Our first international trip together was during spring break in 2019. It was a memorable experience, mostly due to Murphy’s Law. For those of you who do not know, Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. That being said, let’s get started.
Travel Fun # 1
The trip started with us being misled by the GPS, which instead of taking us to JFK, decided it would be more fun to take us to the middle of Korea town, NYC. Luckily we didn’t miss our flight! The rest of the flight was uneventful, which is always a blessing when you are in a flying tube full of strangers.
Travel Fun #2
We arrived in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe around 6:45 pm. It was dark, darker than we anticipated. This was only an issue because we needed to rent a car and drive to the air bnb. The primary language in Guadeloupe is French, and the tourism industry is largely based on that, including all of the paperwork. Most of the employees knew little to no English, which is understandable and upsetting at the same time. After walking around the car trying to look like I understood everything that was being pointed out to me, we set off on our adventure in a foreign land.
Travel Fun # 3
Shortly after leaving the airport it started raining. This wasn’t just a light rain either, it was heavy rainforest rain (we rented an air bnb close to the rainforest). Luckily the traffic at the time was minimal, and we managed to stay on the road.
Travel Fun # 4
We got lost. The address we were given led us to what looked like an old farm road that ended up being next to the neighborhood that the air bnb was in, but not the air bnb itself. Because our phone service does not cover international travel, we were not able to call or send a message to our host without wifi, something that we did not anticipate needing to do.
Travel Fun #5
We left the creepy old farm road and traveled in search of a free wifi signal. We drove around the neighborhood in a full on panic. We were lost in a foreign country in a storm, at night, and did not speak the language! With every store and home we passed, we checked for a wifi signal, and eventually found one at a KFC! We went inside and ordered chicken tenders (Meaghan is vegetarian, but we had not eaten since 6 am and this was our only option). This is where received one of our first language lessons of the trip: ‘tenders’ is not pronounced the same in French as it is in English. Eventually we just pointed at the menu and apologized for not knowing any French. At one point in the conversation, Meaghan said ‘gracias’ out of panic!
It All Worked Out
We were able to send a message to our host through the airbnb website, who quickly drove to KFC and led us to his home. He was amazingly nice, despite us making him leave his home to find us. It turns out the the address we had was the original address that was given to us, which was just a rough location. The real address was sent to us later, and it went right under the radar.
Quick Tip
If you are given an address for your air bnb in a foreign country of which you do not know the language, make sure that it has numbers in it BEFORE you drive there in a nighttime rainstorm.