Should I buy travel insurance if I’m just visiting family?

We’d been planning this trip since we first started dating. My husband is a Can-Aussie (that’s half Canadian, half Australian) and hadn’t been back to Australia since his early teens. So, at this point, it’d been about 10 years. He was pretty disappointed his Canadian wife didn’t know what a ‘real wave’ was 😆 

We found a crazy deal on plane tickets and, after 6 years together, finally booked our trip Down Under! We were incredibly excited. The bikinis were bought, bags were packed, pets were taken care of. But we hadn’t bought Travel Insurance. 

Our trip wasn’t going to be dangerous in any way – the main goal was visiting Family and jumping in waves. 

Australia is home to him and everything would be in English anyways. Plus, the trip was really expensive to book! We didn’t want to waste our money on insurance because, honestly, it’s not like we’d have to use it. It’s not a dangerous country and we’d be with Family the entire time. 

But I was terrified of the snakes and spiders (the only ones we ended up seeing were in a zoo 😎) so I bought it just in case. 

5 days into our 3 week long trip, we were staying in this dingy hotel downtown and I wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I’m in a horror movie. My face felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. I’d never had this before but was bawling from the sharp, throbbing pain in my jaw. 

First thing the next morning, we went to a walk-in clinic. They weren’t sure what was wrong ($150.00). So, they sent me to a Dentist ($300.00). This pain in my jaw would not go away. 

After plenty of x–rays and questionnaires, the Dentist tells me my wisdom tooth was badly infected from a weird kind of cavity. My only option was to have it pulled on the spot ($215.00) and continue the trip on antibiotics ($80.00). 

She had me in and out of that chair in 5 minutes – seriously, this Dentist was incredible.