The Worst Journey in the WorldAspley Cherry Garrard was the youngest member of the Scott Polar Expedition when he and two others lost their tent to the winds of a night-time snowstorm. They spent hours in temperatures below -70°F stumbling about the ice floes hoping they'd bump into it as it was their only hope of survival.
OK, so that was bad, but we reckon you've had worse. We know how hard you lot are.
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chthonic, Thu 7 Sep 2006, 12:40)
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Six Hours of Eternal HellBy far, my worst journey was a Greyhound bus ride from Michigan to Chicago during the autumn of my freshman year of college. It was the first time in my life I'd been apart from my parents for more than a week, and I was terribly homesick, so I decided to hop on a Greyhound bus for home one cold, dark, rainy afternoon in October. I sat by a window planning to be antisocial. At the next stop, an enormously obese woman with her 4-year old daughter sat down in the single seat next to mine, crushing me up against the side of the bus. I couldn't move and could barely breathe. The woman immediately proceeded to tell me her entire life story in minute detail, and her child cried and kicked and writhed throughout the trip. I thought the 5.5 hours to Chicago could get no worse.
But then a group of extremely drunk passengers, both men and women, boarded the bus, sat in the back, and proceeded to get even more drunk, as if that were possible, and very rowdy. An ever increasing number of empty liquor bottles rolled around on the floor as the bus sped up and slowed down. The drunks began to get surly and combative, and roamed up and down the aisle threatening people, including the bus driver, even going so far as to tell the mother of a crying baby that, if she didn't make it shut up, they'd throw it out the window. They appeared to be quite serious about this. I decided I was very glad, indeed, the obese woman and her child were sitting between me and the aisle because they made it virtually impossible for any of the drunks to get near me. These 5.5 hours were absolutely hellish.
To top it all off, while waiting for me at the Chicago bus station, my mom's billfold was stolen from her purse, leaving us with no money to pay the parking garage fee. My dad had to take a cab from work to get us out.
Since then I've traveled a lot and have never had such an awful experience. Even when heavy smoke started seeping from under a trap door in front of me on a flight to California couldn't compare.
(, Fri 8 Sep 2006, 20:13, Reply)
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