So I'm a very well-traveled dude (60+ countries), and the company I keep is often also well traveled, and usually street smart (or so I assumed, until this morning).

Two of my best friends are travelling around Spain and Portugal for 2 weeks.

This morning I received a phone call from one of them to tell me they had their bag stolen in Lisbon.

Having believed them to be rather street-smart (emphasis on past tense), I expected it to involve some dramatic robbery in which they were wildly outsmarted. But to my great surprise, it was the most unexpected theft ever...

• They were sitting on a restaurant patio at a small round table with 3 chairs.

• On the empty chair they set their backpack (as we all often do when we go to a restaurant, no further than half a foot from them).

• Someone down the street yelled very loud.

• As they turned their heads to the right to see what it was, someone from the left quickly snatched their bag, and ran away without them noticing.

The culprits obviously planned it to happen this way. The whole thing it took all of 2 seconds.

What was lost in the bag (between the two of them):

• Drivers licenses

• The keys to the rental vehicle

• National ID cards (with the equivalent of a social insurance or social security number on them)

• 5 credit cards (since you can never have too much debt while visiting Portugal!)

• 4 bank cards (because obviously 1 is not enough?)

• A 128gb iPhone which was more than 1/2 full of photos + all the other info a person has in their phone... which btw, had not been backed up for almost 8 months!

• 600 Euros in cash (like WTF!)

• A Costco membership card (Just in case they get bulk-size hungry?)

• Two gym membership cards (did they seriously think they were going to work out after supper?)

• Frequent flyer cards

• Airline membership cards

• The number to the hotel safe written on a piece of paper (but not memorized, FFS)

• Hotel room keys WITH the hotel room still written on the key-card pouch (Did you note the above line btw?)

• Monthly subway pass from their home city on the other side of the world (because everyone knows that will get you around every continent /s)

• Work ID pass with magnetic door entry (In case they want to start a branch of their business in Portugal??)

• Auto association membership card (Like why? Really, why?)

• Health insurance cards x 2 (which, btw, are only valid in their home country).

• Travel health insurance cards

• The rental agreement with all the rental information for the rental car.

• 5 different points cards for department stores in their home country (face-palm x 10!)

• A gas card for filling up their car in their home country (shaking my head here folks)

• The garage door opener from home (Am not shitting you!!)

• The company garage door opener card for the underground parking at their work (Still not shitting you!)

• A professional membership card (Don't know what they were thinking, but you never know when you'll need your credentials /s)

• A couple of USB keys with all of their work on them (Just in the even that they had an hour over diner to do their work???)

I'll stop there (And the above was just the wallet stuff... I didn't even go into the other stuff they had in their backpack).

Thankfully (although surprisingly, after learning about the above shit-show), they left their passports in the hotel room safe (but I haven't yet heard if the thief tried to use their hotel room key and safe password... Can you imagine!?)

Of course, they immediately went to the police station. As they were waiting the two hours to file a police report in the police station, one tried to cancel half the library and their entire life that was stolen from them, while the other filed a police report.

Why, might you wonder, was the wait at the police station 2 hours long? Well, it was because 6 other tourist in front of them were also theft-victims. They were filing their own police reports with eerily similar stories of theft (pick-pocketing & bags stolen).

Moral of the story (and here is your TL/DR):

• Do you really have to carry your entire life with you when travelling out of country? Really?

• Do you even have to leave the hotel room with anything but one bank or credit card and one sheet of paper with a photocopy of your passport bio page, a photocopy of your bank or credit card, a photocopy of your travel health insurance info, and emergency contact info written on it?

If the answer to both of these questions is no, then don't.

Also, pro-tip: When I did the bulk of my solo travels, I always had a light rope. One end was permanently tied to my backpack, and the other end had a key-clip which I affixed to whatever was around me (usually in a way so the key clip wasn't visible). That way, if someone tried to take my bag by surprise, it would catch and would give the thief quite a surprise. (And the couple of cards I did need to carry were usually tucked away in a tiny aluminum business card holder on my person anyway).

Call me paranoid, but my light back-pack rope with a clip would have likely stopped their bag from getting stolen. And if you're as forgetful as I can sometimes be, if you clip it to your belt loop when seated, you won't get up and forget it! (And even if it did get stolen, my bag had hardly anything in it that would have otherwise thrown my life upside down).

These simple measures have made it so that 60+ countries later, I have never had anything outright stolen (and, as you can see in the above link, some of the countries I traveled to had pretty nail-biting components to them). Hopefully you won't either.