¿Dónde están los ladrónes?

JUPITER, Fla. -- We made it! Will and I arrived safely back in Miami this morning, but not without the usual drama. Well, this time, we had a bit more than the usual drama. I'd give it a 7 on the 1-to-10 fiasco spectrum scale.

We checked out of the luxury apartment this morning so the owner could clean it for guests arriving that night. We left our bags with the friendly doorman downstairs, who put them in a secure room awaiting our return that evening for our redeye flight.

I hesitated a moment, wondering what I should do with my iPod and cellphone. I usually take them with me rather than check them. But, an acquaintance had just regaled us with the story of a brazen purse-snatching on the streets of Buenos Aires. Our alternative, putting the iPod and phone in Will's backpack for the duration of a crowded subway ride, seemed even less secure. So, in a fit of bad judgment, I left them in a case at the bottom of my backpack, solidly buried under a copy of 100 Years of Solitude, my glasses, sunglasses, accounting workbook, two reporter's notebooks, three possibly pirated CDs, two purses made of antique weavings (one full of silver jewelery), a guide to the La Paz Coca Museum, and the July issue of Latin American Vogue.

This did not deter the thief.

We returned from a leisurely lunch with Andrew and hopped in a cab for the international airport, where I discovered the absence of my cellphone and iPod in a backpack that had been rifled through. The culprit did not appear interested in Garcia Marquez, jewelery or my credit cards (which saved me the headache of canceling them).

But worse, I could not find my camera with the previous two days' photos on it. I had asked Will for it at lunch, and he said he had seen it in my bag that morning before we checked it. So we assumed that's where my camera was, and we used his camera the rest of the day. The moment of discovery at the airport improved from 'disastrous theft of irreplaceable proportions' to 'merely irritating and expensive' when Will found my camera in his bag, where it had been all along. Whew! Our photos of Uruguay returned from oblivion. Don't know what we would have done without those.

And really, both my old phone and iPod both would need replacing soon anyway. Thank goodness for planned obsolescence. It took the sting out of the incident, as did Will's amusement at the image of a thief listening to my eclectic and lowbrow iPod playlists somewhere ... including, oddly enough, Shakira's ¿Dónde están los ladrónes?, about the theft of her luggage, and song lyrics, in the Bogotá airport.

So, it could have been a lot worse.