One Reddit user asked:
What's the worst place you ever had to spend the night?
We expected some interesting answers from more adventurous users who travel, hike, etc. Everybody loves a good seedy hotel story.
What we weren't expecting was a comment section full of bonkers stories about private islands, failed drug smuggling, surviving disasters and unintentionally doing permanent ear damage over some snoring.
Yeah. It's a lot.
Canada Didn't Have Hard Feelings
A bus terminal park bench after being turned away at the Canadian border.
I was on a Greyhound and stupidly tried to bring weed across the border to avoid paying expensive prices in Toronto. I was also pretty drunk as it makes bus rides tolerable.
They found it and charged me $100 to take me back to the bus station in Burlington, VT. I slept on a bench there until the next bus left in the morning.
It's one of the safer bus stations for sure, but cold hard benches suck no matter where they are
Canada didn't have hard feelings and let me in that time.
After A Rafting Accident
IN A TREE!
Had a rafting accident and the three of us ended up spending 18 hours (overnight) hanging on to tree branches in the middle of an over flowing river until we were rescued the next morning by the swift water rescue team.
We took turns sleeping as the other two grabbed on so we would not fall in.
Picture us in no shoes, shorts and t-shirts as the temp dropped down below 50 degrees that night. Made the front page of the local newspaper, our 15 minutes of fame I guess.
The Psych Ward
The psych ward.
Especially when they have to come in every 10 minutes and shine a light into your eyes to make sure you're alive. Or when there are people screaming down the hall all night.
Spent two months in one in 2018. I don't know how they expect you to get better when they keep you from getting good sleep, good food, fresh air, or any social connections whatsoever.
- d24602
Alabama In July With No AC
Used to live with a guy up in Hayden Alabama. I actually loved it, it was peaceful and we had very few neighbors, I took care of the dogs.
Mid July and the a/c goes out, it was supposed to rain all week with about 80% humidity coupled with 95+ temperature outside. The house turned into a swamp, we opened all the windows and doors, turned on every fan we could find and still it was just awful.
The bedroom was so hot we couldn't use it so we slept on the couches which were so soaked by the end of the day that you could press your hand into it and your hand would come up wet.
It was so bad, we walked around stark naked in a last ditch attempt to beat the heat before we broke down and called a repair service.
With Wet Toilet Paper In My Ears
I slept in a hotel bathroom with wet toilet paper in my ears once when I was a stupid kid.
I was sharing a room with my dad and my brother, both of whom were terrible snorers (my dad at least has a CPAP now and my brother's estranged, so two problems solved). I couldn't sleep, couldn't handle the snoring... so I went in the bathroom, wadded up some toilet paper, wet it, jammed it in my ears, and tried my best to get some sleep.
Wouldn't recommend, did some long-term damage to one eardrum from a bit of toilet paper that was stuck on there for years afterward.
A "hOsPiTaL"
My mom had a heart attack in one of the highest 'criminals per capita' cities in India, Etawah.
Some relatives took her to a hospital. I arrived the same night.
They showed me to the room she was in, and I don't think I've seen a more depressing room in my life - and I grew up here in India, in not a rich family.
The walls had spits EVERYWHERE.
The bedsheet had stains older than me.
The medical equipment was outdated.
Rats and mosquitos everywhere.
The walls had cracking paint.
The floor was filthy.
The bathroom was so bad, I took one look and I went outside to piss on some bushes.
When I asked where could I sleep, they flung a thin @ss dirty AF mattress on the floor, no pillow, and told me that's my bed. There was on fluorescent lightbulb giving off a feeble, 'vibrating' light that cast most of the room in shadows. The paint on the bedrails was chipped and stained, the small cupboard beside the bed was greasy with accumulated dirt so thick you could write in it.
I was quite stressed over the medical emergency for my mother and depressed because of the room, but I sucked it up and stayed for the night since we were to transfer to Delhi and a much better hospital in the morning. You know; one where you couldn't get infections just from touching the bed rails.
I fell asleep around 4 am, tired as f*ck. I could hear the rats scratching in the bathroom and see cockroaches on the walls from what little light came through under the door once the lights were out in mother's room. It's so vivid in my memory I can recall every single silly disgusting detail of the room.
And that is the story of the worst place I ever had to spend the night in, a "hOsPiTaL".
A Chartered Boat To A Private Island
I had a boat chartered to drop me off on a small island, and was scheduled to pick us up the next day.
As it turns out, we weren't able to get off the beach onto the actual island because of a razor sharp barnacle wall surrounding the whole area, so we were trapped on a sand bar until the next morning.
So unfortunately, as night fell, the tide started rising, and only a tiny sliver of the sand bar stayed above sea level. The ground was soaking wet and sopped through the tent we were sleeping in, but to add insult to injury, turns out the sand bar was also a huge horseshoe crab mating ground, so the entire island was swarmed by horny horseshoe crabs.
So the rest of the night we basically were wet, cold, and being swarmed by horseshoe crabs f*cking against our tent.
Truly one of my worst nights
The Doll Room
80s horror GIF by absurdnoiseGiphyMy aunties house. She collects dolls. Antique, creepy @ss dolls. Her guest room doubled up as one of her doll storage rooms.
Imagine being in a room with hundreds of creepy dolls on shelves all around the room, all staring at you. Didn't help that her house is Victorian and weirdly laid out. Her living room was ground floor, and then you'd go down a steep set of stairs into the basement (which is where the guest room was..) this led out to her back yard, weird house built on a weird slope.
I couldn't move from fear, I literally lay there all night terrified to move incase one of the dolls moved. 😂 Branches hitting against the window and the rattling of her heating pipes helped make it a very horrific night.
I refused to ever sleep there again, so she introduced me to the other guest room (that I didn't know existed) and this room was first floor, zero dolls, pretty pleasant place to sleep. Wtf did she torture me with the doll room 😂😂
Triple Locked Doors
Some crummy motel in Montana.
We had started a road trip and I couple tell I was the only person of color to come through that place for years probably. The maintenance guy followed me into my room and gave me some story about checking to see if the cable was working. Other staff and guests were sizing me up.
I triple locked my door and the window, and I slept with my pocket knife under my pillow that night
Maybe Max Knew
Llano State Park in Junction, TX.
I was five months pregnant and enormous (twas a 12+ lb baby boy) ... it was Memorial Day weekend and we decided to go camping. We had the one baby in the oven, an 18 month old "Max", and a ten year old "Jake".
Why we thought this was a good idea, I'll never know. Chalk it up to rose tinted glasses. We live in the Houston area. The drive alone was arduous enough.
We get there though, and it's lovely and wind blown and wild. We set up camp and the balmy ninety degree temps take a nose dive. We had sleeping bags but this cold was relentless. Plus it was windy.
Max kept crying and crying, something he never did. He was always a chill child. But from the moment we set up camp he had become clingy and fussy and now that night had fallen he was full on wailing.
We didn't know how to handle a crying child. Hand to God, he had never cried like this before. We never had to comfort him. We had no clue what to do besides hold him close and rock him gently.
He didn't seem to be sick. No fever. He wasn't prone to ear infections and his ears didn't seem to be bothering him. He was dressed warmly, unlike the rest of us.
It was full on dark, just past nine, when a park ranger rolled into our campsite. He said he was going to have to ask us to leave if Max didn't settle down because we were disrupting quiet time.
So we gathered our things and bundled into our truck. As soon as we were in the truck Max stopped crying.
He began baby talking and leaned into me and snap! fell asleep. We waited a beat and then moved back to the tent, which we hadn't dismantled yet.
We had just begun to settle down when he woke and began to cry again, this time with renewed vigor. We went back to the truck.
I told my husband he and Jake should go ahead and sleep in the tent and I would stay in the truck with Max, the screamer. Quietly, they did just that. A couple of minutes later Max woke up screaming again. He didn't settle down until my husband and Jake got back into the truck.
We resigned ourselves to a long, uncomfortable night cramped in the truck. I needed to pee, but didn't dare leave because I thought Max would wake up crying again. Max slept through the night.
As soon as dawn broke we packed up the rest of our stuff and in the midst of doing that my husband saw fresh, large piles of animal scat behind the area where our tent had been pitched.
Now there haven't been bears, wolves or mountain lions in Texas in decades. But that was one big pile of sh*t.
Maybe Max knew something we didn't know. In any case... that was THE most uncomfortable, long night ever.
10% Off
On a drive to Florida, my dad pulled into a Super 8 in Tifton, Georgia. I had misgivings from the get-go, as the place didn't look great, but it was only one night. Only one night, you can live through anything, right?
For some reason, my father was adamant that no one but himself enter the lobby to check in. We absolutely had to stay inside the car at all costs. This was the first clue that perhaps something wasn't quite right, as this rule was not so strictly maintained elsewhere.
Upon opening our room door, a moldy smell immediately hit our nostrils. Stepping into the room gave a strange sensation on our feet, which quickly revealed itself to be caused by the stickiness of the carpet. Oddly, the carpet had also been cut up and laid back down repeatedly. A quilt carpet. One does so wonder why.
The entire room was covered with a layer of dust - some surfaces moreso than others. The nightstands, for example, only had a light, but visible coating; the beer cans crumpled and stashed behind the television, on the other hand, boasted a good quarter- to half-inch. The walls had a odd sickly yellow tone, as though they'd been plastered with successive layers of smoke, dirt, and general bodily fluids.
My emotions ran so high that I felt as though I simply was too overwhelmed to respond. My mother, God bless her, did that for us, by throwing a protest, but my father pointed out that this place was cheap, and it's not like we could stay anywhere else on such short notice if we abandoned this place. Further protests were met with a firm refusal to allow us to stay elsewhere. It was only one night, after all...
We attempted to make the best of it. I went to brush my teeth, but found myself unable to do so when the water from the sink faucet was brown. Attempting to procure water from the bathtub produced the same result. At this point, I realized I had few options outside of simply going to bed and hoping to fall asleep and wake up and get the hell away from this horrible, horrible place.
I pulled back the bed sheets, which had the texture of laundered sandpaper, and immediately noticed an odd type of circular hole I'd never seen before. "Cigarette burn," my mother said. She also warned me not to look at the underside of the bedspread, or inside the nightstand drawers, or behind or underneath the bed, with the implication that this had been done during my fruitless attempt to procure clean water in the bathroom.
I didn't sleep. We arrived in Florida the next day. My father sent off a lengthy, angry email of complaints to the Super 8's management, and in return, received a tepid apology and 10% his next stay in response. "Screw that," we responded in unison.
Or so we thought.
A week later, guess what parking lot we pulled into in Tifton, Georgia?
While my mother screeched and I fought tears, my father shouted about how they'd given him 10% off.
The Astrodome
The Astrodome during hurricane Rita. I got to take a shit in a trash can with an audience of dozens and that was one of the nicer parts of that week.
The smell in that place must have been dense.
Wow, that's just miserable sounding. Glad you survived it.
An Italian Cave
Ironically in Italy's beautiful Cinque Terre.
But we were sleeping in a cave by the beach that we didn't know was preoccupied.
Me and my brother were travelling with basically no money and decided it would be super fun to sleep on the streets instead of spending money on a hostel.
Our Mother had gifted us this trip for our birthdays and paid and planned the whole trip. Most nights she had booked us a place to stay but some nights she planned for us to find our own accommodation. She didn't know this but we had no spending money as we were broke as hell. One night we decided to spend the money we did have on booze instead of a hostel.
We searched the day for good spots to sleep and found a couple of good options. We stumbled across a cave by the touristy part of one of the beaches. There are five famous beaches that are extremely crowded during the day but at night everybody returns to the hotels and restaurants leaving the area clear. The cave we found was out of the way slightly enough and nobody goes there at night time.
Once it got late enough we headed over to the cave with different bits of cardboard we found in a dumpster. We set up two cardboard beds are drank Italian wine while watching the beautiful night sky over the sea with waves crashing. We thought we were in heaven.
The first hour was fine but soon enough the novelty and wine were wearing off. We realized the genius cardboard idea wasn't so comfortable after only an hour. Restlessness I can handle. What came next though still has me itching.
Once we had settled, stopped talking and started trying to go to sleep we started to hear little noises coming from within the cave. Squicky little noise letting us know we weren't alone.
I don't have any phobias and am really not scared of much but it's at this stage I should mention my childhood fear of rats. When I was little my father, who was a history teacher, would tell me stories including the history of the Black Plague. The tales of disease caused by rats haunted my young dreams and to this day I can't handle the sight of a rat.
So here we are trying to get to sleep when we start to hear the little noises and footsteps getting closer and closer.
We ended up making it through the night without any serious rat interactions. We were so creeped out by the rats that we resorted to setting up a rat barrier. We had plastic bags that we set up a perimeter around our sleeping area. It wouldn't keep the rats out but if they walked over the plastic bags they would make a ruffling sound notifying us if a rat was getting too close.
All night long the plastic alarms were going off making us jump up screaming and yelling trying scare off the rats. The cave itself also had little tiny rocks falling from the ceiling at random times. These little rocks also started tripping our plastic security alarm.
What we thought was going to be a night to remember ended up being a night to remember.
Not Even My Worst Tinder Hookup
BDSM themed love hotel in Tokyo after I missed the last train home. 3AM. Drunk off my ass with a tinder date.
Neither of us are good at Japanese. Call first place that pops up on Google maps as taking reservations at 3am. Go.
Oh lawd, there is a cage in this motherf*cker, it is in a basement of a very dubious looking building. The "bed" is a hard rubberized block. There are no sheets. There are no pillows. Reception gave us 3 towels to lie down on the bed.
There is the scariest shower room I've ever seen (don't worry, I did not take a shower in there), and no toilet - so if you have to pee, you have to walk down past reception to the shared toilets.
I can hear a lady screaming in another room. I am with a guy I met 4 hours ago and if he wants to murder me, i reckon nobody will come to find out till at least morning. On the other hand, dude didn't live here like I do and was probably thinking I was going to murder him or at least mug him.
In good news, I didn't get murdered. Had an alright time, made fun of badly censored porn that was on the TV, slept on a puddle of towels on a rubberized bed with a stranger as both of us hoped not to wake up with the other one absconding with our valuables, and train-of-shamed home in the morning.
Was my first Tinder hookup. It was not my last one or my worst one (dude was a cool guy, it wasn't his fault, and he took it all in stride and wasn't an a**hole. Also, he is probably on Reddit, I wonder if he will see this?).
Moral of the story: If you are going to hoe, know where to go so you aren't caught out and have to sleep in a cold ass dungeon without a single pillow. Also know when the fck the last train runs if you aren't ready to pay for a room and you don't look like a freaking idiot.
The Death Of Innocence
I went to an all girls boarding school in Africa that was known as a farmers daughter school.
During a time where farmers were being killed to take their land, there was a riot outside of the school. We listened to the mob outside the fence (maybe 100 feet from our room) chanting about the different ways they were going to r*pe and torture us if they got in.
I was 12. I have never been so terrified in my life.
They finally dispersed at about 5AM... and we were required to get up and 6 to go to class. Definitely the day any innocence I had died.
Camping In South Florida
Went camping in South Florida in the summer when I was about 10. My older brother insisted on setting up the tent, and all was great until a massive thunderstorm in the middle of the night.
That's when our tent flooded because he had picked a nice concave spot to set up. Good job, brother!
Commence three kids whining about being soaked, so we all went to go sleep in the car. After the rain stopped it got super hot in the car so we opened the windows...But it being summer in Florida, within about five minutes we were swarmed with mosquitoes and spent the rest of the night wide awake smacking them and itching (and probably bickering and complaining, if I recall correctly, as we were little shits when in close quarters).
The inside of my mom's car the next morning looked like an insane tiny massacre had happened, with bloody mosquito splats everywhere.
The spots were still there years later, and a great way to piss my mom off REAL quick was to dare to mention them, lol.
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Surely there muse be some perks to the hotel life. Constant room service, posh front desk help, sweet pools and hot tubs would be lit.
But maybe all that bouncing around wears on ya.
A Redditor asked, "Those who basically "live" out of hotels due to work travel, what's the best and worst part of it?"Those who basically "live" out of hotels due to work travel, what's the best and worst part of it?"
Simple Pleasures
Never having to wash my own sheets.
Finding new and interesting places to hide the wad of cash.
Double Edged Swords
Best part: it's like being single again. Just get to make your own schedule.
Worse part: it's like being single again. Lonely.
Make it stop!!
The best is I spend almost zero time doing things like cleaning, so much of that sort of thing is just provided for me.
The worst is restaurant food becomes literally sickening after a while. Also it can be "Groundhog Day" pretty often: I often strike up a conversation with someone and it turns out to be the exact same conversation with someone else the last place I stayed.
GiphyDON'T TOUCH ANYTHING
Per-diem is essentially getting paid to experience new restaurants every day, I've tried such a wide variety of food from all over the country.
Getting sick! When you travel you're exposed to germs from new places, so usually a week or so after travel you'll start to get cold/flu symptoms. Actually fighting off a cold now.
In Limbo
Worst part: Missing out on hobbies, having to reconnect with your SO and kids when you get home because you missed yet another week
My dad travels a lot for work. He says sometimes it's hard to engage with home on weekends and stuff because he's still in travel mode, especially if he had to travel again the next week. I know my parents used to fight about it when we were kids.
Twilight Zone
After a long period on the road I will bolt awake and literally not know what city I am in. I have to concentrate for 30 seconds on the events of the previous day that led up to my lying here at the Hilton in City X. It's really disconcerting and unpleasant, like geographic vertigo.
One day I woke up in a cold sweat feeling stressed out. I started doing my normal morning routine of determining what country I was in, if I had enough in the local currency, what time was my flight out, and what my schedule was for the day. After I found out I didn't have an answer to any of those questions, I looked around and found out I was in my own bed. I didn't recognize my own bed!
'Sorry to cancel tonight but I'm 4000 miles away'
Tuck me in plz
Hotel beds are generally pretty comfy, but my bed at home is better. I can sleep in my favorite divot in my bed.
The worst was I never could sleep well in a hotel bed. I would get 3-4 hours each night.
GiphyThis must be how the Rolling Stones felt...
Unhealthy: Sitting in airplanes, eating quick airport food, working long hours, jetlag, not exercising, and sleeping poorly all add up. When you see other middle aged business travelers in the airport, the majority of them do not look healthy.
It is hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle on the road. Restaurants and booze and lack of exercise add up. I have to try really hard to try to keep some balance, but don't always succeed.
First Class Always
All. The. Points. I get to keep all my airline miles, hotel points, and rental car points. This makes traveling for fun pretty inexpensive. Pick a brand and stick with it if you can to maximize this benefit. Also, get the credit card for the airline and hotel chain of choice.
Best part for me was the travel points and the ultimate credit card that was paid off at the end of every month. Made thousands on just the cash back bonuses alone.
Free airline miles is the best part, for me. I love traveling, so it's a bonus for me to get to see lots of new places and get paid for it. This year I paid $0 for all my family's personal plane tickets, because I was able to cash in miles accumulated through work for all of our trips.
Giphy