April 27, 2018 - A Very Bad Day...

April 27, 2018 goes down in the Long Family history as a very bad day. Our ten months of travel bliss (barring my father's illness and a couple close calls with catching trains and planes) quickly came crashing down.

I got my phone stolen on the Barcelona subway in the morning, and had our rental car broken in to in Southern France and had four of five backpacks taken. While their target was clearly our technology (three computers, two tablets, and Autumn's phone), what really hurts is they ran off with our fuzzy friends (Bandit, Chester, Love-y, and Pleepleus), along with Nicole's and Autumn's journals. And the kicker is they nabbed our passports too. 

When your life for a year is sitting in a car, and it's broken in to, it hurts bad. Like punch to the gut bad.

We spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening at the local police station filing a report. Fortunately some good samaritans that were nearby helped us contact the police, and our amazing Airbnb host literally sat with us at the police station for the entire time, and shuttled us back and forth to his apartment. Such a kind hearted man.

We now have temporary passports and will be going to the US embassy in Paris next week to see what else we need to do. We spent the afternoon today on a shopping trip to the French equivalent of Walmart, so we were able to get most things we need to reanimate our backpacks. It just sucks to have to rebuild a world that was working so well.

I couldn't be more proud of how the kids are handling this. Yeah they're devastated, but still have the urge to press on...

Bryce has amazing resilience and is already warming up to his new softer and sightly bigger hedgehog, but poor Zane is really crushed by his loss. We took a drive around the adjacent rough and tumble neighborhood near the parking lot in the desperate hope that they tossed the bags (and our furry friends) aside, but to no avail. Autumn is incredible and has really stepped up to comfort the boys... and us too. She has remained cool headed thru this whole ordeal.

Nicole and I are doing our best to keep our spirits up, but it's tough when we feel like someone sucker punched us in the gut. We had a sleepless night last night. I was replaying the events over and over and kicking myself for getting complacent. After all, we just went ten months traveling thru some pretty sketchy places without a scratch, so when it came to a nice little town in the South of France, I didn't bat an eye to leave our car for the afternoon. Stupid. I even said as we walked away... "We can leave the passports in the car". Stupid. Same goes for getting my phone stolen. We were the epitome of silly tourists trying to jam in to a crowded rush hour train with five giant bags, one of which I had to hold on top of another. I was standing right next to the door too! Stupid.

At the moment we're taking things day by day. The sting of the violation is slowly fading which is giving us clearer heads. We're just still very tired. Life will go on and nobody is hurt (at least not physically). Our message to the kids has been to not let this spoil all the fantastic adventures we've had, nor jade their view of how incredible this planet is and how wonderful people really are. We had total strangers step up to help us over the past 24hrs, and it has helped to ease the pain and anxiety.

These events come at a point in our travels where we were already losing some steam, so it is certainly giving us pause. But one thing seems fairly certain though, now that we've surpassed the 10 month mark, we all seem set on crossing the one year finish line. How we get there is the question. We didn't come this far, to only come this far....

All for now... Next stop:???

PS. We still have to fill the gap of Milan and Barcelona blogs

Au Revoir our friends....