We was robbed

I'm on the tail end of the two week Canada vacation. It has been incredible. Most of it has been camping, although we spent our first vacation night with friends in Seattle and the second night in a freaking awesome hotel in Vancouver's west end. That night we parked quasi-illegally on Denman street, which is a major thoroughfare. I left pretty much everything in the car. No problem, everything was there the next morning, sans ticket.

About twelve days later we are back in Vancouver, staying in the hostel, enjoying such wonders as a mattress and showers after a fortnight in the wilderness. We parked behind the hostel in one of the 6 designated parking spots in the alley. This is thirteen blocks from where we'd parked on Denman two weeks before.

These parking spots are monitored periodically be the desk staff (a precaution I'd felt to be a little extreme -- we aren't in the shabby meth-lab part of town -- but comforting), and I was up looking for tea bright and early, so I know it was sometime between 4am and 6am when my passenger window was smashed in and the following things were stolen:



- Pentax digital SLR camera, plus data card with 600 pictures on it. (That's all the vacation pictures plus about 150 other pictures from before the trip).

- Army surplus knapsack, fabric embellishments, which contained no cash but ALL of my clothes aside from what I was wearing and a skirt stuffed hastily in the laptop bag, to wit:



- acrylic knit scarf, blue yellow and teal, tassels braided freshmen year in high school during science class.



- Knit hat from the Saturday Market, bought when Dani and everyone was visiting.



- green and black flannel shirt, one of the best travel shirts on earth.

- Second only to the sweater I always wear with it, dark blue.



- Crazy purple wool vest, worn practically every day last winter
- four tank tops; three nice ones (brown, grey, off white) and one cheap one (dark blue)
- four pairs of underwear
- two bras
- four pairs of socks

Also:
- a vintage hand towel, green and blue floral designs.
- three bells -- one purchased on our very first visit to Portland, two purchased at the global gifts store on Hawthorne that have a nice ghostly ringing sound to them.
- indeterminate amount of Anthony's clothing. (His bag was found empty, there are some clothes around the car but the items I saw had been floating around anyway, i.e., we threw them there, not the thieves.)
- the postcards I hadn't yet written (I think. I remember putting them in my knapsack when I repacked.)
- possibly the big sketchbook (not used in a while, but was nice and had lots of good old stuff in it.)
- an aquarium trip, since timing was off and spending that money for what could have been only 2 hours for that huge place was not worth it. Next time. Next time I will see the beluga whales.

Also, indirectly:
- $$$ to get the window replaced. It would be a cluster to try and get the insurance to come to my immediate rescue, so it's a pay now, hope insurance helps in the end game. Here's hoping.

It could have been much worse of course, and it happened at the end of the journey not the beginning, but I still feel very unhappy about the whole thing. To put it mildly.