Ever been on a trip where one thing after another just seemed to go wrong?

My friends and I got a good taste of that during our all-girls vacation in California last month. Our trip — the one we had planned for months — certainly had its share of ... well, I'll just call them unexpected issues.

I won't go into all the details. But let's just say for starters that there was an overbooked hotel, a trolley malfunction, and a very sweaty man on a very crowded bus.

Ah, good times.

But hindsight is a funny thing. Now that it's all over, most of these stroke-inducing moments have turned into entertaining outtakes from "National Lampoon's Vacation."

Even with all the fabulous experiences my friends and I shared during our trip, we talk more about the glitches and the kooky, unplanned incidents. And we laugh. Hard.

Sure, we loved getting pampered at a day spa in Napa. But we'll giggle about how we all squeezed into a "suite" at an inn across the street from a car dealership. (Tip: Don't blindly judge a hotel by its Web site.)

We can't remember exactly what we ate at that great restaurant in North Beach, but we'll never forget the clueless cabbie who dropped us off at the wrong pier the next day.

And, c'mon, what's more interesting: a productive day of shopping, or how it took us more than three hours to travel a couple of miles back to our hotel?

Near the end of our trip — particularly on what's now known as "that one BAD day" — we rolled our eyes and wondered out loud what else could possibly go wrong.

But after some expletives and a few deep breaths, all we could do was shrug our shoulders and laugh.

And I realized these are the things we'll still laugh about when we're 80 years old.

Ah, good times.

I won't go so far as to say I would relive every second of our trip. I wouldn't choose to repeat, for example, my friend accidentally cutting her mouth on a slice of rock-hard French bread. (See? One thing after another!)

But I've come to believe that great experiences are born of the good and the not-so-good stuff; the carefully planned events and the out-of-left-field curve balls.

And it truly doesn't get much better than sharing these moments with your closest friends. These memories, albeit occasionally bordering on madness, will belong to us and us alone.

You can spend all the time in the world planning a perfect, smooth vacation, but it's often the unscripted, offbeat stuff that you wind up remembering and cracking up about the most. Once I understood that, the irony was quite amusing. That's a big step for a control freak like me.

Not that I'll stop trying to plan that perfect vacation getaway. You never know; it could happen.

But if it doesn't, at least I'll still have a lot of fun memories to laugh about.

Reach Lynda Arakawa at larakawa@honoluluadvertiser.com.