Once again, I am seeking inspiration from past posts, and this one goes back to an entry from 2017. In fact, it relates to a post I made not only here at Meerkat Musings, but on another site, The Nudge Wink Report.

The original post recounts a terrifying tale of a train journey one October evening. I was coming home from work, and I was tired. The last thing I needed was to hear the prelude to puking. There was a kid further down the carriage who was moaning and groaning with sickly despair, and the train’s repeated jolts and bumps set him off, shortly before my stop. Thankfully, I was able to escape down the carriage, and did not catch a whiff of the unpleasantries, otherwise I might have joined in.

I’ve had the deep misfortune to experience such travel woes on more than one occasion. A guy randomly and explosively coughed up his stomach contents on another train ride. My daughter was sick on a plane flight to Scotland, and on a prior occasion, she was sick on a long, hot coach ride in Ibiza, which triggered another kid into being sick as well. I consider myself quite thankful that travelling doesn’t generally set me off (well, unless it’s a boat, then all bets are off), though I’ve had my moments on a plane, involving flying through a storm as we returned home from Portugal. The plane seemed to bounce through the air, and my tummy didn’t like that.

Of course, not all travel nightmares involve bodily functions. Sometimes they involve general disaster. Once, the trip between Stevenage and Basildon (which would normally take no more than a hour and a half) took three hours, thanks to various engineering works affecting pretty much every leg of my journey. A friend and I spent an hour and a half on a train in King’s Cross station, waiting for it to take us home. Home was the train’s first stop, about half an hour away. Not this time! A lunatic once skipped across the tracks to get to the other platform and onto my train, this led to the driver refusing to depart until the idiot got off. The delay from all this meant I got caught in a signal failure, and thus faced a longer delay. Oh joy.

All of that, and no discussion of traffic jams. That’s another story!