Monday Morning and No Phone

Monday morning, we got up a little early to pack the truck and head off to Johannesburg to meet a friend of Jennifer’s, have lunch and catch our plane.  It didn’t leave until 8:30 at night, so we had lots of time to enjoy the day.  However, we got up and as I was weighing the suitcases and getting them ready to go, I realized that I didn’t have my phone with me.  I brought my cell phone with me to Africa, but couldn’t use it, of course.  We would need it when we arrived back in Seattle to call Pam, our friend, to come pick us up.  I knew I had seen it earlier in our trip, but couldn’t remember where it was.  No one had seen it.  I looked in my carry on bag, no phone.  We looked in all the other carry on bags, no phone. Then we started to look in the suitcases.  Marty had packed them all the night before, and now I went though them all.  No phone.  Could the guy who stole my razor taken the phone too?  No, I’m sure I had seen it since then. 

I look again in the carry on bags.  No phone.  I look again in the suitcases.  No phone.  This time, as I go through the suitcases, I remove everything, and then put everything back.  As I do, I hear Marty saying, “So much for me neatly packing things ahead of time.”  I make sure the suitcases are packed, weighted, and put down in the truck.  Side note.  There is a 50 pound limit in the US on baggage, but if you fly from South Africa to the US, the weight limit is 70 pounds (32 kg).  If I would have known that, I wouldn’t have worried about one suitcase weighting right at 50 pounds. 

As I’m doing this, Marty asks again, “Did you look in your carry on?”  “Yes,” I assured her, “4 times.”  We pray, we look around Jenn’s place.  We find Andy’s bathroom kit and he puts that in his backpack.  Finally in desperation, I look again in my carry on.  What I use is a bag that I inherited from my son, Josh.  It has a lot of places to put things, besides the laptop.  I had looked in all of the places 4 times.  Well, all the places except one.  As I opened it, I remembered that on a previous trip, I had put our boarding passes in this particular zippered pouch and couldn’t find them for a long time.  We were at the counter and panicking.  Anyway, as I opened the pouch, I remembered putting the phone in there so it wouldn’t get lost and I’d know exactly where it was.  Boy, did I feel silly after finding the phone just where I had put it.

But we had spent almost an hour trying to find the phone, so we ate breakfast bars and cereal at Jenn’s and off we went to JoBerg to meet Jennifer’s friend.