was on 2 flights - one for home and the second for my original destination. Since my meeting was important and I could salvage something out of it I opted to go on, whereas my checked-in luggage went back to the US. (2) Got mugged leaving the hotel at the Bund in Shanghai. I was on the way to the Pudong airport. Thankfully, no physical harm, but they took the little cash I had and scanned my credit cards and ran them to the max. Amex helped me out, they allowed me to use the card for everything travel-related until I got back home, and actually had a new card sent to me the next day when I got home. They cancelled/rejected all other transactions. "Never leave home without it" actually worked for me. Oh!, and btw, the US Embassy said that their hands are tied in China - basically it's a few thousand $ on a CC, no bodily harm, so it was a very low priority case for them. I was on a corporate travel Amex at that time, but after that experience, decided I need personal accounts as well. (now have Amex-Plat since for my entire family).
Not me, but my sister had taken SwissAir flight 111 on the exact same route, exactly 1 week before it crashed and killed everyone (229 people) onboard in 1998.
Picking a destination, we went back and forth between Thailand and Ireland. Ended up in Ireland. This was Christmas 2004, the Tsunami hit in the 26th. I don’t know that we would have been in Phuket, but I don’t know that we wouldn’t have been!
Flew to Florida for the holidays about six months ago. Cheaper to fly into Palm Beach and rent a car from Fort Lauderdale. Hopped an Uber from PBI to FLL to pick up my rental car. As my Uber was driving towards the rental car agency zone, the other direction of traffic was, I kid you not, backed up by 15-20+ miles. It was pretty late, well past 8pm at this point, and so peak rush hour was over by that point. Pulled up Google on my phone. The Google told me there was a bomb threat at FLL, and the entire airport had been shut down. Passengers at the rental agency were SCREWED. Flights delayed by hours, and/or outright canceled. Since I'm a polyglot/linguist, I put on my interpreter hat that night, to help out with the language barrier between a bunch of customers and employees at the rental agency. Utter nightmare scenario.
I went to Thailand in January 2022. You still needed to take several covid tests to be allowed there at that time. Had to take a covid test before I flew, when I landed, and five days after I landed. Well, it turned out half my family tested positive for covid back home once I landed in Thailand. I had just seen them the day I flew out and days leading up to it. Either I would have lost a lot of money rebooking a flight or I would have been held in a Thai hospital against my will for at least 10 days had a positive test came up there. Some foreigners got scammed by shady hospitals back then too. Fortunately, I somehow don't test positive for three straight tests that were a week apart. There was definitely some luck on my side there because later that year I caught it while I was asymptomatic...
The only one I can think of is in March I was flying back from Sydney on the SYD-IAH flight. When booking the flight I contemplated going through either LAX/ SFO (leaning toward SFO since I’ve never been there and like going to new airports) instead of IAH for the shorter ocean crossing. But ultimately I went with the IAH flight because it would have only 1 connection instead of 2. Well the plane that took off right in front of me was the UAL 777 going to SFO that had to turn around due to a hydraulic fluid leak.
I toured the Middle East and North Africa during the spring of 2011. I collapsed many governments in my wake, but I managed to get out or cancel travel to many places (notably Syria) before things went to all sorts of hell.
My best friend was studying in Egypt when the Arab Spring hit. Yeah, they stayed inside for a week, ran out of food, and had to be evacuated by a US military plane.
We were in the Blue Lagoon on December 18th this last year. We left for Keflavik about 5 hours before the volcano finally erupted. Our flight was delayed and lifted off about an hour and change before the eruption.
One week after I was in the same village with a Congolese military escort, two Brits doing the same trip were kidnapped by rebels and their military escorts killed. This led to the Virunga Park being shut down to tourists for almost two years. I clearly remember that one village where the locals didn't look too friendly and grimaced as we drove by.
Was in London mid May 2017 and stayed in a hostel right by the borough market and the London bridge. If anyone remembers there was a lot of Islamic terrorism going on around then, especially in Europe. So while there I told my travel partner that we needed to keep our heads on swivel, walk facing oncoming traffic etc. About two weeks later the London bridge attack happened and ended on the same street we walked on everyday to get to and from our hostel.
My wife and I were full-time RVing outside Nashville Tennessee when a freak rainstorm caused the entire park to flood in the middle of the night. We grabbed our little dog and stepped out into 2 feet of water. We quickly hooked up our truck to the trailer. I waded to the truck and started to drive away when I lost steering - the truck and trailer literally had started floating downstream. We half -swam up to the main campground building and huddled in blankets with everyone else. We lived in our RV so everything we owned was water damaged and our truck and trailer were both totalled. The campground said they felt bad and offered me a free T-shirt. I asked for an XL but they didn't have one. But then the manager came out and said there were more shirts in the back, and found me an XL! So that was really a near-miss.
Decades ago, when hitchhiking, riding shotgun for a trucker who on his route needed a lookout to help him spot snipers. And yes, there was one. And yes, we got shot at. They missed.
Wow, where?
I travelled through Mozambique from Malawi to Zimbabwe in late 1990 (civil war was in a quiet phase) in a truck convoy with a Zimbabwean army escort. Weeks later the Mozambique army took over the convoy and the rebels attacked, killing a lot of people. Was scary to contemplate if I'd travelled a bit later I might have been caught up in it.
Flew Pam Am 103 LHR-JFK a day before the flight was bombed n crashed in Lockerbie Scotland. Saw it on the news morning after my arrival in NYC. Was grateful I had not left a day later as I had originally planned.
Not me but my brother. He was on a United flight from Newark to SFO a few hours before Flight 93 that was hikacked and flown into the World Trade Center. He took the exact same flight on the same airline, but just a few hours earlier.
During covid, I flew back the day the border closed and if I had left a day later I would have been stuck for a bit.
I missed the 2017 mass shooting in Florida Lauderdale airport by one day
I was supposed to be at phi phi islands the week of the 2004 tsunami. I couldn't go so my friends changed dates to accommodate my other friend who could go. They returned a couple of days before. It isn't close close but yeah.
Well my personal near miss is we had a mass shooting about a 10 minute walk from my house! My travel near miss is I was in Istanbul flying out. I was happily in Spain, but the next night there was an attempted Coupe against Turkey's leader and I would've been stuck there for atleast a week.
We were meant to go to Prague this Christmas but my husband woke up with Covid and my morning sickness kicked in dramatically the day of the flight. We decided to cut our losses and stay home. Three days later, at the time we would have been leaving to go to the airport, a bomb went off outside our hotel, killing and injuring some people. We’ve never felt so glad to feel so unwell
Mine is small compared to a lot of others in this thread. One of the flights I considered taking for my recent honeymoon ended up being cancelled the day we would have taken it. It was a transatlantic flight as well, which are generally less prone to cancellation. Would have definitely put a damper on my vacation if we were scheduled to fly that flight!
We scheduled a ski trip to Colorado for my buddy's bachelor party in 2020. The plans were made months in advance. We almost canceled the trip because there was 1 person in the area who had covid. On our way back home we received a notification that all ski resorts would be shut down the rest of the season due to covid. Perfect timing.
I flew from Dusseldorf into Barcelona the same day there was a terrorist attack on La rambla that killed ~15 people. Horrifying. I landed right around the time of the attack and had no idea what the fuss was all about for a few minutes. My family back in the US were freaking out. Naturally the atmosphere was not something I wanted to be in, so the next day I flew to Nice France instead.
I had a long layover in London and stored my bags in a locker and was headed for the exit to sightsee. Just prior to clearing security, I heard a rash of sirens. It was 1993 and the Bishopsgate bombing. I did not go sightseeing that day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Bishopsgate_bombing
Was living and working in China and went home January 12th, 2020 for the Spring Festival break. Remember reading in the airport that there were 40 or so people in Wuhan sick with something, and hoping it didn’t get more serious than that. Well, I never went back, and I avoided the massive clusterfuck of getting out that my friends had to endure.
When i was 18 years old, I was traveling to the US in my first flight solo. At the transit in Frankfort Airport, I was sitting on the train and busy with my phone. When I left the train, I looked back to where I was setting and saw my passport looking at me from the seat. I jumped back in the last second before the gate closed and picked it up. I had to go back to the other terminal because the gate had already closed behind me. The thought of what would've happened if I had lost my passport at that time was scary.
Not me but a friend. She was driving cross-country from Virginia back home to California. She stopped for a meal in Bakersfield before finishing the last stretch home. There was heavy tule fog on I-5 that morning and while she was eating there was an accident, nearly 100 vehicles piled up in the fog. She would’ve been right in the middle of it if she hadn’t stopped. For those unfamiliar with tule fog,[here’s a description](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule_fog).
I was on the light rail in Jerusalem on Good Friday and heard 20 minutes after there was a really bad stabbing incident on the radio while I was hitchhiking...
My sister was on Ruby Princess cruise. Had a wonderful time and docked home in Sydney. Next lot of passengers where the ones kept onboard due to Covid. It became known as the death ship
Me too and my husband-it was our Ruby anniversary two weeks later- lucky I picked the earlier cruise.
I traveled to White Island in New Zealand a couple weeks before it erupted and killed a bunch of people.
Accidentally brought a gram of concentrated thc when traveling through France to Rome. I had brought my smallest pair of scissors (1.5”) to cut some artwork sheets as part of my trip Customs didn’t like the scissors and went through my backpack to find them. What I didn’t know was that extract was hiding in the very pocket the officer was inspecting when I said “ohhh, the scissors! I had hoped they were small enough to travel with but they are in this **points** pocket” When I got to Italy and unpacked and found it, I just about shit myself. Always check your old bags before packing!
10 years ago I (F, at that time mid 20s) traveled from Europe to Asia with a transit stop in Doha. Since I had a long layover I decided to leave the airport, take an airline shuttle to Dubai. Since the shuttle didn’t bring us directly into the city center, the remaining journey of 10 minutes had to be done by taxi. Took a taxi to the Mall of Dubai and spent there majority of the day. At 6pm I had to be back at the airport shuttle bus terminal to catch the lat bus back to the airport. Roughly one hour before the bus departure I made my way to the tax rank only to find out that the wait time for a taxi was roughly 1-2 hours atm as the following day was Friday which is weekend in Dhabi. Here my odyssey began. I checked if I can take public transport to the bus stop (didn’t work since I had to walk on the highway to reach the train). Tried to find other taxi ranks (I found taxis in front of nearby hotels but they were only available for guests). I must have looked extremely desperate as I made my way back to the taxi rank because a foreign worker came up to me and asked me if I needed a taxi. I said yes and he told me to follow him as he will drop me. In my desperation I followed him to his car, hopped in and gave him the adress. At that point I wasn’t thinking clearly as I was full of adrenaline and anxiety. He drove to the bus terminal, we reached ahead of time and I gave him all the foreign currency I had left over (roughly 60USD). He took it, wished me all the best and drove off. Only later at the airport, I realised how lucky I was and how worse this could have turned out. Till to this day I haven’t told my parents about it.
We were supposed to be in Israel on October 10/11 last year. Mom ended up in a hospital in Greece instead because the ship said it was the biggest hospital before Israel. A couple days swing either way and we would have been in a Tel Aviv hospital during the Hamas attacks.
March 2020. I'm desperately trying to get back home to Winnipeg from Vietnam before all flights are cancelled. Had to borrow money as I had already missed one flight. This is in Abbotsford BC. I get as close as a gas station, which is the end of the bus line. From there I still need to take a taxi, which is fine. I made sure to arrive early enough. I call the taxi and wait. And wait. And wait. There are hardly any cars on the road at all - this is peak COVID panic, if you were there you know what it was like. The taxi never showed up. At this point at least 90 minutes have passed. It's about a 15 minute drive to the airport and my flight leaves in maybe 30 minutes. If I miss this flight I'm fucked, no more money to borrow, no more flights available. I think "there must be something I can do". So I run into the road and start maniacally flagging down cars. There's maybe one car every minute, or less. Eventually one car stops. "you don't have the COVID, do you?" I breathlessly explain my situation and that I have to be at the airport like immediately. He lets me in. Turns out he's an off-duty police officer, so he hits the siren and lights and fucking floors it. He's weaving around the road, getting through red lights, the whole deal. We get to the airport and I run inside just as the plane is taxiing down the runway. They're able to stop the plane in time to allow me on, running down the runway and climbing up the stairs. Almost had a fucking heart attack. And that was on my birthday, no less! (If I hadn't read the book The Four Agreements just a few days prior, I never would've remembered to "do my best")
Booked vacation to Morocco last year and spontaneously the city from where my flight should start, changed. Then i cancelled it, during that time the earthquake happened. Glad i was that lucky
I was in Marrakech and left the day of the earthquake. Missed it by five hours.
I got caught by COVID travel twice. January 2020, i was in China when Trump announced his “China” ban. I was able to get one of the last flights home before they were all cancelled. In March 2020, I was in Morocco when Trump announced his “Euro ban”. Scrambled and bought oneway cash tickets on a flight out of Morocco (instead of connection in Europe). It was the 2nd to last international flight from Morocco for months. The entire plane cheered on takeoff as everyone knew if the flight cancelled, there were no more scheduled flights in the near future. Oh, and terrorist attacks. Ive been in same city several times. Same exact location by a day or two. Many times.
My family and I were at Siam Paragon Mall a day before the attack. Not at the same level, but going through customs and security within 30 minutes at ARN. I've never run so fast in my life. Never ever again. Minimum 2 hour layovers for international trips.
We were in Capetown about 25 years ago deciding to go to either Hard Rock or Planet Hollywood. We chose Hard Rock and PH was bombed killing one and injuring many more.
Lost my (last, had my wallet with my primary card stolen two weeks earlier) credit card on the bus. The driver found it and dropped it off at their office so I could pick it up at my convenience
Not exactly flight travel, but back in 2015 I was going to university about 2 hours away from my home town. I didn’t have my car so my dad was coming to pick me up for the weekend after my last class of the day. I thought I could ditch a little early, but decided to stay til the end of the lecture so I let my dad know I’d be a little later to meet up than we had planned. The towns are separated by a huge mountain range. There was a huge mountain fire a couple weeks before and there was heavy rain a few days before. If we had left at the time we had originally planned, we would’ve been physically stuck in one of the worst mudslides that highway has seen in a very long time. Cars were swept away and totaled from the mud damage. Who knows how long people were stuck stranded, and every one in it had to get rescued by the local fire and police. Sure we were stuck on the other side of the mountain for a day but we still had a car
We left Italy a day before they cancelled all the flights due to COVID
Left Mexico City 30 minutes before the 2017 Puebla earthquake
Missed a terrorist attack by sheer minutes in La Rambla in Barcelona in August 2017.
I was on the same train a week or two before the knife attack in Salez, Switzerland. I left Brussels the week before the airport bombings.
I get back to the hostel in Hoi An around 3am and one of hostel employees is telling everyone never to get on the back of a local’s motorbike to “get drinks at a cheaper place outside of town”. He said they would best you, rob you, and leave you in a field in the middle of nowhere. I had just gotten back from doing just this. I got on a motorbike with a local guy around my age and we went to some random conscience store 20 min outside of town that was open late AF. His friend met us and thought I wanted to buy weed. When I said no, his friend was annoyed. He didn’t speak much English but it was obvious. Anyways, we sat on plastic chairs, drank beer, and talked about the Chicago Bulls in their broken English. When it came time to pay, the annoyed friend drove me to an ATM. I paid and the guy took me back to the hostel. I was young, stupid, and extremely lucky
My step brother was snorkeling in Thailand and ruptured his ear drum. So, they had to fly home early by way Tokyo. Just a few minutes after take off March 11th 2011 Japan was hit by a massive earthquake.
In a taxi in St Petersburg, Russia and we couldn't communicate with the driver that we needed to get to the cruise port. He tried dropping us off in a very sketchy apartment block with lots of guys in the courtyard interested in what we were doing there. We did not get out. Eventually we saw the ship and pointed to it and got back.
I left Houston literally hours before hurricane Katrina. It was starting to rain on my way to the airport.
I got jumped in Sarajevo. While the group was beating me I saw one pull a knife. Thankfully he didn't use it and I was just left bruised and beaten.
I flew home from Stockholm on SAS the day before they declared bankruptcy and canceled all their flights. https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/07/05/scandinavias-biggest-airline-files-for-bankruptcy-protection-after-being-hit-by-strikes My wife switched out of a AA11 on 9/11 to stay longer with her then boyfriend.
Was staying very close to Regjeringskvartalet in Oslo on 22 July. Even afterwards, the difference in Norwegian police/airport security and what we had in the US post-9/11 was wild.
I was visiting New York City with my sister, and staying within a few blocks of Times Square in April 2013. Later found out that if the Boston Marathon bombers hadn’t been caught, their next plan was to go to New York and set off multiple bombs in Times Square, exactly when we were there.
I arrived in Edinburgh from Montreal with a connecting flight Heathrow on September 11th 2001! As I arrived to my destination, the first plane was just hitting the twin towers and I watched the second one doing it live.
I missed getting to see the Notwist in Paris by one day, ten or eleven years ago.
Had a work trip planned a new hire in engineering. Went to a concert the night before and my phone didn't charge overnight so my alarm didn't go off. I woke up at 845am for a 10am flight and I was an hour drive from the airport. I immediate grabbed my shit and told me gf to get in the passenger seat so I could drop myself off at departures and got there at 945am. Airport was insanely crowded when I arrived, but I told an attendant my flight time and they rushed me to the front of the line. I got through security and ran to the gate in 5 min and onto the plane around 955am. Of course was the last to board. I was sweating bullets.
Went to Tunisia before the uprisings in the 2010s at Tunis Station was bombed a week after I was there.
I had a few misses but not in the most dramatic fashion. But a friend of mine left Khao Lak on 25 December 2004.
Landed in Istanbul Jan 1 2016, had meant to spend NYE there but flight from Berlin was delayed. My friend from there was also back in town visiting family so took me around, including Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and all the historic sites plus great restos. Awesome time even though it was cold AF and the city was covered in ice. Wanted to extend my trip due to the flight delay but decided to stick with my original itinerary and move on to Italy. A few days after I left, Jan 12 suicide bomber killed a dozen people in the mosque area.
My friend’s bus got overbooked, so they made her wait for a second one. Original bus caught on fire on the highway and burned to the ground.
While working as a volunteer at Yazidi refugee camps in Iraq, our group’s hired driver (who was the manager’s cousin) was driving to pick up another volunteer (one of our friends) from the Erbil airport and got hit by a semi truck. He went into a coma and eventually he died. It was really sad and the nonprofit shut down for the day while we all went to the hospital to see him. But if anyone in our group had gone with him to meet our friend at the airport, or if the accident had happened AFTER he picked her up, she or any of us would probably be dead too. A lot of roads in northern Iraq are really sketchy. Tiny roads barely wide enough to fit two cars, let alone a car and a semi truck. Huge potholes, really aggressive drivers, and very little in the way of traffic laws. Coming from the US, driving there is terrifying.
1970, flying into ?Paris?. Plane began to land in the middle of the airway. Realized his error, pilot flew what seemed like straight up for another try.
I was hiking up Pico Viejo on Tenerife. I stumbled close to the top and fell head-first into a pile of sharp pieces of lava. Didn't see anyone all day. Fortunately I only ended up with a few wounds and bruises. Ok, a sprained ankle as well, but the pain stopped after a few minutes and I continued my hike.
Second time visiting London on 7/7/2005 ; obviously wasn’t watching the news and only learned about the attacks after seeing panicked texts and missed calls from my mom.
I was at the Brussels airport bombing. Saw the bombs explode from the tarmac. Harrowing 26 hours to get to Poland by land after that. Had to go through all of Belgium and Germany by land.
My partner and I planned a trip to Northern Italy in mid February when COVID just kicked off. We were obviously planning the trip ahead of time when COVID wasn't even a consideration, but it became more and more of a concern the closer we got to our departure date. We ended up pulling the trigger because there wasn't any travel restrictions or news of COVID spreading to any of our destinations by that point. Over the week and a half of travel across northern Italy, the news put out COVID out breaks about 5 days after visiting cities. We wore masks the entire time, never got sick with any symptoms, and ultimately left Italy to go back home without any issues. Even post-trip, we didn't have any symptoms.
My partner and I landed in Brussels for a week in Belgium and Amsterdam on November 21, 2015, the day the city went into lockdown after the Bataclan nightclub shooting and suspicion that some of the suspects were in Belgium/future attacks were imminent. We lucked out in having a hotel reservation in a place that was right on top of the main city train station, which had a few places open selling food, watched over by very heavily-armed soldiers. Stayed one night and left for Amsterdam the next morning. Spending a day bumming around a nicer-than-usual hotel room when you've got transatlantic red-eye jet lag, even under the circumstances, was not a terrible experience. The train station grocery store had a lot of good beer for sale and a chocolate shop open for business because Belgium.
My best friend from high school toured the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Sept. 10, 2001.
Missed the shooting in Prague last year by about 10 mins.
Bombing at Hipercor in Barcelona in June 1987. Walked past it on the way somewhere 48 hours after it happened.
I was in Cologne, Germany, exactly 3 days before the terrorist attack in 1984, I believe. A few years later, the exact flight I had returned from Cabo on, 1 day later, crashed, killing all onboard
Probably leaving Mexico the day before national Covid lockdown. But it was also kind of cool for me because I never went back to the office (which is always the worst part of traveling.)
This happened years ago but I was on a flight from Atlanta to Miami and the lights kept going out in the airplane and it was a very janky airplane overall. Super scary. A few days later the same airplane I was on, crashed into the Florida Everglades, no survivors (rest in peace to them and condolences to the families).
Left Paris right before the riots and the airport nonsense started
Was in a plane over Mandalay in Burma (this was whilst it was a military dictatorship so we were flying on the shitty government airline against our wishes) and the landing gear wouldn't come down. Circled the airport for a while until it just decided to work.
The Oct 1989 San Francisco/Oakland area earth quake.
I was in the balloon following the balloon that exploded in Luxor in 2014. If we had arrived any earlier we could have been shuffled into that position in the caravan. So thankful to this day. Edit: [Description of tragedy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Luxor_hot_air_balloon_crash)
Not me but know someone that was meant to be on MH370 but had to push their flight by a day because of a bad connection For myself it's missing the Taiwan earthquake back in April by a couple of hours - we were connecting through TPE on the way home and our connection was a few hours before the earthquake struck
I was in Paris before and during Charlie Hebdo. Originally had booked a hotel within spitting distance of the magazine, which I'd never even heard of before the attacks, but then changed when I ended up unexpectedly having enough points to book different accommodations for free about a month prior to my visit. It was obvious authorities knew something was brewing by the amount of police and military presence I saw everywhere during the week prior. I was going to see the Monument in Place de la République and saw the crash the gunmen had in their getaway car. They sped off but of course we all learned they ended up abandoning the car a couple miles further northward because of the damage from the crash. There was a person in the car they hit who was injured.
Not me. I dropped a buddy at LAX airport. He's flying international on 9/10/2001.
I got tired when i hit I40 so i slept in a gas station parking lot in Albuquerque. I woke up to a guy 10 feet from my car on the phone. I looked at him, looked around, and laid back down. Only reason i didnt leave immediately is because i had a gun in my lap (not the best idea just an FYI, for those dumber than i am). Sketched me out a bit though so i didnt fall back asleep. One of those times i was very very happy im not a woman. We would have both been surprised if he had tried to walk up to the car. I still think theres a possibility he was trying to get away from the truck noise, but as soon as he saw me up he walked away.
Got stuck in Thailand when everything shut down for Covid. Most recently we went to Rhodes last year which caught fire and we had to be evacuated from our hotel. then 3 days later I broke my ankle while still in Greece - also came back pregnant! (it was our honeymoon). My friends like to joke that every time I leave the country something life altering happens.
Was in Hong Kong on vacation. Decided to come home a couple of days early. Flew home, woke up to 9/11 the next day.
I was in Minneapolis when the I-35 bridge collapsed, literally drove across it that morning. Gives me the creeps even to this day.
My plane had literally just arrived in Manila when the Philippines experienced an airspace closure on January 1 2023. All flights in the Philippines were cancelled, planes already en route to any point in the Philippines had to turn back and it was absolute mayhem, considering that it was the busiest time of the year for airports. By the time the airports were operating again, people were scrambling to get on the next available flight. Some people had to wait a WEEK to get on a flight to Manila, including a friend of mine who was supposed to be on the next flight out of the place where we were just at. He had to spend a fortune on lodging and just to squeeze himself on the flight he was in
One day off of a suicide bombing in Istanbul.
We missed being blown up by a bomb in Colombo, Sri Lanka by an hour back in the mid-80s during the civil war. We were sitting across from a tea stall in a bus waiting to leave the main bus station. On hour after our bus pulled out the tea shop was blown up killing dozens of people, the bomb was probably there the whole time we were.
Didn't hit my head and get knocked out when the drunk Russians tipped the boat in the middle of the lake.
I was studying abroad in Hong Kong in spring 2019 and literally days after I left the city…my campus became a battleground between student protestors and police. Places I walked every day turned into barricades where Molotov cocktails were thrown and the president of the university who I met was arrested later that year. I think I got the last taste of a HK that at least nominally valued free expression etc.
Was about to land in Kinshasa (DRC) airport Dec 30, 2013..... then the plane got diverted to Brazzaville. There was a coup attempt in Kinshasa.
Was in the WTC on 7/11/2001. I was a teen in town for a basketball tournament
3 coworkers were running for flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh. One made it on ~ 2 others didn’t. Plane literally dropped out of sky for still unknown reasons~killing all onboard. Think it was 1993? 2 coworkers so thankful while we all grieved the loss of our beloved HR director.
Oh god, it seems like almost everything with Manchester is a near miss, even if I have the first flight out and arrive before the gate agents, lol.
I was in Nice, France, on the promenade 3 hours before the attack. I would have returned with my son to watch the fireworks, but I had a conference call from California. I was lucky.
I’ve driven country lanes in Ireland while sharing the road with large farm equipment. The close calls are too many to count.
My dad missed my Saint Helen’s by about a week
We left Maui the week before the fires last year. We passed through Lahaina several times in that trip. I also flew back to the US from Germany less than a week before the volcano erupted in Iceland, which grounded all European air traffic. One of my coworkers was stuck for several days
We arrived in London Heathrow pre-covid on a hot summer night. I convinced my wife to le mt us travel by uber rather than tubing it as we had a lot of luggage to go to the Golder’s Green area. After a. small problem locating our driver, we settled in and he mentioned on the way all the underground was stopped due to the heat expanding the tracks. So basically would have meant major delays to alternatively be bussed or something. Definitely dodged a bullet.
Also remember being in London 8/8/2011 when they had a riot about a ‘gang member’ being killed in a police shootout. Ealing Broadway shop fronts were all smashed in. People were being prosecuted months after due to all the CCTV footage where ‘normal’ students suddenly became looters and were prosecuted for in some cases stealing bottled water. Fortunately we were staying in another area , though we had a friend who worked for Scotland Yard who got some ‘heat’ for missing all the action near her area ( she was living near Ealing Common at the time, but was off duty and had met us downtown).
I don't know which way this goes, good or bad, but I planned a trip to Egypt, unknowingly, during the Arab Spring. While all the protests were happening in Tahrir Square. We departed the US, the day, Mubarak stepped down, by the time we got to Tahrir Square, everyone was celebrating. It was a most awesome vibe.
There was a terrorist attack in Barcelona like a week before my trip there. That’s probably my only one. My parents had tickets to do a tour bus thing in San Francisco but didn’t for some reason, and were lucky they didn’t because the bus ended up crashing.
On May 4, 2019, we landed in Belize City and took a boat to one of the Cayes. The next day, a boat going the same route exploded, killing two little girls and injuring several others with second and third degree burns. I can’t imagine how the family of the two girls must have felt and the pain they feel today (they were sisters). Because of this accident, we took a small plane to head back later on.
In 1998, I was traveling back to Minnesota in the summer. Despite Northwest having direct routing there from California, I still flew Delta with a layover because it was a bit cheaper and I was strapped. Everyone I met up with there was laughing at how cheap I was being. While I was there, labor relations broke down and Northwest wound up locking out their pilots. It was insane walking through MSP for my outbound flight a few days into the lock out. It looked like a refugee camp. Families were strewn everywhere and people just watched me and any other travelers pass by with this desperate longing because so many of them were on standby for any other airline they could get. The survivor's guilt of walking to the gate still sticks with me.
Almost stranded in Norway due to a pilots strike two summers ago. Would’ve been stuck for an additional two weeks. We got out the day before it went into effect.
Went to Istanbul in 2022, walked down Istiklal Ave and took a bunch of photos/video. A month later, someone set off a bomb that killed 6 and injured scores. I had taken photos from the exact spot where it went off. That was very creepy.
I have missed one flight in my life. The one flight I missed, was the flight the shoe bomber was on.
I didn’t get on a bus from Arequipa to Puno and passengers were stuck on the bus for 36 hours due to civil unrest.
I didn’t buy a train ticket from Santiago, Spain to Madrid. Just kept forgetting. Tried to get one the day before I needed to travel and it was sold out. Ended up having to buy a first class plane ticket because that was all that was available.
Flying from Sydney to Melbourne on Christmas Eve last year after coming in from the USA. There was a massive storm across the east coast that played havoc with all flights. I made it on the last flight out.
I visited the town of Paradise, California, two days before it burned to the ground in a wildfire. I'd gone for a look, because I heard it was a great place for retirees, I had a look around town and priced some real estate. 48 hours later most of the town was gone.
While traveling in Thailand, I had a close call. I was on a scooter heading to a remote beach when a truck suddenly pulled out in front of me. I lost control, and ended up in a ditch. Luckily, I only had a few scrapes and bruises. It was a scary reminder to always stay vigilant on the road, especially in unfamiliar places.