Pickles

I lost all my passports, resident cards, many credit cards, and travel tickets and documents in Seoul once right before a Christmas holiday break. They were in one of those Tumi travel wallets, and I left them in a taxi apparently. I still had my wallet and some cash. (I learned about this because I eventually got them back a few weeks later, when the taxi driver found them in a cleaning and sent them on to the hotel where I had been picked up. This also reminds me of the time I overpaid a Seoul taxi driver on a trip to the airport, and he parked his car and frantically looked for me up to security to return the money).

In the span of 36 hours, I was able to convince: one of my countries' embassies to issue me an emergency passport; the airline for my flight to Tokyo to take my word that a ticket existed, but the fact I didn't have it didn't mean I needed to buy a new one; Korean immigration to let me out of the country without an entry stamp; Japanese immigration to let me in as a resident with no proof of residency; the US embassy in Tokyo to issue me travel papers to re-enter the US without legit documentation; and the airline in Tokyo to let me on the plane.

I had to delay my travel to the US for one day, given all the shenanigans, and to top it all off I was flying on miles, but I was able to work it with the airline to get an open seat from a different fare bucket for the next day to be allocated to the miles bucket so I wouldn't have to buy a ticket.