Chaos and Tragedy

Yesterday was completely chaotic. It started out well enough, with this peculiar boat pulling up alongside ours in La Spezia, which made a great photo with the sunrise. Is Warner Brothers getting royalties? I imagine so.

We disembarked the cruise ship at 8:45 a.m., and boarded our chartered buses for Rome at 9:30. It took more than an hour to drive the 39 miles from Civitavecchia to our hotel, the Marcella Royal near the Villa Borghese. We all piled out of two buses, dragged our suitcases two blocks to the hotel and stepped into the blissfully air conditioned lobby to find lots of other people already there -- some leaving, some arriving, some apparently just hanging out. It was madness for a while, with many people lined up in the sun outside (on a 97º F day -- that's 36º C) just waiting to even access the lobby. Dave and I were fortunately some of the first in the group so we at least waited inside. Eventually we were shown to our room.

We put our bags down and decided to go find lunch. Now, things get fuzzy for me here, and you'll see in a moment why this is important. I think I grabbed my camera bag, because we intended to go from lunch for a brief walk around a nearby piazza, and I wanted to be able to take pictures. I don't have a clear memory of carrying it to lunch but I believe that I did.

We ate at the little restaurant on the left, behind those triple-parked cars (which is why I took this picture, using my phone). The food was great -- bruschetta pomodoro and some sage ravioli for me, and a couple of beers. Then we wandered around the piazza, which turned out not to be a piazza at all but the Gardens of Sallust, a conference and arts center built into some Roman ruins. Interesting, but we didn't stay because it was deathly hot and we wanted to get back to the hotel. I took one more picture with my phone.

We got back to the hotel, and lay down for a nap. A couple of hours later, I woke up and wanted a drink of water. I looked for my camera bag, which contained my bottled water, and it was nowhere to be found in our hotel room. This is when I realized I must have left it behind in the restaurant.

I checked with the front desk just to make sure I didn't leave it in the hotel lobby, and they didn't have it. I went back to the restaurant, and they said they'd found nothing.

So I looked at the "Find My" function on my iPhone, because my AirPods were in my camera bag. They were shown as being in a neighborhood behind the Termini train station -- not an area I'd visited. Someone had clearly found/stolen and spirited away my camera bag.

I knew immediately that I was pretty much sunk. The odds of getting it back were minuscule. But Dave and I took a taxi to the address, determined to try. "Find My" showed (and still shows) the AirPods in the middle of a street, so we looked into parked cars and checked the area. Our taxi driver even helped. There were three large rubbish bins next to the street, and his theory was that someone discarded the empty bag (or maybe just the AirPods) in one of those bins, knowing they could be traced. I tried to get the AirPods to make noise but couldn't get that function to work, and I even unloaded the bins about halfway but found nothing. (And then I put the trash back, don't worry.)

So, yeah. My camera is gone. Not a loss I take lightly, and I hate the fact that I can't be exactly sure how it happened. My best guess is that I took the bag to the restaurant and left it on the floor beside my chair. Why I didn't realize it while we were walking around immediately afterwards -- and I was taking pictures with my phone -- I don't know. I blame the heat, the two beers and the chaotic day.

I filed a report with the Carabinieri so I can hopefully claim the camera on my travel or homeowner's insurance. It's an expensive camera (with three lenses) but it's also 15 years old, and it has done yeoman's work for all that time, so I'm not too broken up about it. There were no pictures on it -- I'd downloaded everything, fortunately -- and it has felt too heavy and antiquated for a while now. Maybe I'll buy a new one that better suits my needs at this point in my life. Or maybe I'll just use my phone and/or my stepmother's camera. I once had dreams of turning photography into some sort of profession, but let's face it -- all I'm ever going to do is blog.

Likewise, I don't mourn the AirPods -- a couple of years old and easily replaceable. I do mourn the loss of my house keys, which were in the bag, but we have spares. (I don't think it's likely that someone will fly to London to burglarize us, but I may look into changing the locks because our address is on the bag.) I carried an antique key on my key chain given to me 42 years ago by one of my best friends in high school, and I mostly hate to lose that key, even though it fits no lock.

I lost nothing else of value. My passport was in my pocket, thank goodness, along with my wallet and phone -- I never put any of it in a bag for just this reason.

I have a feeling I will be mulling this over for a while, trying to figure out exactly how and when I became separated from the bag and how I didn't notice for so long. Dave never noticed anything either, and his memory is as fuzzy as mine about when and where I had it last. As I said, it was a crazy day, and Rome is a crazy city, and it is what it is.

What's really bizarre is that this is the second camera I've lost in a traveling mishap in a Mediterranean country. I lost my old Canon AE-1 (a film camera) in 2000 when a taxi driver in Greece drove away with my backpack. And that time I lost my whole bag -- all my clothes, my undeveloped film, everything! Never got any of it back. So at least this situation isn't that dire.

We are going to try to make the best of our brief Rome visit today and see some sights before heading to the airport at 5:30 p.m. for our late evening flight.