Travel is full of ups and downs – as perfect as it may look online, there are always lows to balance out the highs. After writing about my top travel experiences of 2025, this post is an important one: all of my WORST travel moments!
As always, I’m grateful to be alive at the end of the year to write this post. Looking back, most of my worst moments were emotional/mental stresses, as opposed to physical – not that that makes it better, just different! I wasn’t injured, robbed, or harmed. And after two years with a lot of car trauma, I’m pleased to say there were NO CAR CRASHES in 2025! Here are my worst travel moments of 2025.
Overwhelming stress and instability
This year was defined by stress, and by far the worst travel moment of 2025 was having to cope with so much constant instability. I faced housing instability (not knowing where I’d sleep at night and feeling/being homeless), financial instability (my bank accounts dropped extremely low at times waiting for payments to come through), mental and emotional instability (loneliness, lack of a physically close support system, and processing a lot of emotions/grief I hadn’t had time to deal with in the last year), professional instability (wtf am I doing with my career)… the list goes on.
It was immensely challenging having to face all of these stresses at once, constantly. Having to always be planning “what’s next” is one of the hardest parts of long-term travel. And after traveling for so long, it really caught up to me this year. My mental health nosedived. I was homeless and felt it. I was tired of living in my car, but had no other options. I was rejected from jobs I applied for and really wanted. It was an enormous struggle. I’m happy to have started a new chapter moving into my new flat in York!
Dealing with a housesit cancelation while I was on the road
At the start of the year, I began making moves and planning out what I’d do after I left New Zealand. I arranged for a 7-week housesit on the Isle of Arran in Scotland, somewhere I know and love, and was thrilled! Unfortunately, the housesit was canceled with just a few weeks’ notice, leaving me with nowhere to go when I got back to the UK. I made other plans and arranged another housesit for most of April (this time in Oxford). But it was really difficult to set this up. Most owners like to arrange video calls beforehand – finding a time where we’d both be available was challenging enough, let alone a time that I was guaranteed to have wifi or reliable phone signal when I was road tripping New Zealand and living out of my car! I’m glad it all worked out, but it was not fun.
Ticks in Scotland
I pulled up to a great overnight camping spot during my road trip in the far northwest Scottish Highlands this summer. I sat at a picnic table that was by some long grass, and didn’t think much of it. That is, until I noticed that my feet and ankles were crawling with the tiniest ticks I’ve ever seen in my life!! (I was wearing shorts and flip-flops.) They were miniscule and must have just hatched from a nest near the picnic table. I got rid of so many, but found one or two small ones on my bedding in the car – which prompted a panic trying to find a dryer (to kill all the ones on my sheets) in rural Scotland.
I had a number of other ticks this year, in the Lake District and in Switzerland – was there something in the water in 2025?! – but this incident takes the cake.
Forgetting my jackets not once, but twice!
This was probably my biggest fail and stupidest moment of the year. When I left my housesit in Oxford and took the train to Cardiff, carrying everything I owned, one of my trains was canceled and I was put on another extremely busy service. In all the commotion, I forgot my rain jacket and fleece in the overhead compartment of my train! Despite several communications with lost property, they were never found. I replaced them (I needed a new rain jacket anyway), but felt so stupid as a simple mistake cost me quite a bit of money. As I disembarked my plane in Switzerland, you wouldn’t believe it – I did the same thing!! I left my rain jacket and fleece in the overhead bin, and didn’t realize until I’d arrived to my hostel in Geneva.
The next afternoon, I went to the airport and was thankfully able to collect them that day before I left the city, for a fee. I cried when he came out of the back room with them. I couldn’t believe I’d made the same dumb mistake not just once, but twice!
Burnout in Cornwall
After months of balancing full-time travel with a full-time freelance writing career, I knew my pace was unsustainable and I’d burn out. That burnout hit me in Cornwall, and it hit HARD. I cried every single night for the first five nights I was there. I put on a brave face and went out for hikes and adventures, but returned back shattered. After ignoring a lot of emotions and grief from the last year, it all caught up to me and it was a lot to process. I cried a lot, and I was very, very alone. It was a tough time.
Lots of issues with my new car
I desperately needed to buy a car in Cardiff, in order to travel up to my next housesit across the country in northern Scotland. In a bid for freedom, I bought one from a rando off Facebook Marketplace, as per my usual. While my Qashqai is exactly what I wanted, it was the first time I viewed and bought a car on my own, without a mechanical inspection or a friend to support.
Immediately, I needed to get work down. I negotiated the price down, but not enough – the wiper motor repair kit I needed cost £450! As soon as I got to Scotland, I needed to get new brakes (discs and pads, front and rear), a new tie rod, a new tire, plus tracking (~£730). When I got back to York in the middle of August with my squealing brakes, I discovered that the guys in Scotland had royally fucked my car up. They sold me brakes that are rarely sold now because they squeak, and installed them wrong so the metal bit was scoring the disc; they did the tracking wrong, meaning I wore out my front tires (one of which was brand new!); they ignored my missing wheel bolt, which needed to be replaced.
Thankfully, the Halfords in York sorted me out, and as the parts were under warranty I didn’t have to pay out of pocket. But it was a lot of work/repairs that needed to be done shortly after spending a lot of money on the car, and it was very stressful. Shoutout to my girl Erin for getting everything sorted for me!
Exhaustion upon arriving in the Lake District
I had a lot of fun partying on my last night in Croatia – too much fun, maybe, as I got to bed late and didn’t get much sleep. (Although, the three snorers in my dorm room and the people who woke up and packed at 5:45am may have also been the cause.) I then had to walk across the city, get myself to the airport, fly back to the UK, pick up my car from where I’d parked it on my friend’s driveway, and then drive 2 hours to the Lake District. I was hungover, exhausted, and not in the mood for construction and accidents to turn a 2-hour drive into a 3-hour drive. By the time I finally showed up at my camp spot, in the pouring rain, I ignored the wrecked car with broken windows and got ready for bed. All I wanted to do was take a shower, do my laundry (I was quickly running out of clean clothes), and sleep in a real bed. I had none of those things, and cried myself to sleep in the back of my car. I was exhausted to the bone.
Between this and the weather, my birthday trip to the Lake District did feel subdued. I couldn’t do some of the walks that I wanted, I had another terrible night of sleep at a farm that decided to have a rave until 4:30am, and I just felt weary.
Crowds and parking in Cornwall
Cornwall is a very popular place to go during the school holidays. But it was BUSY! Some places, like St. Ives and Looe, were literally so packed with people, it was a struggle to walk down the street. Parking required a crazy amount of research – I spent a lot of my time in Cornwall looking up car parks, trying to figure out where to park for cheap (or extending walks so I could start from a free parking spot), and counting my parking time so that I didn’t run over and receive a massive fine. While Cornwall was gorgeous and I’m so happy I went, I don’t think I’ll go back during the summer holidays again.
Feeling really, really lonely and struggling with relationships
Three years of full-time solo travel can really take a toll. I’m used to being on my own, but this year was the loneliest I’ve been in a long time. Housesitting and freelancing meant I wasn’t meeting people the way I normally do when I travel (at campsites, hikes, hostels, etc). And bouncing around the country meant that it was rare for me to get to see friends, as I was always leaving and going somewhere else. This year, I went over two months without seeing a single friend. I didn’t have any sort of socializing (besides the pet owners I was housesitting for) from the middle of April until the end of June. I’m an introvert, but even for me that’s pretty isolating.
The state of my life these last few years has meant that I’m used to always reaching out to friends, taking the initiative and making the effort to get together, call, or message. But after doing that for almost all of my friendships for so many years, I found myself too burned out to continue. I have chats with friends where our entire message thread in the last year is just me saying, “hey I’m back in York until [this date], when are you free I’d love to see you!” and them responding, but a meetup never happening. Constantly reaching out became too difficult, and over time I lost the energy and simply stopped.
I also didn’t go on a single date in all of 2025. Partly because I wasn’t emotionally ready for most of the year. But partly because I found it too overwhelming to even try, given that I’d be moving somewhere else in a short period of time anyway. Not that I’m sure what I want right now, but it would have been fun to go on a date or have a crush.
I cried alone a lot this year. I missed my friends and family a lot this year. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time alone. But I’m trying to take this as a learning experience. I’m realizing which friendships I value the most and are worth making the extra effort. As I put down roots in York again, I want to focus on my friends in the area and creating a community again.
So, there you have it – all of my worst travel moments of 2025! There have been a lot of ups and downs this year. While the highs were so high, the lows were so low. Again, I’m grateful to be physically well and healthy, that my family and friends are well, to have a safe place to sleep at night, and to have luxuries like a fridge and shower again. This post could always be much worse. I’m trying to focus on positive energy in 2026 and the exciting next chapter ahead!
What were your travel challenges in 2025?
