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Travel’s weird and wild 2009

January 08, 2010 |

There were plenty of good reasons to stay home in 2009, and by that we don't mean the bad economy, skyrocketing air fares or terrorism fears. The San Francisco Chronicle takes a look back at the year's strangest happenings in travel.

And the other 1,999 were bored to tears: An Arizona man in June posted a blow-by-blow account of his vacation on Twitter, telling followers that he and his wife "were preparing to leave town," and later that they had "another 10 hours of driving ahead," and still later that the couple had "made it to Kansas City." The couple returned home, Cnet News reported, to discover that one of the 2,000 people following them on Twitter was apparently a burglar who took advantage of the couple's well-documented absence to steal thousands of dollars of professional video equipment.

When pigs fly, this won't be a problem: An Air Zimbabwe plane crashed during takeoff when it hit a wild pig on the runway at Harare International Airport, the Times reported in November. It took the airport's emergency rescue team five minutes to reach the plane, by which time members of Zimbabwe's secret police had already arrived and arrested two passengers for taking photos.

At least someone could sleep on the flight: A JetBlue employee fell asleep in the cargo hold of a plane in March at JFK airport in New York and didn't wake up until the plane was in the air, en route to Boston, Online Travel Review reported.

Get the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

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