What’s the worst travel experience you’ve ever had?
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Rise & Inspire · WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 28 October 2026
Today’s prompt asks for my worst travel experience. When I try to answer honestly, I find that the worst trips were rarely the ones with the longest delays. They were the trips in which I spent the delay quarrelling with it.
That is my argument in a single line: a journey that goes wrong is usually ruined twice, first by circumstance and then by us. The second ruin is often the larger one, and it is the only one within our control.
1. Circumstance spoils the plan. We spoil the journey.
A late train costs us two hours. Our indignation can cost us the whole day. We rehearse the complaint, recheck the timetable, and tell anyone nearby how things should have gone. Nor does the irritation stay with us. It spills onto the ticket clerk, the taxi driver, and the family travelling beside us. The itinerary failed; the journey did not have to.
2. The Buddha had a name for this: the second arrow.
In a short discourse from the Pali Canon, the Buddha describes a man struck by an arrow and then, immediately afterwards, by a second one.1 The first is the pain that happens to us. The second is the distress we add to it: the worry, the resentment, the endless replaying. On a journey, the cancelled flight is the first arrow, and we did not choose it. The second arrow, the fuming that follows, we fire ourselves.
3. One of history’s great travellers lost everything on our own coast.
In the 1340s, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta reached Calicut as the Sultan of Delhi’s envoy to China.2 Before he could sail, a storm struck the harbour. The great junk meant to carry the embassy was wrecked, and the smaller vessel holding his belongings sailed on without him. He was left on the shore with little more than his prayer carpet, an envoy who had lost his embassy and dared not return to Delhi empty-handed.
His account does not pretend this was anything but a disaster. Yet it did not become the end of his story. He went on, to the Maldives, where he served as a judge, and eventually, years later, to China.
4. A storm can take the ship and still leave us something to do.
The Acts of the Apostles records Paul’s voyage to Rome as a prisoner. His warning against sailing on had been set aside in favour of the ship’s master and owner (Acts 27:10–11). After two weeks of storm, no one aboard had been eating. Paul told them plainly that the ship would be lost, but not their lives (Acts 27:22). Then he took bread, gave thanks, and began to eat, and the others took heart and ate with him (Acts 27:35–36).
He could not save the ship. He could still lead the meal. That is the distinction worth learning: the difference between what we can change and what we must learn to navigate.
5. A fair objection deserves an honest answer.
Not every ruined journey is a problem of attitude. A missed last farewell is a real loss. So is a medical emergency far from home, or a cancelled bus that costs a daily-wage worker a day’s earnings. Telling such a person to look on the bright side is not wisdom; it is unkindness.
Nor does refusing the second arrow mean accepting poor service in silence. Ask for the refund. Rebook the ticket. Write the complaint if one is due. The claim is narrower: once the practical steps are taken, the resentment that remains repairs nothing.
6. An itinerary is a forecast, not a promise.
Life does not always follow our itinerary, and planning still matters. But a plan is a prediction about weather, machines, and other people, and predictions fail. When ours do, we feel cheated, as if the world had broken a contract it never signed. Hold the plan the way a navigator holds a chart: seriously, but ready for the sea.
7. Life is the longer journey.
We plan careers, families, and futures too, and they are also delayed, diverted, and sometimes wrecked. We cannot refuse the first arrow. We can learn, slowly, not to fire the second.
A meaningful journey is not always the one that follows the perfect plan. Sometimes, it is the one that teaches us how to travel through uncertainty without losing our peace of mind.
Your Turn
Have your travel plans ever gone badly wrong? What was the first arrow, and did you fire the second? Share your story in the comments. Your experience may offer another reader a valuable perspective.
Notes for readers
1 The Sallatha Sutta (“The Arrow”), Samyutta Nikaya 36.6. It belongs to the Pali Canon, the earliest surviving collection of the Buddha’s teachings.
2 Ibn Battuta (1304 to about 1369) of Tangier travelled for nearly three decades across Africa, Asia and Europe. He dictated his account, known as the Rihla (“The Journey”), after returning to Morocco. Calicut is today’s Kozhikode in Kerala.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 28 October 2026: What’s the worst travel experience you’ve ever had?
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