I return from a distant land with tales of adventure and loss

So we’re back after a couple of weeks, give or take, doing some extraordinarily fun stuff in the eastern Mediterranean — visiting Athens, cruising on a barquentine through Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas, and ending up with a few days in Venice.

More on those adventures anon. Now I’m dealing with the “loss” part — specifically, the loss of my wallet in Venice, where I suspect (highest probability) that I dropped it inadvertently out of a pocket I had stuffed it in juggling three things at once, someone picked it up, grabbed the euros from it, and tossed the remainder in a trash can or canal. (I say this because it took me about 6 hours to start canceling the cards, on the off chance that I could find the wallet, and there were no bogus charges put on them in that time.)

Which means the hassle, on return, of replacing my drivers license, my debit/ATM card, and the two credit cards I had brought with me.

It’s at this point that all those handy-dandy automatic payments from one’s credit card come home to roost. I have 14 vendors / services / subscriptions / charities that draw from the card each month, and I anticipate spending an hour or two having to contact each one to say “Use this number.” Though it is a useful opportunity to say, “Hmmm, do I really want to continue that particular service?” Which would be marginally less annoying if this was Sunday like it was supposed to be and our flight from Venice to JFK wasn’t delayed by three hours meaning we had to stay overnight in NYC and thus lose our “One day at home before the work week to unpack and do laundry and fix credit card stuff” and have this be Monday instead after arriving home at 11:30pm last night.

Yes, I know, #FirstWorldProblems, but, hey, I’m back in the US, I’m allowed to kvetch about anything that annoys me. Also, Trump sucks, which has been an ongoing irritation while being out of country, as much as it is being in-country.

On the bright side, I was treated very politely by the carabinieri officer I filed a police report with in Venice, and I have an Italian police report as a trip souvenir.

Speaking of which, three Travel ProTips:

1. If you are taking a credit card overseas, don’t take the one you have all your autopayments done through. I was actually given this advice, but then took that card anyway (as a backup for the one I used while there) because it had a attractive exchange rate. And then kept both cards in my wallet, so that when I lost one, I lost both. Dumb.

2. Do make sure you have a copy of your credit card info with you. I did the front-back photocopy stuff, but as it turns out I could just as well have used my LastPass secure note info for each one (except I don’t usually include the contact phone numbers in my LastPass records, except it turns out that in this Modern Age you can just as easily cancel a credit card through the web page, though that doesn’t include an option to have the replacement sent to where you are, except that didn’t matter for us because we only had two full days left of vacation, or so we thought).

3. Take your time. Don’t do something like “I’ll stuff my wallet in this pocket, rather than take the extra thirty seconds to put it somewhere secure.”

Also, being in a foreign country without credit cards (even if your spouse has some) and DL (even if I had my passport) is a profoundly unsettling thing (though at least one member of our party said that I was outwardly handling it with far greater aplomb than they would have, which was nice). It probably saved me some money in not making purchases I would have otherwise, but, it was still kind of “One step away from disaster” sort of thing. Like when everyone else in my party had already boarded the (late) flight from Venice ahead of me, and then the board pass scanner bleated “Passenger not on this flight” when the attendant ran my ticket through. Ha! That was a really funny few moments of panic as I stood there with just a passport and a EUR 50 bill to survive on, until the other attendants pounded on some computers and got the machine to accept my boarding pass.

Okay, enough complaining. I have many wonderful photos and experiences to curate and report on, and will do so as soon as the couple-dozen higher priority things on my list are resolved. Regardless, it’s good to be home.

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