Late 89, I was a brand new fo, maybe two months off OE on the mighty Shorts. We had inherited a bunch of EAS routes out of ORD when Britt Airways shut down. Fun places like Burlington, IA, and Mattoon, IL.
At many of the smaller cities, our transportation to the hotel was via "crew car", some old POS beater provided by the station (this ended not long after, the alcohol fueled shenanigans with the cars during the "lost weekend" layovers probably had something to do with that).
This pretty much brand new fo was paired with an even newer captain. Our stand up was ORD-CMI-MTO and back, with probably 6 hours on the ground total. When we got there, the agent threw the captain the keys to the crew car, provided a brief description of the vehicle and walked away. We found the car, fired it up and set off for the hotel. I remember asking the captain if he knew where the hotel was, I'm pretty sure he replied "I think so".
Around 30 minutes later, surrounded by nothing but farm fields, and hardly a light in sight he decided "I guess we should have gone the other way". Turn around, find the airport and start off the other way. We finally found the hotel, it was probably a Holidome, we stayed at a lot of those back then. I think we ended up with like four hours behind the door that night.
I didn't sleep much, and honestly felt pretty bad when we got back to the airport, but I figured I'd be ok back to ORD. I remember it was really, really cold when we started up. There was no PCA then, we both were wearing our overcoats and gloves for takeoff, and put blankets over our legs in cruise. the airplane had just started to get comfortable when we got back to ORD, and the blast of cold air up our legs when the nose gear doors opened was kind of shocking. As we taxied in, I was really not feeling well at all. We hit the gate, the ca turned on the lights and looked over at me, he said something like "you look like hell, and there is something all over your face". Turns out I had chicken pox, for the second time.
I ended up sick over thanksgiving of my probationary year, was accused of sick abuse until I showed up in the chiefs office covered in scabbed over pox for my hearing. Good times.