There are many rules for traveling safely, and I generally follow them. I’d say that I’m a fairly conservative traveler, but today I broke one of the biggest and most obvious rules out there.
This rule is so obvious it’s not even explicitly listed in our 8 travel safety tips that will make you think twice while traveling or the 6 more tips for traveling safely What was it? What did I do that was so bad?
I left our backpacks in our car while we parked on the street
Why I’m so stupid
I mean, this is general advice that is not even specific to traveling – generally a good thing to do WHEREVER you go. Also because our rental car is so small, it doesn’t have a trunk, which is where I usually stick my backpack when I don’t want to carry things. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing to book a “standard” car after all….
I of course feel stupid and know that it’s entirely my fault. I actually even SAW the backpacks in the back seat when I locked the car but mentally thought “Oh well there’s nothing valuable in those”. The problem, of course, is that the THIEVES don’t know there’s nothing valuable in them.
It does give me a bit of a smile to think of the thief back in his “hideout”, looking through my junk (see below) and getting angry :-). It’s kind of like how I joke that my biggest concern if someone were to break in my house would be all the damage to the walls and house that they’d do after getting mad that they wasted all their time breaking in to find mismatched, borrowed and old junk 🙂
What did we lose?
Thankfully, I did follow some of our other travel safety tips, and kept my most important things either on my person or back in the room.
As far as we can tell, we lost:
- Various cell phone chargers, accessories and adapters
- My favorite international power adapter
- 2 ponchos
- 1 nicer plastic water bottle
- My son’s jacket
- Our travel mascot Mario
- Glasses case
- Earphones
- Our copy of Exploding Kittens 🙁
- And of course, the 2 backpacks themselves
All in all, an annoyance to be sure but it certainly could have been much worse. My son’s cell phone charger was still plugged in to the car’s USB port and our books on CD were still the car.
Our passports were in my pockets, and my laptop and charger were back in our room. So at least I don’t have to deal with getting a passport in one day to make a flight
Thankfully this will be a life lesson that was not TOO terribly painful to learn
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
You lost Mario?!?!?!?
Better you rethink your claim that there was nothing valuable in them.
I’m sorry that happened to you Dan! I’m glad you didn’t lose anything too valuable
Sniff sniff….Poor Mario. Hope he is happy living in Greece now.
Oh no! Glad you didn’t lose too much. Did they damage the rental car?! We ended up having to pay $180 when our BMW rental car was keyed in an 8 inch spot on the door while in Italy and chase sapphire preferred insurance wouldn’t pay the claim! I hope you don’t have any rental car or insurance issues. I wasted so much time trying to get the insurance claim paid. In the end I gave up, but it was actually chase’s loss since I don’t use their cards for travel expenses anymore. Citibank prestige insurance recently quickly paid a delay claim I had with no issues.
I am so sorry that happened. Especially the loss of Mario 🙁 *HUGS* for you!
The only things that I really missed were my earphones and mario. Everything else we could do without. Like my dad said, I was really glad and grateful that they didn’t take my cell phone charger, because it was right there. But then this morning, I lost it myself. Go figure.
Oh drag!!! Glad you didn’t lose passports! My friend had all of her luggage (2 people) stolen out of their rental car in Portugal. She lost everything. Pretty sure their passports were in there too.
What city was this in?
Athens Greece
Oh man that really stinks. I am sorry.
I can’t wait to hear more about Athens. We are headed there soon.
Suck brother. Happened to me recently. Love the F150 I got for a standard rate but nowhere to keep bags.
I’ve since bought a cable lock that goes with me everywhere. $10 on Amazon.
Lock bags together and loop that thing thru your seat frame or trunk hinge. Yeah it (or your bags) can be cut or the lock picked but these criminals dont run around with bolt cutters, not do they wanna take the time to cut 2-3 loops on my bag(s)…it’ll deter and foil the smash and grab criminal and save your stuff.
I truly enjoy your blog and would like to send you a new box of Exploding Kittens.
I have Amazon Prime so I can ship anywhere but I dont think Amazon will allow me to ship to a PO Box. If you care to privately email me your snail mail address I will order one for you and let you know its coming.
Thanks for all you do. (And your humility to acknowledge you are human like the rest of us.
Jerry
I did something similar last month only mine was much worse. After landing in Nicaragua we had a few hours to kill before leaving Managua so we went to lunch. The small back window on our rental was broken out and the thief got into the trunk and took 3 suitcases and a backpack. We had to turn around and come home the next day. I’ve traveled a decent amount (35 countries) and thought since I had a view of the car (although somewhat obstructed) from the patio we were eating at that I mitigated the danger.
You live and you learn I guess.
Sounds like San Fran..they break out windows and into cars a 1,000 times a day there…