Fasten your seatbelts

Tell ITN about the funniest thing that ever happened to you while traveling in a foreign country. (ITN prints no info on destinations in the United States.) There are no restrictions on length. The ITN staff will choose each month’s winner, who will receive a free one-year subscription to ITN. Entries not chosen cannot be acknowledged.

This month’s winner is PEGGY PARKER of Milwaukie, Oregon:

Several years ago a friend and I took an escorted bus tour of France. Both of us were fairly well traveled, so we were used to getting our share of good and not-so-good guides. This trip gave us the latter. We decided that, in order to make the best of a bad situation, we would find humor in this.

The guide was pompous and unhelpful and had the most affected English accent we had ever heard. All of us on the tour finally pinpointed what was wrong with his accent: it sounded exactly like Peter Sellers doing his Inspector Clouseau character in the “Pink Panther” movies — so, in private, all of us were mimicking his over-the-top delivery.

One night, as we were coming back from a casino on a very winding, dangerous road overlooking the ocean, the bus hit an enormous pothole so hard, it threw us all out of our seats — high enough that we hit our heads on the ceiling. The driver even temporarily lost control of the bus.

Afterward, for a few seconds it was so quiet in the pitch-black dark, you could have heard a pin drop. We all knew what could have happened on that dangerous stretch of road.

Then, out of the silence, my friend, using her best Clouseau accent, said, “I believe we hit a BIMP.”

Calm was restored, and everyone got it except the guide, who remained oblivious for the remainder of the trip.