5 ways to avoid a sad vacation finale

(Tribune Media Services) -- Oh, the terrible things we come home to from vacation.

While everyone else seems obsessed with how we will -- or won't -- spend our summer, does anyone care what happens when it's over?

Well, I do. I've experienced almost every non-Hollywood ending to a vacation you can imagine. They feature death, destruction and a couple of pink slips from my clients. I'll get to those in a second.

But first, let's hear about your unhappy endings.

Cliff Woodrick returned from a four-week vacation in Quebec to a gruesome sight and an even more unpleasant smell: the corpses of more than two dozen fish bobbing up and down in his algae-coated aquarium.

"We had a storm that knocked out the power while I was gone," he remembers. "The three pump filters went offline, and some of the electrical connections in the house were fried."

Yuck.

Reader Stacey Udell came back from a weeklong California getaway to find a thousand unwelcome visitors. "Black flies everywhere," she says. "Water had accumulated on the floor in the basement near a window, and the flies must have come in and multiplied. It was so totally gross and shocking. We couldn't even let the kids in the house."

How about getting fired after coming home from a vacation? I've been there so often -- why do they always wait until you're away to decide you're history? -- that I'm reluctant to go on vacation. That, and maybe the fact that the last time I took a real break my house was hit by a hurricane.

It could be worse. A British couple recently came home from a trip to find that their pet tortoise had burned down their residence. I'm not making this up. A few weeks ago, the Grahn family of Hugo, Minnesota, returned from a weekend getaway to discover their house had been flattened by a tornado.

Here are five ways to prevent a bad homecoming.

Don't try to control what you can't

There's a certain randomness to travel. In a sense, you never really know what you're going to come home to. Alice Argento returned from a vacation in Belize to see her Cranbury, New Jersey, apartment in flames. "We jumped out of the car and ran toward the apartment to find our roommate, who had been watching the house and my dog, on fire," she remembers. It turns out her roommate was making French fries, and had left the hot oil unattended for a minute. They were able to extinguish the fire, but her roommate had to go to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns. "What a night!" she says. And really, there was nothing she could have done to prevent it -- except maybe to tell her roommate to stay away from deep-fried foods.

Be prepared for a power failure

That would have saved Woodrick's fish and possibly the contents of Naoma Foreman's refrigerator. The power went out in her Phoenix home while she was out on vacation recently. "All food was spoiled, and everything had to be hauled away -- including the refrigerator," she recalls. Don't stock up on groceries -- particularly perishable groceries -- before heading off for the weekend. Power failures can happen, and if they last for more than a few hours, you'll have a mess on your hands.

Don't cut corners on pet care

The folks whose turtle burned their house down already know that. And so do I. A few weeks ago, while I was away on assignment, one of my beloved cats was run over by a car. Instead of putting my kitties in a kennel, as I should have, I asked a friend to come by twice a day to feed them. I'm still grieving the loss of my companion. I can't read the comments on my own blog without losing it. Lesson learned? Make sure your pets are safe before you go on vacation.

Take extra precautions when you see trouble coming

Remember the 2004 hurricane season? Florida resident Evelyn Fine does. She was having her Orlando home remodeled during the middle of the summer and thought it might be a good time to go on vacation. If you'll recall that summer, there were storms lined up one after the other at several points, taking aim at the Sunshine State. Wouldn't you know it, one of them took out her air conditioner and Fine's irreplaceable wine collection was, in her words, "cooked." "Much was corked and the balance was barely drinkable," she says. It might have been a good time to move them to a nearby wine storage facility, where the bottles could be stored safely.

Stay home

Back in 1995, when I lived on Long Key, Florida -- a remote island between Islamorada and Marathon in the Florida Keys, I watched Hurricane Opal approaching. I was scheduled to fly to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a family reunion. But with the storm on a direct path for the Keys, I decided to call off my trip and take my family to the mainland instead. What made me change my mind? Maybe it was the Monroe County sheriff who stopped by our house and asked for our names and whether or not we were staying in the house. He needed to know how many bodies to look for if the hurricane hit. Fortunately, it didn't. Sometimes the best way to prevent a vacation tragedy is to not go in the first place.

(Christopher Elliott is the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine. This column originally appeared on MSNBC.com. You can read more travel tips on his blog, elliott.org or e-mail him at celliott@ngs.org).

© 2008 CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

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