Some Dispatches From the Land of Lost Purses--and Tips on Keeping Your Grip

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when my mother bought me my first purse, but I will never forget the injunction it came with: “Never let it out of your sight,” she said.

At the time, I doubt I had much more to put in it than $10, a hairbrush and a library card. But these things became precious because I kept them in my purse. According to Sheila Swan, coauthor of “Safety and Security for Women Who Travel” (Travelers’ Tales Guides, $12.95), “Women have a visceral connection with that little bag they carry around.”

By the time I grew up and started traveling, my mother’s words had become deeply ingrained, though I eventually started wearing a fanny pack instead of carrying a purse. I keep my valuables there when I’m on the road, strapped tight against my waist. In especially dicey places, I hide my passport, traveler’s checks, credit cards and cash in a money belt underneath my clothes, leaving just enough cash in the fanny pack to see me through the day. But I feel the same way about the fanny pack as I feel about a purse. If I lose sight of it even for a minute, I gasp and my adrenaline flows. Sharing rooms with strangers in hostels, I’ve gone to bed with my pack cradled in my arms. In hotels with shared baths, I take it with me to the shower. And I wouldn’t dream of removing it for the sake of comfort on long plane rides.

If you’ve ever lost your purse, you’ll appreciate how I felt one afternoon at the Honolulu airport, where I was catching a flight home after a visit to the Big Island. I took the shuttle from the inter-island terminal to the gate for my flight to L.A. There, I immediately realized that I’d left the straw bag--containing my camera, film and notes for a story--on the shuttle. What a sight I must have been sprinting back to the shuttle stop and flagging down every bus that passed, hoping to find my bag. Fortunately, I found it on the front seat of the fourth shuttle that passed. But after I had it safe on my shoulder again, it took me a good while to calm down.

After all, losing your purse can spoil a trip, forcing you to use precious vacation time to cancel credit cards, replace travelers’ checks and get a new passport.

A colleague of mine, Michelle, found this out the hard way several years ago on the way to Jamaica with her mother. At a security checkpoint in LAX, she stuffed her small shoulder bag, containing her wallet, inside a carry-all and sent the whole bundle through the X-ray machine--or so she thought. But the next morning when they reached Miami, she went to a snack shop to buy a cup of coffee and discovered that her small bag wasn’t where she thought she’d put it.

Right away Michelle suspected that she’d been preoccupied or distracted back at the security checkpoint and had somehow left her shoulder bag there. She made a series of panicked calls to LAX as her mother fumed. Her story has a happy ending because she still had her travel documents, making it possible for them to fly on to Jamaica. Her purse was eventually located at LAX’s lost-and-found office. But the temporary loss of her cash and credit cards dampened the fun of the vacation. And I can well imagine her mother’s reaction. If I’d lost my purse under similar circumstances, my mom would still be talking about it.

Author Swan, who once left her purse on the counter of a pub in London, says the best way to avoid such mishaps is to give yourself plenty of time when you travel. “Especially in foreign countries, don’t be in a hurry. Take some deep breaths and always think about what you’re doing.”

Swan also advises women to leave precious, irreplaceable items at home, and to carry a purse or fanny pack close to your body where you can feel it so you immediately know when it’s not there. According to Swan, the best strategy for traveling to faraway places is to keep just one credit card and a small amount of cash handy, hiding away the rest of your valuables in a money belt.

My sister, Martha, who was shocked when someone picked her purse last year in the vestibule of Salzburg Cathedral, learned from the experience that travelers are vulnerable everywhere. “I was just too trusting of churches,” she says. And Evelyn Hannon, editor of Journeywomen.com, an online travel magazine, avoids leaving her valuables behind in hotel rooms by putting her money belt with the clothes she lays out for the coming day.

But among travel experts, there’s disagreement about whether you should carry your passport and most important valuables in a money belt, as Swan suggests, or leave them in a hotel safe. Mary Beth Bond, author of numerous books on travel, including “A Woman’s World” (Travelers’ Tales Guides, $17.95), routinely stashes most of her cash, tickets and passport in hotel safes, which is why the teenage boys who robbed her at the Louvre 20 years ago got slim pickings.

The very best piece of advice I’ve heard on the subject, in fact, comes from Bond. She recalls the way a family vacation in the Canadian Rockies was saved when someone found the purse her mother had left on a hotel bench. The good Samaritan had turned it in to a front desk clerk. “When you find a lost purse, always turn it in,” she says, which sounds like a female traveler’s golden rule.