Out of Eden...

Travel adventures, like the rest of life, are rollercoaster rides of emotion. After three great days in Dubrovnik, I guess we should have seen the inevitable descent coming. We woke up early to catch the 8:00 bus to Sarajevo (actually, we woke up to catch a bus to catch our bus). The day started out with some minor annoyances; namely an unexplained bubbly rash on the back of my hands and the worst allergies I’ve had in years. Checking out at 6:30 AM was complicated by the fact that we were staying in a room belonging to a pizzeria and we could only exit through their doors, which we had to lock on the way out. We exited, locked the outer door of the pizzeria, and I went through a mental checklist of possible forgotten items, lest we orphan them when I dropped the key in the mail slot. When I was positive everything was go, I released the keychain into the slot and pulled back my left hand to reveal bare skin usually covered by a, now conspicuously absent, platinum wedding ring…

Any description I might attempt could do no justice to how I felt. If you really require a visual portrayal of my despair I suggest this: Pour a bottle of ink on a blank page, place a small dying small animal in the ink and let it writhe around. Then repeat for five pages. At least that’s what it’s going to look like in my autobiography. Maybe the PETA boycott will make headlines and boost sales…

We really didn’t know what to do. I knew it hadn’t fallen into the mail slot and I was pretty sure it wasn’t in the room…”How sure are you?” Mmmm…well, mostly sure. Our immediate solution was to write a note explaining the loss, include our address, and attach 20 Kuna for postage. As we walked to the bus stop (the bus to catch our bus) I began to feel even worse about the situation. When we reached the bus stop I realized that I didn’t even know the name of the place we had stayed at. After a couple minutes of nervous nauseous indecision, I decided to run back to the pizza place to see if anyone might have come in early. After a few minutes of sitting outside the pizza place, I decided that we were just going to have to miss the bus. Further obliterating our budget with another night in Dubrovnik and messing up my interview schedule were just going to have to be the price of my idiocy. I slowly slogged my way out of the old city and back up the hill to the bus stop where Erica was at. She had been really quite and calm about the whole thing so far, but I was playing it safe and avoiding eye contact all the same.

It turns out that my wife, having a cooler head and better sense than I, went through all my luggage while I was gone and found the ring in the toe of one of my shoes. No, I haven’t the slightest idea how it got there, and I’m not going to try to explain it. Kind of like the time I ended up in Mississippi while driving to Florida, I’m going to have to add this to the list of my indefensibly stupid misadventures. Nonetheless, I want my 20 Kuna back.