STUCK IN THE TROODOS MOUNTAINS Our most bizarre travel experience occurred in 2015 in Cyprus.After spending a lot of money on a spa day in the Troodos Mountains, which included massages, facials, and other treatments, we returned to use our credit card.

We ended up leaving our passports as a guarantee to return and pay the following day after attempting to pay multiple times and discovering that we did not have sufficient cash.After going through our online banking, we realized that we had committed the most serious rookie error:

We hadn’t approved the charge card to be utilized abroad.As a result, we ended up using our debit card to withdraw the money, incurring the foreign transaction fees we were trying to avoid.The next day, we drove back up the mountain to pay our fees and get our passports, but as we got close to the peak, our rental car came to a screeching halt.Before we started driving, we looked at the digital fuel gauge and saw that one quarter of the tank was empty.

We did what we could only think of: we called a local guy with whom we had gone scuba diving earlier in the week to see if he knew of a fuel station nearby. He quickly searched Google and discovered one two miles down the mountain in the tiniest village we had passed through.We were able to freewheel the vehicle back down the winding mountain road to the village and into the fuel station, where we discovered that it was closed on Sunday!