Well, I cancelled a trip to Chengdu the morning one day before the Sichuan earthquake due to a last minute change to a client meeting. I was an hour away from leaving and would have been in the western part of Chengdu at a factory 24 hours later when the quake hit.

Instead, I was in a skyscraper in Shanghai and the worst I experienced was motion sickness due to the swaying of the building.

It could have been a VERY different trip.