That was an experience!

It was quite an experience for you having to sleep on a bus overnight because it didn't get to the destination before night fall. It was cold and all you had over you was a cotton sheet. The next morning it was strange for it to be snowy. When I was 14 years old at Athens Airport all flights were delayed and people laid of the floor. There weren't any seats left to it on. Our flight home didn't happen until dawn the next day. Then another funny experience was when I was 21 years old. I had enjoyed Singapore and wanted to go to Sumatra in Indonesia. I caught a ferry over there and got about a crowd of 50 people looking at me in that port. Then I saw a Danish couple and we all got another ferry. We saw the overnight ferry and said no way. We stayed in that village and it was a very poor place. Then next day we took a ferry and then a bus. There wasn't much leg room on the bus. Arriving in Sumatra I booked into a hotel and on the wall in my room it said "Do not sleep here these beds have bed bugs and flees. So check out now". It was late in the evening so I swapped to another room. That had mice or rats running across the floor at night. I asked other travelers to recommend a better place to stay. So I moved my backpack to a guest house.

I haven't had travel experiences that could have had such a drastic ending... but... I have been, alone, on a bus with a strange man as the FBI (dressed in "street" clothes I might add) were raiding the bus that I was on, but apparently were without a warrant because they were only searching what was in the immediate open but did not dig through anyone's bags or belongings. The strange man, who had been seated in the seat directly across the aisle from me, wore sunglasses the entire length of his trip, he even slept at them. At the next stop, he promptly exited the bus and bought a ticket to another destination, back in the direction that we had just came from. I've always wondered... I also had a very recent and horrible experience with Amtrak, the American national rail system. I was ID'd once by a police officer before boarding the train and once again after getting onto the train. The lack of concern and assistance from their employees almost put me into the hospital. I'm very lucky to have had a travel companion. To make a long story short, they did not provide assistance with any of my baggage and because of their poor customer service, even though the elderly and handicapped were allowed to board first, I couldn't even make it to the line for priority seating. Instead, I had to run a quarter of a mile through the train station behind my travel companions with almost 100 lbs of stuff on my back, and also trying to lead a small child, who was carrying alot of the luggage. Amtrak offered luggage assistance, but was only interested in helping one family that was boarding the train. When I reached the area that the information desk told me I had to be at, I was, less than 60 seconds later, directed back to the exact area that we had just came from. Once there, we had a matter of minutes to run about another quarter of a mile down the track to the train. I walk with a cane due to problems with my knee and passed many station employees on the way. Due to all the walking, I was also experiencing a severe asthma attack. Not a single employee assisted me along the way! I was utterly appalled! And when I finally reached the train? The attendant helped neither me nor my child board the train. Despite the fact that I fell going up the stairs due to the weight I was carrying and walking with the cane, the attendant was only worried about me touching the right side of the door (assumably, it would cause the door to close?). I was lucky to have actually had both my inhaler and nebulizer treatment device with me, or I would have been going to the hospital instead of boarding that train. I was hyperventilating, gagging for air and ended up throwing up within seconds of making it up the stairs. It took double the breathing treatments before I was able to return to a semi-normal rate of breathing and it took days before I recovered entirely. I emailed Amtrak's customer service, whose automated service tells me that they are backed up, and it could be four to six weeks before I receive a reply from an actual human being. Imagine.