Outtakes; or mistakes I’ve made when travelling

Posted on by Julie

A mainstay of Christmas TV is the Christmas Special, which is often part clipshow and part hilarious outtakes. So today’s post is my own outtakes, the mistakes I’ve made when travelling.

There are two very obvious ones that come to mind: the Great Train Adventure (Romania edition) and the Great Train Adventure (Helsinki edition). I’ve told both many times.

A train with blue and red carriages, stopped outside the station. There is nothing else visible but blue sky and grass. In hindsight, it's very obvious this was not the Transylvanian capital city.
In hindsight, I should have realised before now that this wasn’t a city.

In Romania, I got confused and leapt off a train twenty miles early, finding myself in a picturesque village called Predeal in the rolling Transylvania countryside instead of in Brașov, the capital city of the region.

A hasty and blurry selfie inside the Helsinki rail depot. There's a train behind me painted in green with trees on it. I'm wearing my red and black striped hat and a purple padded jacket.
Inside the rail depot

In Helsinki I – along with half a dozen locals – got on our train to Rovaniemi, nine hours north, only to find an out-of-service train was sitting at our platform and got taken to the depot, via the train wash.

Bergen seafront: tall, pointed Hanseatic warehouses, medieval buildings and all set on the seafront with a tree-covered mountain behind them.
Some idiot got off the bus in the wrong place in Bergen once.

Smaller ones: well, I can never find my hotel. I get the right bus into town but get off at the wrong place, or I get off in the right place and then walk the wrong way. Norway is especially bad for the latter. I did get the wrong bus in Helsinki in 2014 (18 or so hours before the Great Train Adventure, actually) and Vilnius in 2012. I’ve failed to realise having a bus ticket isn’t enough; I need to validate it when I board.

My room in Paris: a narrow room of reasonable length. A tall glass door at the end looks out over the street but the only light come from a lamp on a table and a light over the sink. It's a lot less salubrious than it looks in this picture.
This picture really does make it look a lot better than it was.

I’ve picked the wrong accommodation a few times: see the tumbledown hotel with the midnight scream in Bucharest and the hovel in Paris. My standards are not as… uniform, let’s say, as my parents’ (“Isn’t there an Ibis?”) but those are the two that immediately spring to mind as ones I actively wished I hadn’t booked.

The view from the airport hotel, overlooking a car park. An almost pyramidal building opposite is the airport. It's pouring with rain and rain on the window is obscuring the view somewhat.
The view from the most expensive hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.

I also regret the airport hotel in Iceland this summer. It’s a great hotel and very convenient but the price! Oh god, the price! I booked a late-night flight because it was cheap and then discovered it was probably going to be too late to pick up my car that night, that there are no 1am buses to the town two kilometres away and a taxi to a guesthouse would be at least €50 each way. No other choice but the agonisingly expensive hotel opposite Departures. Idiot.

My room in Malta. The walls are bare and white and look like they're painted over bare rock. There's a wardrobe and you can see the corner of the bed. Bright curtains cover a window which makes the room quite light in daytime but the light visible above the wardrobe is pretty inadequate in the evening.
Funnily enough, I didn’t take a photo of the sockets.

Tiny mistakes: I took my European plugs to Malta and had to buy an adaptor to turn them back to my native three-pin. Discovered that flicking through my guidebook at the gate as boarding commenced. The room wasn’t ideal either but the price – I did that entire trip, flights, accommodation, food, souvenirs, excursions and that adaptor for under £200 so I’m not really complaining.

Thousands of people crammed into a square between the shops and the dish of the Trevi Fountain.
No ATMs in Rome

Didn’t take any cash to Rome in 2019. Assumed Italy was as cashless as the UK and spent the first 24 hours hunting for an elusive ATM.

Selfie on a bright-painted fake pirate ship in north Poland in November, wearing a furry hat, a hoodie with the hood up and a slightly thicker button-up fleece shacket/hoodie. I'm as cold as I look.
This. Was. Freezing.

Ah, another biggish one: I didn’t take a proper coat to Gdańsk. It’s on the shore of a sea that’s become synonymous with “really cold”. I was there in November! Why did I think a fleece-lined shacket was going to be warm enough?

My sister and I pretending to fall off a beam at ADAM Lookout. My hair is confined in plaits, as usual. Hers, which is fairly long and fairly thick, quite a lot darker than mine and a touch more reddish-purple, is loose. It's far too much hair to not brush for six days.
This is enough hair that you need to brush it while you’re away, yes?

My sister would add the time that I carefully planned the route from the station to our Amsterdam hotel only to get there and discover we were at a different branch of the XO Hotels group. It’s an easy mistake to make: XO Blue Square vs XO Blue Tower. I’d then add that, well, she didn’t pack a hairbrush and her hair is longer and thicker than mine and she tends to leave it down rather than confining it in plaits.

Dua Lipa on stage in Liverpool. I'm actually at the far end of the arena but this is a good close-up photo with a good zoom. Dua is wearing a neon pink catsuit with matching opera-length gloves. Even at this distance, you can see how the suit is actually lacy.
The things you can achieve with a good zoom.

I’ve not yet missed a plane. I did leave my pouch of important documents – passport, boarding pass etc – at check-in earlier this year, though. It was a flight from Southampton to Manchester so I didn’t discover this at security because I didn’t need any documents. No, I was happily sitting at the gate before the announcement to come to gate 5 was made and I was presented with my invaluables that I hadn’t even noticed were missing.

A small pile of bags next to a smaller patch of grass. Half an hour ago, my tent was pitched here. In ten minutes, it will be again.
It’s a small tent.

In Iceland in 2013 I packed up my tent to get on a bus that actually only crosses the Highlands three times a week, not daily. Took the tent down. Consulted a timetable. Made a phone call. Put the tent back up in exactly the same place twenty minutes later. Hoped no one had noticed.

The back of my apartment building in Murmansk, a yellow building which is dark grey on the ground floor. Behind the building is a narrow road for accessing the apartments behind and behind the road is a patch of trees with a children's playground.
I sat here for so long…

In a way, failing to get into my Murmansk apartment was one, but that was more on my landlady than me. I should have realised I would need some mobile data and enough Russian to tell her I was there, but she should also have realised her tenant-to-be was English and therefore recognise me when we met outside. She gibbered Russian at me and I responded «Я англичанка» – I am English. I meant “-and therefore I don’t understand you” but come on, you’re looking for a foreigner in a town where foreigners apparently don’t venture and you’re talking to one!

A white metro train with mint-green accents arriving at Trocadero station under Paris. It's all very well-lit and very clean-looking.
The Paris metro looks much cleaner than the Tube, doesn’t it?

What other mistakes have I made? What other stupid things have I done? Responding to the people in Rome who tried to get me to buy bracelets was stupid anyway but doubly so when I literally had no money. Did I get on the Paris metro in the wrong direction once? I do it now and then in London, usually on the District Line. That’s no big deal. That doesn’t even count as a mistake.

A glass ball a couple of inches in diameter held up to the camera. Inside it, you can see the tall Gothic-shaped red and blue stained glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle's upper chapel.
One of the most expensive photos I’ve ever taken.

Oh, I did drop my brand new camera in Sainte-Chapelle, breaking the insides so it’s never worked since. Entirely my fault: I had a Lensball and I was more concerned with that than with making sure my camera was actually in my pocket before I let go of it.

No, through luck and judgement – mostly the former, let’s be honest – I think these are the worst mistakes I’ve ever made while travelling, so it’s all gone pretty well for me.