Travel Happy Tips: Expect the Unexpected

Sara after her Costa Rica health scare (Photo: Sara Stewart) Just keep all your bodily fluids inside until this SUV gets to the emergency room, I tell myself while being bumped and jostled down a barely paved road in Costa Rica. Curled into a clammy, shivering ball, I thought about how differently my day had begun.

Kevin A. Woolsey Inside Story What I am about to share is an inside story, never before told to any member of the traveling public. Resort owners and innkeepers worldwide all have our little behind-the-scenes secrets told only to other innkeepers we really trust at end of season parties where we try to top one another's tales of guest or maintenance horrors; this is one of ours.

Broken Jaw X-ray (Photo: Thinkstock) I've bungee jumped, parasailed and jumped off the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere. I scuba dive and surf whenever I get the chance. I climbed Kilimanjaro. I'm taking flying trapeze lessons and have gone to stuntman school. The only real injury I got in 12 years of adrenaline-seeking travel?

(Photo: Wavebreakmedia Ltd. / Thinkstock) Sometimes you just have a no good, very bad day. When that day involves airports, travel, a lack of oxygen, satan's spawn, a lot of vomit, and diverted flights, it's all that much more horrid. It happened to me on Saturday. The day started off on a weird note.

The first time our daughter, Alyssa, went scuba diving with us in the open ocean was quite memorable. At fifteen she had done fresh water dives, plus we had snorkeled together several times, but she was a little intimidated by the vastness of life under the sea.