"WHERE ARE THE PASSPORTS!"

I (Sam) have been doing some really dumb stuff lately. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I think that I'm just getting dumber. A few of the most recent incidence include buying train tickets for the wrong week and dropping my wedding ring down a flight of stairs to have it break in half at the bottom. The worst was somehow letting my fanny pack out of sight long enough to have it stolen, along with my wallet, checkbook, and both of our passports. Brilliant. We got off the bus, crossed the street to the train station, and while waiting in line to buy tickets I reached for my wallet and realized it was gone. I sprinted back to the bus, searched it with the help of the bus driver, but to no avail.

We filed a police report with the national police, talked with the resort and called the embassy. The embassy said that after we get a copy of the police report, we need to come in the next morning to fill out an application for a temporary passport, and that it would cost us 260 euros! (appr. $370) We were devistated.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending! The next morning, we were woken up by a phone call that scared the pants off me. They found our passports! It was about 30 minutes before we would have left to go get the new passports. If they had called 30 minutes later, we would have been on our way to spend the morning getting passports and paying big bucks only to come home to find out they had found our old ones. We were ecstatic, and extremely grateful. We had to take a train about 30 minutes into the city to get to the national police station. Everything had obviously been rummaged through, but everything was left except for 25 US dollars. Thank goodness for understanding criminals!