I once had a 60 hour plus trip home from Kenya that involved no overnight stays, just an eight hour bus ride then three multi hour layovers.
We had one wonderful night spent in a community center with a hundred or so fellow travelers in Santa Rosa NM when black ice derailed our drive two hours from home and no hotel rooms were available. I would estimate that 99.9 % of the men and a few of the women snored. We slept on wrestling mats - thank goodness for the quilt my grandmother had given us on our trip. I fell on the ice getting out of the car and had a bruise the size of a dinner plate on my hip a couple of days later.
In Kenya, on a different trip, our first night was a farm stay to recover from jet lag before our safaris started. Although it was a lovely house and property, The toilet started mildly overflowing and the owners wouldn’t answer the phone. My husband said not to worry, it’d be OK. We were sleeping in separate rooms with me in the leaking toilet room with the kids. It was not OK and I had to get up later to try to stop the flow of water into our room. I resorted to using the bedding to try to soak up the water that was then becoming a flood. I think jet lag had affected my cognitive abilities as I chose not to wake up my husband for some reason. Finally he heard me and came in and saw for himself that it wasn’t going to be OK. He got on the phone and kept calling the owners who finally answered and came to help and fixed the toilet. The next two days at the farm stay were actually very nice and they refunded us for the first night.
I was in China with my 4 and 6 year old daughters in a hotel and they saw a gecko on the wall of our room (on about the 10th floor). They started screaming bloody murder, so I called the front desk and tried to explain with my 50 word Chinese vocabulary what the problem was. No one came, so I finally trapped the guy in a paper bag. Finally, quite a while later, a busboy came to the door, and I still couldn’t explain what the problem was, but handed him the bag and indicated that he shouldn’t open it. He smiled and nodded and I’m pretty sure he understood at that point. Then, about two hours later, two very nicely dressed manager type employees came to the door inquiring what the problem was. Still couldn’t communicate the concern, if I’d known beforehand, I would have drawn them a picture, but they left knowing that all was OK.
Finally, I was on my way back from China on a later trip and had made it to CA on Christmas Eve. However, weather was very iffy on the final leg and the airlines was asking people after we boarded to wait for a flight first thing the next day as we needed extra fuel in case we got diverted. Of course, no one volunteered as it was Christmas Eve. They started identifying stand by passengers to deplane as they were lowest on the totem pole, then the final stand by passenger threw a hissy fit and refused to get off the plane because she wasn’t not going to be home for Christmas! The crew tried to convince her to leave which went on for 10 minutes or so, and I was getting more anxious by the minute bc of the bad weather, the atmosphere on the plane, jet lag, etc. so I stood up and practically yelled, “I’ll go!”. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and a few people thanked me and I was on the verge of tears walking off the plane from the stress. Of course, I wasn’t able to be on a plane first thing the next morning, and didn’t get home until late afternoon on Christmas Day and was greeted enthusiastically by my young daughters and my husband who bragged about getting a $2 Christmas tree the day earlier bc he was waiting for me to come home to get one ??? I was like yay, thrifty man, but didn’t you think I might be too tired to want to decorate a tree? (Same guy who said the leaky toilet would be OK🤔).
