Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

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 🙂

a man wearing a mask and holding a red tool

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:

a stuffed toy sitting on top of luggage

  • 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


This site is part of an affiliate sales network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites, such as thepointsguy.com. This may impact how and where links appear on this site. Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Some or all of the card offers that appear on the website are from advertisers and that compensation may impact on how and where card products appear on the site. Any opinions expressed in this post are my own, and have not been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by my advertising partners and I do not include all card companies, or all available card offers. Terms apply to American Express benefits and offers and other offers and benefits listed on this page. Enrollment may be required for select American Express benefits and offers. Visit americanexpress.com to learn more. Other links on this page may also pay me a commission - as always, thanks for your support if you use them

User Generated Content Disclosure: Points With a Crew encourages constructive discussions, comments, and questions. Responses are not provided by or commissioned by any bank advertisers. These responses have not been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the responsibility of the bank advertiser to respond to comments.

BoardingArea