by Gabe Zaldivar
Last updated: 11:12 AM ET, Sat December 27, 2014
Image via Thinkstock.
We've all been there before. You head out for drinks with your friends; one thing leads to another and you wake up in France without a passport.
OK, this may have just happened to one of us. His name is Shawn Smith and this is his story.
Metro's Ollie McAteer reports the 48-year-old was hanging out with two friends at a local bar when the suggestion was made to go "on an overnight trip to the continent to buy cheap tobacco."
While we like to say yes to life, we now know doing so poses some peculiar future predicaments.
Smith, while a seemingly fantastic sport, has never traveled to far from home, a fact that is crucial as McAteer writes:
"Incredibly, Shawn, who has never left the UK and doesn't even own a passport, managed to get through unchallenged in Dover, France and Belgium while he snoozed in the back of his friend's car on December 1."
Already this sounds remarkably close to the escapades of the merely stated fictional character "Gandalf" in the series Friends.
What transpired will make your worst hangover look like a holiday. According to the report, Smith was stopped in Calais as the group was returning back to the United Kingdom.
That's when a curious story went from bad to truly gnarly. Smith traveled to the British Consulate in Paris where he found that his German birth put a snag on getting an immediate temporary passport.
McAteer continues that Smith was forced to stay a week in France, surviving as best he could when one takes an unexpected International vacation to France: "Shawn spent £450 surviving in the French capital and dined out on guest house breakfast croissants and fast-food meals at McDonalds."
Most of us, not counting those currently mired in a holiday bender, save up for our excursions abroad, so I can only imagine the resourcefulness it would take when you are essentially transported to a foreign land. To exacerbate things, this was Smith's first International excursion.
Smith offered, "I only went abroad to save cash on tobacco but it ended up costing me a fortune. It was an expensive hangover but something to tell the grandkids about."
And that's all we travelers ever want, a fantastic story to relate to jealous friends. The only caveat is that we rather enjoy actually knowing when we are going to wake up in a different country for the first time.
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