I went to Denver RomCon … and if you want details on the fantastic conference, go back and read Janelle’s Monday post. If you want the down and dirty Carly stories, you came to the right place on the right day. A reminder for those not familiar with my travel woes:
4 Never Travel with Carly horror stories dating back to 2005 HERE
An iPhone horror story which led me around my local neighborhood for hours HERE
And then I arrive in Denver last Thursday. Ready for this? I walk up to shuttle at airport and ask “crown plaza”? The driver says, come with me. He charges me flat fee along with other people on the bus, and since I’ve been to Denver before things seemed familar. At some point I realize I’m driving way too long on the short bus and I say isn’t the Crown Plaza closer? The driver says we are going to the Crown Plaza. I say near airport? He says no in downtown Denver. Hello shouldn’t he have asked me which hotel if there were 2 in the area?
He says I’m stuck, he’s on his route. He’ll try to get me on a bus going back once we get to Denver. An hour later he’s dropped off all his people at various hotels I say, are we going back to my hotel now? No, he says, I have my pickups first. 
If he’d told me that from the beginning I would have gotten off at the first hotel he stopped at and taken a cab! Now I tell him to drop me at the first available hotel with taxi cabs. I ask for my money back, he gets it, and then I had to pay $30 for a cab ride back to the hotel – only to discover the shuttle from the airport to the correct hotel is FREE. And the cab ride from downtown to my hotel took all of 15 minutes. 
I’ve traveled an hour and a half after a perfectly lovely flight, my heart is racing, my head is pounding, and I arrive at the hotel around the corner from the airport. Woo Hoo.
At least I had a good time and an easy trip home!
So can you believe I have yet another travel horror story?
Carly Phillips would like to take 100% credit for all her stories but the truth is, Carly’s strength is writing family, emotion, funky elderly people and animals. She couldn’t plot her way out of a paper bag, which is why she smartly found her plotmonkey pals early on in her writing career. Thanks to their support, Carly is now a NYT Bestselling author of 23 plus novels. Because writing doesn’t keep her busy enough, Carly is also a wife, a mother of one preteen and one teenage daughter, the primary care giver of her soft coated Wheaten terrier and an expert carpool mom.
Destiny
Dirty Little Secrets
Once Upon A Valentine
Through The Night
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Lol Carly! At least you made it to RomCon in time and nothing disasterous happend.
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At least it wasn’t too bad. Glad you made it safe and safely back.
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Carly, Carly, Carly…lol! Yes, that account still makes me laugh. So glad you made it though. I had a blast hanging out with you, Janelle and some of my other faves. Don’t worry. You weren’t the only one who didn’t know there was a free shuttle to the hotel.
I called and they said the shuttle would be at Island 3. When I got there, two Crowne Plaza buses were sitting there. Almost took the wrong one. My driver asked me specifically which one and I checked the paper to make sure I got it right.
Peace and love,
Paula R.
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This sounds like a situation that could come up in a book!!
I’m glad everything was okay in the end.
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I’m glad everything worked out in the end and at least you ended up at RomCon.
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Wow that sucked and you never let on at all..
You can add my horror story to yours..when we left the hotel to come home they didn’t load one of my suitcases onto the shuttle..it took them 40 min to find my suitcase. By the time they found it and got it to me we would have missed our flight but it was delayed by a year.
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I would report this to the Denver visitors center’s site — I know that our local one always wants to know of problems/difficulties that visitors have. They don’t spend millions of dollars promoting their city & convention facilities and then want people to have bad experiences with the locals responsible for their travel. accomodations, etc.
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I’m sorry, but I look forward to your travel horror stories. They make mine seem tame and are so much funnier too.
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Can’t believe the guy didn’t ask you which Crown Plaza since they had 2 in the city.
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Actually I can believe!
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Only YOU, Carly!
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OH the joys of travelling.. but we do it anyway… But you know I think this has a spot in a book… You know maybe the cab driver is really a hunk and asked the lovely lady for a date and she ends up travelling around in his cab all night.. I see many possiblities for a good book here..
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What a horrible story! Glad you enjoyed RomCon. I may be able to go to RomCon in 2012.
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LOL. I laugh because I’ve been there. Think we might have been born under the same (un)lucky star or traveling black cloud. My friends alternately roll their eyes at me when I says “You’re never gonna believe what happened on the way….” or perk up at the thought of a story so out there it couldn’t be made up. They love sharing the “my crazy friend….” I have a friend who calls me to “check in” and “just see what’s up” when things are down in her life, because she says she always knows I’m gonna tell her something worse that makes it no seem so bad….
Thanks for sharing your stories, both personal and plots. I’ve enjoyed reading you for years, and after subscribing to the blog can see that you are as fab as your written words. :)