These Are The Worst Road Trips You've Ever Taken

Not every road trip is an adventure that you'll remember for the rest of your life. We wish every day on the road could be sunshine and rainbows, but sometimes your vacation is just nonstop thunderstorms. God forbid you decide January is a good time to visit a national park, but the highway to get there is unplowed and has turned into a stranded-car sanctuary.

We asked our readers last week about the worst road trip they've ever taken. I honestly couldn't conceive how bad things could get when stuck inside a car with other people for hours on end. Commenters submitted some truly absurd anecdotes, ranging from being locked inside a scorching, aluminum-topped pickup bed with his brother as kids to someone's beloved Border Collie defecating in his girlfriend's lap. I love driving, but have road trips been a secret form of torture all along? Without further ado, here are the long-distance drives you'd love to forget:

Right around the turn of the century, my wife and I had to pick up our stepdaughter at Chicago Midway Airport so she could come home after spending Christmas with her bio-dad.

Nothing majorly bad happened to us, but it was a very white-knuckle drive.

A huge blizzard hit in the morning when we were supposed to leave. Bio-dad said her flight still hadn't been canceled, so we set off on our way (early, of course).

What normally would have been a 2-hour trip turned into a 4-hour one. Literally, when we got off the highway at our exit to go to Midway, he calls and says her flight was canceled.

Great!

So we turned around and headed back home. That was a 6-hour trip going about 30 MPH the whole way. That was the worst because I was really tired by then. It was dark by that point, so you really couldn't see anything but the snow coming down. My mind kept seeing cars spin out in front of me, when they weren't.

We made it almost all the way home but got stuck in the middle of the road about 3 miles from home. A nice couple was there in a 4X4 when it happened, so they gave us a push and that got us home.

We did get stuck in the driveway, but that was something to deal with the next day.

I never want to drive 10+ hours in a blizzard ever again!

Submitted by: Tone Capone

In the days of paper maps, was skiing with my girlfriend in Vermont, and we planned to drive to a town about 10 miles away for a nice dinner (jacket and tie, candlelight, etc.). Driving along, some roads plowed, some not, but no biggie. Start driving up a hill, encouraged by the fact that, although there was snow on the road, there were tracks, and I had 4WD. As the snow started getting deeper, my brain clicked: those are snowmobile tracks. Stopped the car, did a 34-point turn to make sure I stayed on the road and didn't go into a ditch or a gully, and coasted back down the hill. Ended up grabbing pizza right near the place we were staying.

Submitted by: JustSomeGuyYouKnow

Around 2017, driving my wife's new-to-us BMW with runflats to Blacksburg, VA from CT. Car was CPO and had bout 20K miles. We hit a mega hole on I-78 in NJ near the PA line. Two passenger-side tires blew. Torrential rain, 5 a.m. could not see a thing. Pulled over and found a BMW dealer 20 miles away in PA that would open in a couple of hours. Went there and waited. The service manager was great, he looked the car over and told us that the remaining tires were new and that changing just two was not a problem. Three months later, the front diff fails. $6700 estimate, a small battle with BMW corporate, but once we produced the service doc with the dealer's recommendation of only two tires they fixed the car under the warranty. Thing is, they did a repair, not a replace and sure enough the thing fails again just out of warranty. Traded it in for an Accord. A word of caution: NEVER buy an AWD, especially German, if you don't know the tire replacement history. Essentially, tires need to be replaced in fours unless the others are very fresh. My trusted indy tells me that as little as 9mm can make the difference!!!!

Submitted by: Nick Sq

We drove from Charleston, SC to the Outer Banks of NC in August in a 1989 Jeep Wrangler with no AC in the rain. The windshield kept fogging up and the road conditions were awful. We had to make time to meet the ferry schedule and it was sweaty, back pain-filled, bouncy 9 hours...

Submitted by: Old_SLAAB_Guy

Amarillo to Dallas for Christmas break in school. My Mazda3 hatch was loaded to the gills with everything we needed to bring home during the break, plus our snowboard gear. A small spot was carved out for our Border Collie to sit. Unbeknownst to me, my girlfriend (now wife) had fed him 6 egg yolks from her egg white omelet that morning and had given him terrible gas. We stopped often to get him to poop, but nothing. Then, in the final 5 miles to her parents' home, he panicked in the backseat. We were on an under-construction part of highway with no exits in sight and no shoulder when he jumped from the back seat into the front seat (he is now properly secured while in the car). I'm trying my best not to crash while looking for an exit while she grabs him and bear hugs him to herself. I then hear her say, "he's sh*tting, he's sh*tting," as she holds him tight and has diarrhea all into her lap. I pull into a Taco Bueno parking lot and she takes him out. I go in and get cleaning supplies and we clean him up, throw away her snuggy-like robe, and put him in a trash bag with his head sticking out for the 10-minute drive to her parents' house. The only casualty was the passenger seat belt, which she accidentally let fully retract and required a full deep clean/disassemble and a 48-hr air out.

Submitted by: RmB

Houston to Chicago and back in a brand new BEV. Having spent 15 years in PHEVs, expected refueling to be a minor issue. It was a major issue; chargers were often inaccessible, broken, vandalized, few and far between. Yes, one can spend a tremendous amount of time gaming out a plan for slightly better results, but lotza time and only slightly better results. The stalling out of the plans to make electric cars viable, by the Republicans, cost manufacturers TONS of money and great frustration for me personally.

"Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest of these: it might have been." (if not for the lingering orange fart in the White House)

Submitted by: Gary Sonnenberg

May 2019. 7 friends, 4 guys and 3 girls on a 2-week road trip from New Orleans to Yosemite and back. At least that was the plan. Our last hurrah trip before graduating college didn't go right from the start. Imagine 7 adults in a rented Escalade PLUS 2 weeks' worth of gear! We overpacked from the start. We had to leave all our tents behind except for one, which was my friend's dad's old Boy Scout tent that smelled like toe cheese and had old wax coating peeling off. We left late because of the packing, so we were constantly behind schedule as a result. We also overplanned things to do so this meant we'd see something for 5 minutes and then have to keep driving so we wouldn't miss something else! Texas went on forever. The big crater in Arizona? Didn't get to see it, had to drive right by. The Grand Canyon? We got there late in the day instead of the morning, so instead of hiking and seeing it we got to look at it for 30 minutes, 15 of which were obscured by clouds. Then we got sleeted on and had to leave. Vegas? Giant waste of time where we all secretly confessed to looking at flights home and tried to salvage the trip... and friendships. Drove through Death Valley in the middle of the night. Tensions were high. Some people were controlling. There were tons of fights and crying. It was too cold to camp so we diverted to San Diego for a few days which saved us. Then Santa Fe. Then 20 hours through storms in Texas and then home. Too many people and too much time. Never again.

Submitted by: PlibbleDibble

The past two summers, I've taken my 1979 El Camino from northern Wisconsin to be a part of Elcofest in Indiana the final weekend in July with no A/C. Both times it was 95ºF, muggy, and rainy, so we had to keep the windows up. For me, those were among the best road trips I've ever taken. But if you ask the wife, she'd probably say they were among the worst.

Submitted by: Anonymous II: The Sequel

In the late '70s, I drove from Saint Paul up to northern Minnesota in -10 degrees to go cross-country skiing. Unfortunately, the heat in my rusted-out VW Squareback was not up for the trip. My passenger rode in a down sleeping bag. We had to constantly scrape the ice off the inside of the windows and windshield. My passenger refused to ride back with me, instead opting for the bus from Bemidji.

Submitted by: Bad bearings

Ah, Yes. The old air-cooled VW winter experience, all bundled up with one gloved hand on the wheel, and the other with an ice scraper!

Submitted by: Radar Lover Gone

Indiana to John Pennecamp State Park in the Florida Keys. In summer. My brother and I rode in the bed of my dad's truck (a single-cab F-100) under a beercan-thin aluminum topper for ALL the miles. Occasionally one of us would be allowed to go through the rear sliding window and sit in the cab with mom and dad. We could open the windows to the topper, but then it got REALLY loud, so we had to use that sparingly. We mostly just baked.

Bonus points: we were sitting on a plywood platform covered in that 1970s green outdoor grass carpet, and under the platform were several scuba tanks which we had been told were full and super dangerous and could explode. Because 1970s parents thought that sort of thing was hilarious.

It was hot, loud, uncomfortable and we spent the whole time going down afraid for our lives. It was years later that our parents explained that the tanks were empty; they just wanted us not to move around too much.

Submitted by: Buckfiddious