I originally submitted this to Budget Travel magazine for their True Stories section, but they never published it. One of the great things about having your own website is that you can publish whatever you want without having it approved by the editor. So, here it is…
Last year when we took a family vacation to Mexico, we got an unexpected surprise. After spending 7-nights at a nice resort hotel we were surprised to find a piece of luggage missing from our room. On the day we checked in, we unpacked our bags and placed them in the closet. But on our last day there, we found them all except for our daughters Dora the Explorer rolling backpack, a bag that had traveled with us on all our trips. We searched the room and did not find anything else missing, just our daughter’s bag. We called the front desk and they sent security to our room. They searched the room thoroughly, but could not find it. They asked if we wanted to speak to the Mexican police and fill out a police report, but we declined. The bag wasn’t worth more than twenty dollars. We filled out the hotels paperwork describing our bag and giving the details of where we last saw it, and then checked out. We were completely surprised that somebody came into our room and stole our daughter’s bag, but left our much more expensive bags.
After we returned home, we opened the door to our house and noticed that in the corner of our living room was the Dora the Explorer bag. It all came back to me. The night before we left I was concerned about space, so I switched our daughter’s bag out for a bigger one.