'We Were Just Passing Through': Houseguest Horror Stories -- and a Few Happy Surprises

· "Thank heavens you had those rubber gloves in the kitchen sink! One of the kids put too much paper in the toilet and I really didn't want to stick my hand down there. I put the gloves back in the sink for you."

· "Did that knickknack shelf in the hall have anything special on it? Because Eric keeps swinging on it, and it finally fell off the wall."

· "Is your computer always that slow? We installed a couple of hundred game packages for the kids, and now it seems rather slow."

· "Was this chair leg [on my grandfather's dining chair] already broken?"

Pat Swain

Fairfax

My wife and I went to the Washington Greyhound station to pick up my mother-in-law on a hot summer day. We saw a large group of sunburned young women crying. They explained that 13 girls from Ireland had taken jobs in Ocean City. They were told they could all stay in one hotel room in Washington very cheaply. They were stuck and didn't know what to do.

We loaded all the luggage and the people into their rental car and our two cars and drove them to our home in Reston. We started cooking spaghetti. Suddenly the girls just took over. We had a wonderful dinner. Then we dragged all the mattresses we could find to the basement. The next morning we all had breakfast and we drove them back to Washington. Some of the girls wrote to us for years, sending cards, etc. The whole experience was great.

Eric Young

Reston

Peace Corps volunteers all over the world are famous for hosting and for being guests. Our desire to travel overwhelms our income, and if a fellow volunteer asks to stay at your place, you can't say no. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, I lived in Uzhhorod, a beautiful, formerly Hapsburg and now formerly Soviet town. Almost every week I hosted at least one volunteer and occasionally their Ukrainian friends and colleagues.

One particular night stands out. The day started with one guest leaving in the morning to head back to her village. A few hours later, a couple arrived to stay the night before leaving for Budapest on a 5 a.m. train. At about 4 a.m., as Ben and Erika were sleeping in my living room on my fold-out couch, someone rang my doorbell insistently. It turned out to be Juniper and Kristin, who had just been dropped off by a bus returning to Ukraine from a pilgrimage to the Vatican.