Now that we can’t pack mouthwash or Pepto-Bismol in carry-on luggage on airplanes, it’s imperative that our check-in luggage makes it to the hotel. My suitcase didn’t make the same trip I did recently to Las Vegas, and what a mess that causes.
We were expected at a pool party and I had no bathing suit. You feel so helpless watching the luggage cruise around and around the baggage carousel when yours doesn’t show up, but it could have created a financial windfall. Every 24 hours with no suitcase, America West promised to let me spend $25 for clothing and incidentals.
Whoopee, I would have clean socks.
Luckily my bag was delivered to the hotel the night we arrived.
Myrna Overstreet of Everett was in Spain when she saw a group of people from the Pacific Northwest with no luggage for three days.
“We were enjoying the beautiful weather in cool clothing, and they were still in their warm Pacific Northwest clothing,” Overstreet said. “That really taught me to carry some necessities in a carry-on, which is problematic these days.”
Going to Philadelphia through Salt Lake City, Dulcie and Jack Sahlberg of Mill Creek were without luggage.
“I slept in my slip (we wore them back then), Jack in his skivvies,” Dulcie Sahlberg said. “He needed to look sharp for convention meetings, so we headed to a mall nearby for a clean shirt and tie for him.”
Their luggage had a nice three-day trip to New York.
“Each morning as I went to breakfast with the women who attended, my garments had not changed – until one morning I walked in in different clothes,” she said. “I was greeted with applause and the announcement ‘Her bags have been found’.”
Last year, Janice DeShon won a trip to the Caribbean at the Taste of Edmonds. There was shuffling of flights, and she lost her luggage. She went to St. Croix and the bags went to St. Thomas.
“After 2 days and numerous phone calls to the airline, our luggage showed up at the hotel,” DeShon said. “The rest of the trip was amazing.”
When she was a National Park Service ranger in Hawaii at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Melanie Ford Bissey of Camano Island used to see luggage stolen all the time. The park is five minutes from the airport.
Folks would come straight from a flight to see the memorial and often returned to find their luggage stolen from the parking lot. Eventually there was a stake-out that lasted about five hours before thieves were caught, she said.
The theft ring eyed cars from a high-rise across the street. They knew how long visitors typically stayed at the park. Put valuables out of sight in a trunk before you get to a tourist spot, Ford Bissey said.
She has also lost luggage twice, but both times she was on her way home, which lessened the impact.
“My husband worked for Enterprise Rent A Car and the company had given everyone luggage for Christmas,” Ford Bissey said. “We went to see family for Christmas that year and we used the new luggage. And when we flew home, unfortunately for us, there was someone else on the plane that worked for Enterprise, using their new luggage, and needless to say we ended up with their luggage and they got ours.”
Alaska Airlines was quite generous when Heidi Kell of Everett didn’t get her bags when she returned from Las Vegas.
“When I went to baggage claim in Seattle, I was told my bags went to San Jose,” Kell said. “My bags came to Seattle only an hour after we did, and I got $300 in Alaska vouchers. I am a carry-on-only gal since that day.”
Dana Libby with the Salvation Army in Everett traveled with a backpack as a missionary. Libby took a group from a small church in the Welsh Valleys to spend a week working with refugees in Greece. They lost their luggage.
“The group learned about the joy of working in a kitchen preparing meals for 700 or so newly arrived refugees in the Athens 95 degree summer heat, all with no change of clothes and a very weak shower to share amongst a group of 10,” he said. “It certainly gave them some new insights about the life of a refugee.”
Also on a mission trip, Steve Goodman of Mountlake Terrace said a worker had her luggage, including her passport and money, stolen in Venezuela.
“The rest of us, who had observed her shining light and servant’s heart and talent over the duration of the trip, were stunned,” Goodman said. “Unbeknownst to her, many people pooled their Bolivars (the currency in Venezuela) that they would have otherwise turned in for dollars for some spending money on their return to North America and came up with about $2,000 dollars.”
The money was given to the woman before she left for mission work in Europe.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the place,” Goodman said. “To those of us who were all rooted and established in God’s love together, it was an example of him working through his people for his purposes that no one there has probably ever forgotten.”
I’m leaving for three weeks of vacation but won’t be going anyplace where I could lose my luggage. On our trip to Las Vegas without my bag, I did make the pool party, wearing a tank top, T-shirt and my husband’s extra pair of swimming trunks.
In fact, snapshots of me at the cabana in that getup are online at www… Oh shoot, the column is too long today so I can’t finish the Web address.
Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.
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