By Francesca Street, CNN
(CNN) — Jill Shropshire turned the key in the lock and immediately felt a snap. She stood for a moment in disbelief: the key had broken off in her hand.
“I wasn’t looking at what I was doing, and I just shoved it in there … I think I put it in upside down and broke it off in the lock,” Jill tells CNN Travel today. “I’m immediately like, ‘Oh no. This is not good.’”
Jill turned around to show the broken key to her sister Jan Shropshire. But Jan had already clambered into one of the twin beds, kicking off her boots.
“I was drunk,” Jan tells CNN Travel. “I was crawling to bed already.”
Jill got Jan’s attention by waving the broken key.
“I’ve just accidentally locked us inside,” she told her sister.
Bleary-eyed, Jan dismissed Jill’s worry, barely looking up.
“Oh, we’ll just call down in the morning. It’ll be fine,” she murmured, pulling the covers over her head.
Jill glanced around the room. The two twentysomething American sisters were staying in a countryside B&B in a converted old house in the Midlands of England.
“There are no phones,” recalls Jill. “This is 1997.”
Not only was there no landline in the room, neither sister owned a cellphone.
None of this boded well. But Jill was also tired and tipsy — both sisters had enjoyed several gin and tonics at the local pub that evening.
So she also climbed into bed.
“We’ll just deal with it in the morning,” she told her younger sister, who’d already closed her eyes.
During the night, Jill woke up every hour or so, remembering the predicament and wondering what they were going to do.
“I was just waking up with stress,” she recalls.
Hazy with gin-fueled tiredness, she’d tell herself there was nothing to be done until the morning.
But a cocktail of jetlag and alcohol led the sisters to sleep in until way past 11 a.m. When they eventually woke, the B&B was silent. They’d been hoping to attract the attention of other guests. Maybe the owner would hear them?
“But everyone had already gone out for the day, so there was no one to help,” recalls Jill.
“We were completely alone,” Jan says.
They had no food in the room — beyond a solitary jar of peanut butter. There was no bathroom. And they were stuck.
The sisters weren’t exactly panicking. Both of them also thought the situation was at least a little bit amusing. But they didn’t want to spend a whole day trapped in a bedroom.
“So, we opened up the window,” recalls Jill. “The front door is right below us. But nobody is walking down the street, no one’s going in and out, whatsoever. I mean, we stood there at the window forever, yelling. We’re banging on the door, we’re hanging our heads out the window.”
No one responded. The sleepy English street seemed entirely empty of activity. The sisters were officially stuck.
A memorable trip to England
Growing up in the American South in the 1980s and 90s, Jill and Jan always dreamed of visiting England. Specifically, they’d dreamed of visiting Shropshire, a county in the West Midlands of England, on the border with Wales.
It’s not usually top of the tourist hitlist, but for Jill and Jan, this wish was personal.
“Our last name is Shropshire, so we wanted to go to Shropshire,” explains Jan.
In 1997, the sisters decided to embark on their first trip together: a backpacking jaunt across the UK, with Shropshire as the main event.
“We ended up in Shrewsbury,” says Jill.
This historic Shropshire town is full of medieval buildings, picturesque streets and a center dating back to the Tudor period. It was the England the sisters had always imagined.
“And we had this really nice little B&B at the end of a cul-de-sac,” recalls Jill. “It was an old house, you walk in and there’s a little desk. Everything’s kind of grandma-looking. I don’t know how many rooms they had downstairs, maybe three or four if that? And then we were on the third floor.”
This top floor had a soundproof glass door at the top of the stairs, and then a hallway leading to two small rooms.
The picturesque B&B was the perfect base for exploring. Jan and Jill enjoyed wandering the cobbled streets, peeking inside the medieval Shrewsbury Castle and embracing English pub culture.
On their second night in the town, they settled down for a long night in one of the pubs.
“We ate,” recalls Jill. “Then more of a crowd came in. We had a few drinks…”
The sisters started off sharing pints with locals, then switched to their shared drink of choice — gin and tonic.
They enjoyed chatting to other pub-goers, explaining how they’d ended up in the town.
“It was wonderful,” recalls Jan of the evening. “Though I was a little disappointed that no one was impressed that our name was Shropshire.”
“Nobody cared,” says Jill, laughing.
“Nobody cared at all,” agrees Jan, shrugging. “We were thinking, ‘Isn’t this special?’ Everyone was like, ‘No…’”
As they stumbled home, Jan and Jill felt euphoric. It was so exciting, traveling together, somewhere totally new for the first time. They’d always wanted to see more of the world. Their Shropshire adventure felt like the beginning of a new chapter.
Getting trapped in the B&B bedroom was not part of their vision for this exciting new era.
A day stuck in a bedroom
When the sisters woke up to that reality, neither could quite believe it, but both were glad they were with the other.
“It would have been much more stressful alone,” says Jan.
“Or with anybody else,” says Jill. “Someone else might really freak out and then that’s more stressful.”
“For us, we’re both like… ‘It’ll resolve somehow,’” agrees Jan. “I mean we’re not going to stay in this room forever. We’ll get out at some point.”
After they’d yelled out the window for a while, to no avail, Jan and Jill decided to change out of their pajamas and at least embrace the day as best they could.
They tucked into the peanut butter for sustenance, but with no cutlery to hand, they had to dig chunks out with a folded-up piece of cardboard.
The lack of bathroom issue was far from ideal, but they came up with a (somewhat) workable workaround.
“There was a freestanding sink…” recalls Jill.
It wasn’t a great solution. But the bigger worry was Jan’s health.
“I’ve been type-1 diabetic my whole life,” she explains. “Back in ‘97 I was using a vial of insulin and syringes — which you don’t use anymore, because we’ve got insulin pens and insulin pumps and stuff. But back then, every place we would go to, I would ask the owner of the B&B if I could keep my insulin in the fridge.”
As Jan was trapped in the room, she couldn’t access her medication.
“So, I’m up there for several hours with no insulin.”
Still, Jan tried not to worry. There was nothing to be done, and she felt relatively stable. And she was confident they’d escape before too long.
“I just sat back in bed and read,” says Jan.
Both sisters had brought stacks of books with them for the two-week backpacking trip. This made hauling their bags on and off trains a chore, but now they were thankful for the distraction they offered.
Hours passed. Occasionally they’d attempt another yell out the window or bang on the door. But the B&B — and the road in general — remained empty.
Escaping the room
It was edging towards evening when the sisters eventually heard movement in the corridor outside. The previous day they’d met a Russian couple who were staying in the room next door, but any attempts at longer conversation had been thwarted by the language barrier. Now they heard muffled voices speaking in the corridor.
Jill and Jan looked at each other. Jan was in shock.
“I couldn’t believe it, because we were in there for so long,” she says.
Jill immediately leapt to her feet. She didn’t want to miss the opportunity. She started shouting and banging on the door.
“I jumped up like, ‘Oh my God, I have to catch them before they go into their room or leave again,’” she recalls. “I think it was a frantic: ‘Help, help!’”
“And I thought, ‘They’re just gonna ignore her, they’re just gonna hear banging and talking and they’re just gonna ignore that,’” says Jan.
But even if their fellow B&B guests couldn’t understand the specifics of what was being said, they recognized the panic in her Jill’s voice. They replied, shouting something in Russian. Then the sisters heard footsteps heading downstairs.
Within moments, they heard the B&B owner expressing muffled apologies.
“She was just on the other side of our door, so we could communicate with her,” says Jill. “She was mortified, but it was completely my fault, because I broke the key off in the door. But she was very apologetic and just freaked out that we’d been up there all day.”
The owner shouted to the sisters she would call a locksmith. More time passed, then there was commotion at the door once again. The locksmith had arrived.
“I think he just took everything off. He took the doorknob apart and got us out,” says Jill.
When the door eventually opened, Jill and Jan couldn’t quite believe they were free.
“We went out right away, because we had been in there for hours,” recalls Jan. “We went out, ate, walked around.”
Shrewsbury seemed even more appealing after a day spent locked in a hotel room. The sisters returned to the pub, in need of a “thank God we’re no longer stuck” drink.
“And they gave us another key. I don’t know if I locked us in that night or not, I might not have,” says Jill.
Decades of adventures
Almost 30 years since their B&B incarceration, Jill and Jan still laugh about the key breaking in the lock and the day trapped in the attic bedroom.
“Those little things, those little mishaps, make it more memorable,” says Jill. “We had a great time backpacking around the UK. Having these little mishaps makes you more resilient. You know you can handle things.”
“And we laugh at ourselves a lot,” adds Jan.
“We do,” says Jill.
Since that memorable first trip, Jan and Jill have traveled together many times. Today, they also work together, running a jewelry business.
The sisters’ outlook in work, travel and life is generally “whatever happens, happens.” They suggest their early-20s-travel-mishaps helped shape that positive mindset.
“We just don’t stress out, unless our lives are in danger,” says Jan.
Jan suggests their outlook probably comes in part from growing up with diabetes.
“When your baseline is like a stone on your back, everything else is fine, and it’s funny,” she says.
“I like to have the attitude that life is good,” agrees Jill. “You just gotta keep looking at the nice things in life and being curious — having a curiosity for the world around you.”
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