My Worst Travel Moments of 2025

You need to take the bad with the good! Every year, I share my worst travel moments of the year because I think it’s important to be realistic when you travel the world for a living.

Things can and do go wrong on every trip. And that’s not a sign of failure on your part as a traveler! That’s just how it goes. And the bad moments really help you appreciate the good ones.

It’s also worth noting that not every destination is going to be a home run for you. Sometimes destinations look great on paper, but you can’t know how it will be until you get there. Unfortunately Austin and Dominica fell into this category for me this year.

As always, keep in mind that these negative experiences are not that bad in the grand scheme of things. My actual worst experiences of the year were much more serious. Deaths. Serious injuries. Friends struggling in various ways.

And those tough times don’t belong on this lighthearted list, so just keep that in mind.

(And don’t forget to check out my best travel moments of 2025 and my favorite new travel destinations of 2025! These two are must-reads!)

Here are my worst travel moments of 2025!

Table of Contents

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• Unrest, Tear Gas, and Delays in Madagascar
• Frankfurt’s Train Station at Night
• Drunk Australians in Kraków
• The Tragedy that is Texas
• The Electric Vehicle Follies
• Cat Health Problems While Traveling
• Dinner at Pujol in Mexico City
• A Hip Injury that Dominated My Year
• Nosebleed on the Streets of Austin
• Dominica Roads and Drama

Unrest, Tear Gas, and Delays in Madagascar

I knew Madagascar would be a destination of extremes, but I had no idea that we would end up in the middle of protests leading to a military coup!

I’ve traveled to areas during protests before — Thailand in 2013, Greece in 2015, France in 2023. Each time, the protests were easily avoidable, and I stayed away from them.

But in Antananarivo, our hotel happened to be in the heart of the protest area. As we arrived, people were swarming the streets and the hotel staff grabbed us and escorted us in quickly, just as a group was pushing a dumpster down the street in our direction.

We took videos of people running down the street from the windows upstairs, and changed our dinner plans to eat in the hotel restaurant that night.

And then came the tear gas. The police were blanketing the neighborhood with tear gas, and as we were in the courtyard, it wafted over the walls and hurt our eyes and throat. The hotel staff passed out masks and urged us to head inside.

We were supposed to leave for Nosy Be the next morning, but domestic flights in Madagascar were cancelled. We moved to a family-run guesthouse close to the airport where they treated us with such kindness, and since the city was under curfew and stores were closed, we made clandestine getaways to tiny little bars and convenience stores that let us in the back entrance.

The president of Madagascar fled the country in secret, flights were canceled another day, and sadly, three of our travel companions decided to head home, rather than just go to Nosy Be for two nights and come back, or risk getting stuck again.

Another worry in the back of my mind was the US government shutdown. If the protests became severely violent or got to a point where we needed to be extracted, there would only be a skeleton crew working in the US Embassy.

Finally, thanks to our leader Helen’s tireless work at the airport, she got us prioritized on the flight list and we made it to Nosy Be! What a relief it was to be out of Antananarivo and on a beautiful island.

But that wasn’t all! I booked a flight back to Réunion after two days in Nosy Be, but that flight was cancelled as well, and I was given a new flight two days later. Let’s just say I wanted to kiss the ground when I landed back on EU soil in Réunion.

Overall, I’m grateful that this wasn’t worse. The worst part was the uncertainty as things were up in the air, worrying and worrying and having no idea how long we’d be stuck.

But these protests, and the coup, were for good reasons. They began with Gen Z members protesting the power cuts and lack of water access — very basic freedoms that we all take for granted. These are what the Malagasy people deserve. And my Malagasy friends are very happy that the president is gone.

Frankfurt’s Train Station at Night

After many years of traveling solo and living in big cities, I’m pretty comfortable when it comes to visiting new places for the first time. Especially in Europe. How bad could a place be?

Then I discovered the area around Frankfurt’s train station. I’ve traveled more extensively in Europe than almost anyone I know, and this is hands down the worst neighborhood I’ve ever encountered on the continent.

I was only in Frankfurt for 24 hours and would be going through the train station four times, so I thought it would be best to stay at a hotel close by. WELL. I am absolutely appalled by what I saw.

A long line of men smoking crack across the street from my hotel. (Interesting smell, that crack.) People on all kinds of drugs sitting on the streets, syringes out.

Coming back from the concert at night, four different men kept following me, coming up to me, and trying to intimidate me. It really freaked me out, but I found a mom with adult kids and pretended I was part of their group.

I want to emphasize that this is one specific neighborhood, and not all of Frankfurt is like this. I explored more of the city on my short visit, including the New Old Town, and enjoyed it. But I am not staying near the train station EVER again.

Drunk Australians in Kraków

I did not sleep one wink my first night in Kraków. It was a bad combination of an adrenaline-infused late arrival at midnight, followed by anxiety because I had a 6:00 AM wakeup for our Auschwitz tour. Either of those on their own can keep me up for hours; both of them at once was a disaster.

But the worst part was what happened at 3:00 AM. All of a sudden I heard yelling outside our room.

Four extremely drunk Australians in their sixties were climbing up the stairs, laughing and shouting and just being incredibly inconsiderate. I heard them get to the top of the stairs, then they just stayed there, still talking at the top of their lungs.

I burst out of my door, in my pajamas, eye mask on my head, probably looking like a crazy person. “You need to shut the fuck up,” I hissed.

Welp. Turns out that was the wrong thing to say.

“DON’T SWEAR AT ME!” one of the women shrieked. “SHE SWORE AT ME! DON’T YOU SWEAR AT ME!”

“It is 3:00 AM and you are waking everyone up,” I snapped. “You need to get yourselves to bed.”

And slowly, SO SLOWLY, they got themselves into their rooms, still chatting at the top of their lungs.

I went downstairs to talk to the receptionist about their behavior and talked to the manager the next day. Two days later, I ran into the two men of the group, and they actually apologized to me.

The Tragedy that is Texas

I have wanted to visit Austin for years and years, and it finally happened this year. Charlie and I attended the SXSW conference and spent more than a week in Austin.

But if you’ve read my list of favorite new destinations for 2025, you’ve probably noticed something: Austin didn’t make the cut.

It’s not that I hated Austin. I just found it tremendously disappointing. It felt like I arrived a decade too late — like the city’s famous weirdness now only flickers occasionally between shiny new chain restaurants and condo buildings. You can feel the weight of Big Tech’s expansion everywhere you look.

I spent time with four friends in Austin, two of whom are longtime Austinites who were so involved in the city’s alternative scene. Listening to them talk about their Austin of yore, I could not believe they were taking about the same place it is today.

Rainey Street broke my heart. This street is home to historic little bungalow bars, but they’re being bulldozed, one by one, and replaced with high-rise condos. How can that happen? Well, they don’t have historic protection. And we all know Texas hates government overreach. So there you go. They can’t compete with wealthy property developers.

And something else we noticed was how much waste there was. At the bars, both SXSW-oriented and otherwise, there was SO much plastic and no recycling. Everyone was chucking thick plastic cups that could be reused into the trash.

It made me realize that the states I’ve lived in — Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut — are on a completely different wavelength when it comes to waste and recycling. Who knew reusable glasses were radical?

And what else didn’t I like? The fact that you need to drive everywhere. The fact that buses barely run. The fact that the first five floors of buildings are parking garages. The fact that the botanical gardens were literally next to the highway, and full of highway noise and smells? I found it depressing.

Again, I had fun at the conference, loved spending time with my friends, and ate a lot of good food — but I really wish I could have experienced Austin in its weird heyday.

The Electric Vehicle Follies

For our long weekend trip to Piemonte this fall, Charlie and I decided to rent an electric vehicle. We had rented one once before — for a brief trip to the UK that didn’t involve a ton of driving and required no charging — and thought we’d have a similar experience.

Oh HO HO HO.

This was a disaster in so many ways.

Our first issue was when we drove from Milan Malpensa to Alessandria — about a 75-minute drive — and the battery was nearly drained upon arrival. HOW?!

We were able to charge briefly there, but then charging in other places turned out to be much harder than we anticipated. It’s not easy to find chargers on Google Maps — when they appear on the map, they’re often restricted or hidden — and you can’t just show up and charge, you need to sign up with an account for the particular app.

And once we signed up for Plenitude, the main charging app in Italy, we found out that they were having a glitch and couldn’t create an account for anyone who didn’t have an Italian phone number. CLASSIC ITALIAN DYSFUNCTION!

We also learned that lots of rental companies will give you the worst electric vehicle they have. I mentioned this to my readers and lots said they had been baited and switched — a few times even given an EV when they ordered a gas vehicle.

Our vehicle was not able to charge at any fast-charging stations — only the slowest. And there was no way we could know about that ahead of time. Additionally, our car, like many EVs, was the kind that drains very quickly with highway driving and is better suited for back roads.

Overall, I am a firm believer in electric vehicles and look forward to the EV infrastructure being improved around the world in the next decade. But at this point, not every region is well-outfitted for exploring by EV. Rural Piemonte is not.

In fact, I doubt I’ll go electric anywhere in Italy anytime soon — unless I’m staying at accommodation with a dedicated charging station.

Adventurous Kateمصدر