Christopher Elliott Travel columnist • Profile • E-mail

Oh, the terrible things we come home to from vacation.

While everyone else seems obsessed with how we will — or won’t — spend our summer, does anyone care what happens when it’s over?

Well, I do. I’ve experienced almost every non-Hollywood ending to a vacation you can imagine. They feature, death, destruction and a couple of pink slips from my clients. I’ll get to those in a second.

But first, let’s hear about your unhappy endings.

Cliff Woodrick returned from a four-week vacation in Quebec to a gruesome sight and an even more unpleasant smell: the corpses of more than two dozen fish bobbing up and down in his algae-coated aquarium.

“We had a storm that knocked out the power while I was gone,” he remembers.  “The three pump filters went offline, and some of the electrical connections in the house were fried.”

Yuck.

Reader Stacey Udell came back from a weeklong California getaway to find a thousand unwelcome visitors. “Black flies everywhere,” she says. “Water had accumulated on the floor in the basement near a window, and the flies must have come in and multiplied. It was so totally gross and shocking. We couldn’t even let the kids in the house.”

How about getting fired after coming home from a vacation? I’ve been there so often — why do they always wait until you’re away to decide you’re history? — that I’m reluctant to go on vacation. That, and maybe the fact that the last time I took a real break, a hurricane hit my house.

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It could be worse. A British couple recently came home from a trip to find that their pet tortoise had burned down their residence. I’m not making this up. A few weeks ago, the Grahn family of Hugo, Minn., returned from a weekend getaway to discover their house had been flattened by a tornado.

Here are five ways to prevent a bad homecoming.

Don’t try to control what you can’t.
There’s a certain randomness to travel. In a sense, you never really never know what you’re going to come home to. Alice Argento returned from a vacation in Belize to see her Cranbury, N.J., apartment in flames. “We jumped out of the car and ran towards the apartment to find our roommate, who had been watching the house and my dog, on fire,” she remembers. It turns out her roommate was making French fries, and had left the hot oil unattended for a minute. They were able to extinguish the fire, but her roommate had to go to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns. “What a night!” she says. And really, there was nothing she could have done to prevent it — except maybe to tell her roommate to stay away from deep-fried foods.

Be prepared for a power failure.
That would have saved Woodrick’s fish and possibly the contents of Naoma Foreman’s refrigerator. The power went out in her Phoenix home while she was out on vacation recently. “All food was spoiled, and everything had to be hauled away — including the refrigerator,” she recalls. Don’t stock up on groceries — particularly perishable groceries — before heading off for the weekend. Power failures can happen, and if they last for more than a few hours, you’ll have a mess on your hands.