By Francesca Street, CNN
(CNN) — Jill Shropshire turned the key in the lock and immediately felt a snap. She stood for a moment in disbelief: the key had broken off in her hand.
“I wasn’t looking at what I was doing, and I just shoved it in there … I think I put it in upside down and broke it off in the lock,” Jill tells CNN Travel today. “I’m immediately like, ‘Oh no. This is not good.’”
Jill turned around to show the broken key to her sister Jan Shropshire. But Jan had already clambered into one of the twin beds, kicking off her boots.
“I was drunk,” Jan tells CNN Travel. “I was crawling to bed already.”
Jill got Jan’s attention by waving the broken key.
“I’ve just accidentally locked us inside,” she told her sister.
Bleary-eyed, Jan dismissed Jill’s worry, barely looking up.
“Oh, we’ll just call down in the morning. It’ll be fine,” she murmured, pulling the covers over her head.
Jill glanced around the room. The two twentysomething American sisters were staying in a countryside B&B in a converted old house in the Midlands of England.
“There are no phones,” recalls Jill. “This is 1997.”
Not only was there no landline in the room, neither sister owned a cellphone.
None of this boded well. But Jill was also tired and tipsy — both sisters had enjoyed several gin and tonics at the local pub that evening.
So she also climbed into bed.
“We’ll just deal with it in the morning,” she told her younger sister, who’d already closed her eyes.
During the night, Jill woke up every hour or so, remembering the predicament and wondering what they were going to do.
“I was just waking up with stress,” she recalls.
Hazy with gin-fueled tiredness, she’d tell herself there was nothing to be done until the morning.
But a cocktail of jetlag and alcohol led the sisters to sleep in until way past 11 a.m. When they eventually woke, the B&B was silent. They’d been hoping to attract the attention of other guests. Maybe the owner would hear them?
“But everyone had already gone out for the day, so there was no one to help,” recalls Jill.
“We were completely alone,” Jan says.
They had no food in the room — beyond a solitary jar of peanut butter. There was no bathroom. And they were stuck.
The sisters weren’t exactly panicking. Both of them also thought the situation was at least a little bit amusing. But they didn’t want to spend a whole day trapped in a bedroom.
“So, we opened up the window,” recalls Jill. “The front door is right below us. But nobody is walking down the street, no one’s going in and out, whatsoever. I mean, we stood there at the window forever, yelling. We’re banging on the door, we’re hanging our heads out the window.”
No one responded. The sleepy English street seemed entirely empty of activity. The sisters were officially stuck.
A memorable trip to England
Growing up in the American South in the 1980s and 90s, Jill and Jan always dreamed of visiting England. Specifically, they’d dreamed of visiting Shropshire, a county in the West Midlands of England, on the border with Wales.
It’s not usually top of the tourist hitlist, but for Jill and Jan, this wish was personal.
“Our last name is Shropshire, so we wanted to go to Shropshire,” explains Jan.
In 1997, the sisters decided to embark on their first trip together: a backpacking jaunt across the UK, with Shropshire as the main event.
“We ended up in Shrewsbury,” says Jill.
This historic Shropshire town is full of medieval buildings, picturesque streets and a center dating back to the Tudor period. It was the England the sisters had always imagined.
“And we had this really nice little B&B at the end of a cul-de-sac,” recalls J