A 21-year-old German tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in the Australian metropolis Sydney landed 13,000 kilometres away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.
Dressed for the Australian summer in t-shirt and shorts, Tobi Gutt left Germany Saturday for a four-week holiday.
Instead of arriving "down under," Gutt found himself on a different continent and bound for the chilly state of Montana.
It appears when this poor guy bought his ticket on line he bought a ticket for Sidney, which is in Montana, instead of Sydney, Australia where he wanted to go. The computers and web took his spelling as right and sold him the ticket he asked for.
Montana in the winter had to be a hell of a shock for him when he was expecting Australia in the summer. I bet I know somebody that will check his spelling a little more closely from now on, don't you?
It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time. Winston Churchill
And spell-check (which many people, including yours truly, depend on to save our asses from things like this) is of no help. (Lots of folks are too busy and/or lazy to proofread what they type. And I'm as guilty of that as anybody -- to my consternation at times.)
But at any rate, I hope the gentleman at least enjoyed his trip to the Gem City (my father was raised there, and my grandfather was the police chief there many, many years ago). It could've been worse -- he could've wound up in Sidney, Nebraska (which is not the end of the world...although it can be seen from there