To myself and to you my dear readers but mostly to myself.  So, I owe you a long blog post about the amazing trip to Austria and Germany that we’ve just returned from.  A post full of pictures and stories and video of all the highlights of the trip.  There were loads- the race itself, the beauty of the Alps, driving the Grossglockner high alpine road, all the ducks, medieval cliff top fortresses, Salzburg, a quirky wine hotel, Klimt’s The Kiss in real life, Schonbrunn Palace, BMW World, Munich, etc etc.  I owe you a post about gorgeous wines, lovely mountain adventures, athletic triathletes and more.  But I can’t deliver.

Because I’ve done something stupid.  A momentary lapse, a split second misstep.  A blip in the matrix.

I left my camera in a taxi cab in Munich in the last 5 hours of our holiday.

Yep, most of the photos and videos- gone.  I hadn’t been drinking or distracted by gypsies– just in a rush and careless.  We all know what it’s like that split second that you realise that all is not right.   Whether it’s the moment the door slams behind you right as you remember your keys are on the other side or when you go to make a phone call and find out your phone isn’t on the table where it had been just a minute ago.  Or when you figure out that you’re on the wrong bus the one day you’re late for work, or coming back to a car with its lights left on knowing full well that it’s not going to start.  It’s that sinking feeling when you kick yourself for being so stupid and careless whilst realizing that accidents and mistakes happen to us all.

So unfortunately that is how my amazing trip to Europe ended.  In tears.  In a Munich police station trying to use the little German I know to tell a police woman how I had momentarily been careless enough to get out of a taxi with no receipt, no license plate number, no drivers name and no camera.  Of course this is after The Runner and I had been staring down taxi drivers for an hour to see if we could find the one we had been in before (we couldn’t.).  I guess if there is an upside (there’s not really) it’s that I’ve learned the word “lost” in German (verloren) and discovered a universal truth:  Taxis are the worst place in the world to lose anything no matter what country.  There must be an international black hole where lost taxi items and socks go never to be seen again.   I’ve finally fallen victim to it.

I will share some of our adventures in the coming days, but I need a bit of time to mourn the loss of Cam the Canon Camera.  Outside you were like any other camera, but what was on the inside of your little memory card brain can never be replaced.

I’ve learned a lot of lessons and picked up a lot of tips in the past few days- most of which I will probably never implement. Like always note your taxi driver’s name and number, take a picture of your contact details as the first photo on your camera SD card, write down the serial numbers for all of your possessions, write your name on everything with a dynamo label, check for your belongings every time you leave a vehicle.  All common sense things that no one does all the time.  We might do some of the things some of the time, but the one time we don’t…..  oh well….Maybe I’ll just use Uber from now on.  At least, it’s traceable.