We all got a letter from her after our return. In one of the other bizarre incidents on the trip, M. had put the deposit for a hotel on her credit card, then decided that we were not going to stay there because she saw a woman in the lobby she was SURE was a prostitute, therefore the hotel was actually a brothel and…

Your grandmother is the shittiest anthropologist.

Last year I went to Iceland with three friends. One of us flew from a different state, and the rest of us flew from Minneapolis. The flights were supposed to arrive there just a few minutes apart. Well, something went wrong with our plane and it got delayed.

Apologies in advance for the length, but I went on a month-long trip with the Worst Woman In The World, and it takes some time to relate. The trip in question an around-the-world backpacking extravaganza with some grad school friends to celebrate our graduation before settling down to real life. Three of the women…

This isn't insane, but still one of my fondest travel memories.

INSANE BAD: I went to college far from home, so it required quite a bit of air travel. Once while trying to get back to college from winter break, my flight was cancelled at one of my layover stops. Shit happens, whatever. But it was in the mid-morning, so not the worst. I hunkered down at my new gate, which was in…

I was visiting Rome and taking a bus with some friends when we started talking to a nun who couldn't have been older than 25. She was from Seattle, and had just gotten to Rome a few months before, so she was still acclimating, but knew her shit. We get to a stop, and a man snatches her backpack and tries to run off of…

This is the spooky story of when my friend and I got stranded on a road trip in a snow storm. We had been in traveling for spring break, and we were trying to make it back to our home city in time for classes to start in two days. The forecast showed snow, but we decided to strike out anyway because we're both from…

Oooh, once I was kayaking in the Puget Sound and a whole pod of orcas cruised right up to us. The size of those sea critters can be super impressive.

By the time I was 6, I had two little sisters. We went on our first family vacation that year, and (now that I know what kind of hell it is to share a hotel room with children) my parents weren't exactly relaxing. By the end of the trip, their plan was to load up the car while we were all still asleep (when you're…

Oh let's DO this! I'll try and narrow it down to one good one, but I have too many to count. This one is long, but worth it.

A few years back I had to fly on a tiny CRJ-200 regional jet from Charlotte NC back to school in Alabama. 50 seats in a two-by-two config...everyone is crammed in there. There were 48 people on my flight and I was one of the lucky two to have nobody sitting in the aisle next to me. At the last second they brought a…

I was traveling through Ireland with a high school group over Spring Break and one evening we all split up in order to do a home stay with some Irish students our age. I'm at the dinner table with the young man's family, who had kindly welcomed me into their home, and the father asked me if I was excited for Easter.…

Yeah...I've been in near accidents before and I don't think I've ever threatened to get a gun and kill someone's family due to their perceived ethnicity and/or racial heritage.

Men have no idea what tampons and pads cost and how deeply essential they are. There's a huge stigma about menstruation that makes a dude buying tampons for his usually overly emotional girlfriend into a tired TV comedy show trope. Women in poor countries either have nothing to bleed into it (and lose jobs and school…

Several years back I was homeless in San Francisco. I could often find friends to stay with, but not every night. The night of this tale I was trying to sleep in the park, and to help me sleep and forget about my shitty predicament I had bought a big jug of Carlo Rossi. Around midnight I'm good and sloshed, but still…

This story is only 'insane' because it features so many random freeway drivers who actually gave a crap about saving a dog. I was on highway 80 south in Oakland and suddenly in front of me, the cars had slowed way down and the highway ahead was practically empty. A few cars were slowly passing by on the right most…

A friend of mine got told on the Fourth of July that her husband wanted a divorce. He blamed her for everything - she was too in to her career, she wasn't getting pregnant fast enough, and a bunch of other douche canoe things in a list that smelled, shall we say, fishy, from the beginning.

Took the kids on vacation with my mom, because ex-husband was sooo adamant about not missing work/not kenneling the dogs. Fine, whatever, couldn't change his mind. Came home a day early because we were exhausted, walked into the house with my 6 month old and 2 year old to see him screwing our barely legal…

Let me regale you with the tale of an ex of mine who I will heretofore refer to as Shitbag.

Shitbag and I dated for about 6 months, fairly casually. His work shuttled him back and forth between Ottawa and Montreal, so he was only in town about half the time, which kept us from getting too serious. Plus, not long after…