Telling a Story

A nightmare journey

What is the worst journey you have ever made? What happened?

We asked our readers to tell us about their nightmare journeys. Jutta from Germany wrote to us about hers...

A nightmare journey I remembered was three years ago when I was going to the airport with my friend. We were going to Mallorca on holiday and we had to be at Dresden airport two hours before the flight.
We leaved home with plenty of time, but when we got to the motorway there was a huge traffic jam! The traffic wasn't moving at all. We didn't know what to do. It was too late to go another way, so we just sat in the car getting more and more stressed. After ten minutes the traffic started moving slowly. We decided to leave the motorway and try to find another way to the airport, but I wasn't sure of the way and we got completely lost. We were sure we were going to miss the flight. We finaly arrived at the airport just thirty minutes before the plane was going to leave.The woman at the check-in desk said we couldn't check in our luggage because it was too late so we had to run with all our cases to the departure gate.
Although my friend fell over and hurt her leg, we managed to get to the gate in time and in the end we caught our flight.


Look at the list of possible travel problems:

the flight was delayed
you broke down
you got lost
you missed your flight
there was a traffic jam
you got a puncture
you forgot your passport
your flight was overbooked

Can you think of any others?

Watch the video and do some comprehension tasks to revise transport and travel vocabulary:       http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/word-street/transport-and-travel-scene-1

Write about a nightmare journey you've had (or invent one).

Use the Plan to help you.

Paragraph 1 When was the journey? Where were you going? Who with? Why?
Paragraph 2 What went wrong? What happened?
paragraph 3 What happened in the end?

Place you piece of writing onto the Wallwisher: http://padlet.com/wall/9it7d39qfq