It’s an amazing thing to witness: many people undergo complete transformations of personality while on vacation. Ordinarily shy people become chatty. Reserved executives find themselves entering themselves into a cruise ship hairiest chest contest. Dieters indulge in chocolate fantasies and couch potatoes find themselves running with glee from attraction to attraction. Everybody, it seems, has a vacation alter-ego.

Photo courtesty of IgoUgo member Sail Army.

When I’m on vacation, I’ve been known to transform from my usual night-owl self into someone who voluntarily gets up before dawn to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean (to be fair, in some cases it’s because I’m still awake from the night before). And, although I’m not a coffee drinker regularly, if I go to Europe you can bet I’ll have a cup everyday.

I’ve also been known to willingly and even happily confront fears I’d never have fun facing in the day-to-day, like crawling through some very claustrophobic caves in Spain in order to see prehistoric paintings, joining a group of non-English-speaking strangers in Mexico for a wild day of dune-buggying in the rain, or deciding to ignore the signs in Jamaica in favor of taking a rental car off the main road and into the wilds of the Blue Mountains.

There are other stories, of course, although I think I'll keep those to myself for now (wink wink). But what about you? What are some of the most outrageous, most out of character things you’ve ever done while on vacation?