The best case scenario while heading out for a long-awaited vacation is it kicks off with excitement, ocean breezes, and effortless logistics. But for New York City creator Sam Souder (@soudersam), touching down in Miami traffic to catch her cruise was allegedly an uncomfortably excruciating test of patience.
In a TikTok storytime, Souder broke down what she dubbed the “Uber from hell” while completing her makeup routine. According to her, a brisk fifteen-minute hop from the airport to her cruise port metastasized into two-and-a-half hours of gridlock. But even that wasn’t the worst part.
In the middle of the ride, the Uber driver allegedly dropped an eye-widening request that left Souder and her friend staring fixedly out the side windows. Fast forward to the last hour of the ride, Souder and her friend weren’t riding alone with the driver – a bottle of pee commuted with them.
Relentless Miami traffic transformed a 15-minute commute into a multi-hour gridlock
The journey began in high spirits after Souder and her friend landed in Florida ahead of their scheduled cruise departure. Souder tells that the cruise terminal sat barely fifteen minutes away from the airport. However, the surrounding roadway was utterly paralyzed by thousands of travelers attempting to arrive and depart simultaneously.
Because of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the 15-minute commute reportedly ballooned into an agonizing two-and-a-half-hour ordeal. To make matters worse, Souder’s smartphone battery had reportedly died. She claimed to have lost two backup power banks and broken a third, leaving her with zero means of communication.
So, Souder and her friend were stowed inside the vehicle while moving mere inches along the two-mile terminal approach. Having nothing else to do, the pair reportedly engaged in pleasant small talk with their driver. Strangely, after spending well over two hours idling, the driver allegedly broke the conversational rhythm with a strange directive.
“All of a sudden, the guy’s like, ‘Look that way,’” Souder claimed. She initially assumed he needed her assistance checking a blind spot to merge and glanced back to tell him the lane was blocked. To this, the driver reportedly clarified his urgent command and said, “No, turn that way… I have an emergency and I have to pee.”
Souder and her friend were gridlocked with nowhere to escape
Faced with a dead phone and no discreet way to whisper or formulate an exit strategy, Souder locked eyes with her friend in silent disbelief. She explained that fleeing the vehicle on foot wasn’t a realistic option since their heavy luggage was locked in the trunk. On top of it, the terminal remained over a mile away on foot, and abandoning the car meant boarding a weeklong voyage without clothes or vital medication.
Resigned to their fate, Souder and her friend reportedly craned their necks in the opposite direction while the driver relieved himself into a bottle right from the front seat. “Genuinely, that’s exactly what we did. Turned our heads while this man peed while we were in the car with him. It was very uncomfortable.”
Making the experience even more excruciating, the vehicle remained trapped in the snail-paced crawl for another 45 minutes to an hour. All this while, the bottle of pee was allegedly sitting upfront and the atmosphere was thick with awkwardness. Having no other option, Souder and her friend had to silently endure the remainder of the commute until they finally reached the drop-off curb.
Giving the elderly driver the benefit of doubt, Souder expressed empathy for his physical distress. “Honestly, I really just think that he needed to use the bathroom… because what do you do? You can’t leave your car in the middle of moving traffic,” she reasoned. However, she also stressed that the ordeal was definitely not the relaxing start they had envisioned for their holiday.
At the end, Souder used the bizarre ordeal to deliver a practical travel warning. She urged vacationers to keep carry-ons containing passports, wallets, and medication within arm’s reach rather than the trunk in case an emergency bail-out ever becomes necessary.
Published: Sep 29, 2026 08:31 am