Complacency

As you can see from the photograph above, we were having a pleasant evening around the campfire Friday night. It was the last night of our son and daughter-in-law's week long visit with us and our MB group was in fine spirits as usual. One of our group was trying to take our picture and her flash wouldn't work on her camera so she asked me to get my camera from our rig to take some pictures. Our rig was just a few paces away, located catty-corner to the empty site we were sitting at with our fire, with the back/street side exposed to us and the front/side door facing the beach road away from us.

As I approached the door I noticed the screen door was open and my thought was that the kids (sorry, Darb and Net) had not secured the door latch well when they came out after us. I grabbed the camera, called for the cat and went back to the group to give them the camera and tell Denny that I thought Patches had gotten out the door. Some of the group saw Patches under the fifth wheel that was parked in the adjacent site and we were able to chase her back into our trailer and close the screen door again. We sat and talked for a couple more hours and then the party broke up for the evening. Denny went into our bedroom and asked me if I had put his shorts away. He had been wearing shorts during the day, but the evening hours had gotten cold so he changed into jeans, leaving his wallet in his shorts. The shorts were no longer on the bed, so I searched the laundry basket, the drawers, the closet, on the floor--all over. Hmm. I went back into the living room and called the kids to see if they had accidentally picked up Denny's shorts with their stuff and they answered "no." So I searched again. And again. And finally we considered the possibility of theft, so I called our credit card company to see if any charges had been made on the card and indeed there had been, so we then called the local police department to make a report.

Now understand; our living room and dining room lights were on, there was a huge security light at the edge of the road next to our site and eight of us were sitting 30 feet away on the far back side of the trailer out of site but certainly in a position to come back to the trailer at any moment, plus there were two cars parked on our site. These people apparently waltzed in off the beach (the campground has security at the entrance) or were people camping here who had been watching us and our routine and knew we weren't in the trailer. Regardless, it was brazen and ballsy. The good news is that they only grabbed the shorts and didn't look around for my purse or any jewelry, my iPhone that was sitting on the counter, etc.

And now the fun begins; two separate police reports from two separate jurisdictions since the theft was in one jurisdiction and the credit cards were used in another (they do things differently down here), having both our credit union and credit card company fax affidavits to the police department so the officer would take a report, arrange to have a new Medicare card sent by mail, arrange to have a new Texas driver's license mailed to us, change credit cards for those companies that auto bill our account, blah, blah, blah. All of which is much harder to do when you are on the road.

So now after coming to this campground for 18 years without any thought or concern to our security we will be locking our doors whenever we leave the trailer. And that s*cks.