Chapter 1: Identity Thief –
It was 12 hours before our flight was scheduled to depart at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field, when Elizabeth began receiving email alerts from Paypal. Her email inbox and text messages were letting her know that purchases were being made to her account. She was sitting on the couch, in the living room of our newly rented house, which was still furnished with cardboard boxes, that we had not yet unpacked. While, she makes lots of weekly purchases using her Amazon Prime account, the charges that were showing up, weren’t purchases that she had made. One of the the charges was for over $1000, while another other charge was for a $2000 diamond ring from Overstock.com. When she opened the website to look at the statement, she noticed that while these two charges exceeded the balance of her bank account, a purchase of $834 had been approved. While, it didn’t get approved by her bank, she found out that an Apple laptop was also ordered. Luckily, the purchase was declined. Shocked by this sudden victimization by an identity thief, Elizabeth instantly began looking for a way to dispute the charges on the Paypal website. When that didn’t appear to be fruitful, she ran into the bedroom, to talk to a representative.
It was about 8pm and I was sitting at my desk, that was hidden behind folding screens from the rest of the living room, finalizing my packing for the trip. I had created a stack of important items on my white, cluttered IKEA desk, on top of everything else, to avoid confusion with any other random items that had made their home on the desktop. I made sure that I had our passports, our recently exchanged Yen, a battery bank, memory card for our Canon t4i. For safekeeping, I placed our Japan rail pass vouchers on the shelf below the desk. The rail pass vouchers were still located in the Fedex, 2 day mailing envelope, which I received them in, which was under the mailing envelopes that our passports arrived in.
I made sure that I removed the passports from the envelope and placed them into my black, Monster Energy backpack, which I earn by collecting 250 tabs from cans of Monster drink over a 6 month period. I placed the empty envelope on top of the one containing the rail pass vouchers. After I packed, my tablet, a puzzle book, and cell phone AC adapters into the backpack, I completely forgot that I needed to pack the rail pass vouchers. Concerned about the identity theft that had taken place, I walked into the bedroom, where Elizabeth was still on the phone with Paypal.
She was in a pretty frustrated state, and as I set my backpack down on the bed to start packing my clothes, she hung up. “They told me to call them at 5am, tomorrow morning. I am going to have to call them on the way to the airport. You have to remind me.” She told me, as I rolled up two of my favorite shirts, my WMMS t-shirt, and my NEOTOLEDO silk screen printed t-shirt, along with a pair of khaki dress pants, a few pairs of boxers, a pair of socks, and my Brooks running shoes. Everything packed tightly into the bag, which meant that the DSLR camera bag and the tripod would have to be attached separately.
I had decided to pack as light as possible, after mistakenly over-packing for our trip to Europe. In Europe, I carried a 40 lb. 70 liter backpack, and I was miserable. I was going to make sure that I was carrying virtually nothing this time. Elizabeth had other packing ideas. She was going to pack a massive roller bag, with a folding stroller wrapped into a makeshift pocket, then have me roll it all around Japan, while she carried our baby, Escher, in an ergobaby carrier.
Clearly, I thought that she would be packing minimally after our Eurotrip, as well, because she was going to be responsible for her luggage, but she knew that she wasn’t going to be carrying anything, so she packed it full of baby clothes, diapers, and her clothes until she almost wasn’t able to zip the bag closed. While roller bag technology has reached a level, where the bag is made of indestructible plastic, has four wheels that can move in any direction, with an easily extendable handle, this piece of crap 1990’s throwback, wasn’t worth the dragging around, even back then. As my future self pulled the bag up subway staircases and had it tumble during rush hour Tokyo crowds, he longed for the ability to go back in time, and at least chose the roller bag that wouldn’t be such a burden. But alas…
Elizabeth had gone to bed early, with Escher, and our older son Hendrix was nestled in bed, so I was up alone to polish up my Japanese with instructional youtube videos and make lists of phrases that I could possibly forget. While I eventually started to drift away, you never know what you are going to forget until it’s too late.