Someone sent me a link to a blog post soliciting lost wallet stories. So I wrote one up.

“I was driving cross-country from Arizona to New Jersey in a rented minivan containing everything I owned at the time - it was the first leg of the trip, I’d completed most of the first leg through AZ/NM and I was headed north into Albuquerque late at night on Rte. 25. There I would meet friends who would put me up for the night.

Once in ABQ, I exited the highway an drove down an off-ramp that made a steady decline to a four-way stop intersection. As I approached, I realized I hadn’t gauged correctly the weight of my payload, and had to hit the brakes rather hard to make the stop sign. I felt the weight of my possessions lurch forward in the backseat. Worse, I heard a wrenching, popping sound coming from the front of the vehicle.

As I accelerated, I realized the tranny was blown. I ended up pushing the vehicle to a nearby service station, then called Avis to swap out their vehicle, waiting a good few hours for a new one to arrive.

When the new minivan arrived, my ABQ friends (who were kind enough to come down to help me) and I transferred all my stuff the new van, and the Avis guy took the old one away. All my stuff - minus one critical piece. Cavity searches of living and dead vehicles revealed nothing of the blue Eagle Creek velcro wallet, stolen and recovered in Prague five years earlier in an even odder story.

Flash back to an ill-fated stop in the Truth or Consequences a few hours earlier for grub, gas, and a hurried pee somewhere in the dark bushes, hearing the faint plop of something falling in the grass mid-urination but thinking little of it at the time.

I ended up at the local branch of my brank, draining my account of it’s final couple hundred bucks in order to get me through the duration of the trip. Once back on the east coast, I bought another blue Eagle Creek, which I have to this day.

So there you have it. Left my wallet in the Truth or Consequences. Made me feel like an Elephant Butte.”