Some Mishaps End With Thanks, Not Complaints

It was an early July morning inside the airport that serves Hartford, Conn. My family was wrapping up a 10-day trip around New England, and four of us sat sprawled amid 12 pieces of luggage, waiting for our flight back to Southern California. When word came from the P.A. system, we rose and filed out to the tarmac.

But five hours later, as we approached LAX, the baggage-and-carry-on tally had shrunk to 11. This was bad. We’d left the camcorder--a borrowed one at that--holding all of our vacation’s video footage back in Connecticut.

I called the airport and asked who was in charge of lost and found. The state police, someone said. So I placed another call, despairing as I punched the numbers. I couldn’t even remember the brand name of the camcorder.

But in the next few moments, I got a valuable reminder: Though this column mostly concerns itself with tourism’s many perils, injustices, rip-offs and inconveniences, the happy truth is that once in a while a traveler stumbles into truly wonderful service or selfless good deeds. And those deeds deserve more notice than they get.

“There are these shining lights out there, and you never hear about them,” says Laurie Berger, editor of the Consumer Reports Travel Letter. Sometimes those lifesavers are travel industry employees, who may or may not be following company policy. Sometimes they’re just good Samaritans.

Margo Classe, author of “Hello Italy! An Insider’s Guide to Italian Hotels $50-$99 a Night for Two” (Wilson Publishing, $18.95), remembers the Venice hotelier who rescued her during a flood last October by giving her a pair of galoshes, even though she wasn’t a guest at his hotel and he didn’t know she was writing a guidebook.

Loretta and Bryan Duberow of Corona del Mar got such unexpectedly good service in Morro Bay over the Independence Day weekend that they wrote a letter to this newspaper about it. The two had driven there to celebrate their second anniversary, but at Morro Rock their car’s alarm system malfunctioned and left them stranded. Enter the Samaritans.

First came Action Towing, whose staffers, Loretta Duberow reports, were “kind, quick and knowledgeable.” They took the car to Main Street Chevron, whose mechanics worked on the car for nearly an hour on the Fourth of July and proffered free Coke and Advil. When the mechanics couldn’t solve the problem, they charged nothing and arranged to store the car overnight. At the Duberows’ hotel, the Inn at Morro Bay, management consoled them with a free bottle of champagne. The next day, July 5, the vehicle was taken to Perry Ford in San Luis Obispo. Not only was the service department open on a holiday, it had the car fixed in an hour. Once they got home, Duberow sent thank-you notes to all involved.

“Our weekend could easily have been ruined,” she wrote, “but the kindness of people who helped us saved the day and made the best of a less-than-perfect situation.”

In my family’s case, it’s the Connecticut State Police who deserve the thank-you note. The first good sign, when I called with my sketchy information about the missing camcorder, was that a human voice answered. It was the night-shift dispatcher, who cross-questioned me on the item, left the line for a moment, then returned to give the good news.

Two days after leaving it behind, I had the camcorder in my hand and a deep debt of gratitude to dispatchers Chris Smedick and Deborah Hence.

By the way, the odds of such a thing occurring at LAX, where more than 150,000 travelers pass through on an average day, are iffy. The airport police do maintain a lost-and-found phone number, but most airlines, stores and restaurants in LAX have their own, so a search could mean a lot of calls. In June, Sgt. Val Valentine reports, LAX police logged 175 new pieces of lost property and returned 72. (After 97 days, the items are subject to being auctioned off by the Los Angeles Police Department.)

But a column about happy ending should end with one. I take you now to Jane Etter, of West Palm Beach, Fla., who two summers ago heard of an Indian sage in the northern mountains of Nicaragua and decided to go looking for him.

Etter flew to Managua, then took a series of buses to the provincial town of Jinotega, where she persuaded a 12-year-old boy to take her up the mountain path to the wise man. Etter, an editor of the budget travel newsletter the Shoestring Traveler, describes herself as 55 years old and “sturdy.” At 5-foot-6, she towered over most of the Indians in the town.

But several miles outside Jinotega, she and the boy got lost. Then Etter slipped in mud and broke her leg. She had been crawling back toward town for about an hour, with the boy, when the two encountered an Indian couple coming the other way on the path.

“The top of the man’s head came to my shoulder,” Etter recalls. “His feet had to be size 4. He was tiny and he was lithe. And he said, ‘I’ll carry you back.’ ”

“He spent five hours carrying me on his back. We were climbing stony, slippery mountains. And on the way, he stopped when I needed to rest. That was embarrassing. By the time we were halfway down that mountain I about worshiped him.”

Near the village, a local lady brought out a wheelbarrow to carry Etter, and a team of townspeople delivered her to a main road, flagged down a taxi, then stood and waved as she was borne off to a clinic. There workers took X-rays and put her in a cast, no charge. Someone found crutches in an attic (the clinic had none). Etter made it home, and her leg recovered fully. She had heard that her rescuer’s job during Nicaragua’s civil war had been carrying the wounded back from the front lines, but she never got his name. Etter is planning, one day soon, to go back and bring the Jinotega clinic a few pairs of crutches.

Christopher Reynolds welcomes comments and suggestions but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or send e-mail to chris.reynolds@latimes.com.