Last weekend, we stayed at the Coconut Grove Beach Resort in Elmina, which is about a 4 hour drive from Accra (this is an important detail later on). It was a vibrant and beautiful place. There were pristinely mowed lawns, colorful foliage, and an abundance of palm trees. The waves of the ocean were only a few hundred feet from our rooms. When we first arrived, there was a wedding going on. It was easy to see why they would choose this place. It reminded me of some of the gorgeous tropical coastlines I’d visited previously like Hawaii, Mexico, and Grand Cayman.

It was a relaxing and laid back weekend. We were scheduled to depart Monday morning at 9 a.m. No problem. I woke up around 8:30 and packed up all of my things (or so I thought). I’m sure others can relate to this, but many times when I go somewhere like a hotel or resort I always get paranoid that I will forget something and leave it behind. I didn’t bring that many things – only one backpack – and so at 8:45 I left to go to the bus. I was among the first to show up. Great. Let’s go back to Accra. I’m ready to go.

Of course as it got closer to 9, everyone else filled in, and with the exception of two or three people nearly everyone was sitting on the bus and ready to leave. I was sitting tensely, running through all the things I brought in my head and seeing if I remembered to pack them up. That’s when I remembered I forgot something. I knew it! It was my phone and laptop chargers. I got off the bus and ran back to the room to retrieve them. By the time I made it back to the bus, everyone else was waiting to leave. Everyone saw me run back to get my chargers that I left behind. Isolated, this scene doesn’t seem that embarrassing. To me, it was only mildly embarrassing at best. But a couple hours later, something happened that, in retrospect, made this go from mildly embarrassing to supremely embarrassing.

We left and started driving back to Accra. I tried to sleep for a while, with some moderate success. I read some of the book I brought with me. Around two hours into the drive, right before we stopped for lunch, I had a sinking realization:

My laptop wasn’t in my backpack.

How did this happen? Out of all the things to forget, I forgot my laptop? I looked through my entire backpack, but it was futile. I always put it in the same place in my backpack, and when I saw it wasn’t there, I knew I had left it behind. “You idiot!” I said to myself. You remembered everything else but the most valuable thing you brought with you? At this point, it was far too late to turn around and go back. Even if we were only twenty minutes away, it might have been too late. A lot of the roads in Ghana, especially some of the ones out in the country, are quite rough – bumpy and full of potholes. Nobody wanted to be in the bus on those roads for longer than we had to be, including me.

So what now? I wasn’t going to tell anybody, not yet. Not until we stopped. Then I’d tell Leslie, but that would be it. I didn’t want this little mishap of mine to become known. Eventually, after another twenty or thirty minutes of driving, we stopped for lunch. I knew that I had left it in my room at the resort, so I was confident it was going to be ok. Nonetheless, I was still frazzled. I told Leslie what had happened, and fortunately it turned out that not only was there another Coconut Grove Resort in Accra, but that she knew someone that worked there. Thank goodness.

However, that kind of thing takes a little bit of time. As I mentioned before, the Coconut Grove Resort in Elmina isn’t exactly a super close drive to Accra. So it was going to be at least a few days. Some of these days I had to wait include days that I was supposed to be at my internship. This made for a relatively awkward encounter when I showed up on my first day without my laptop. My coworkers asked, “Where is your laptop?” And I sheepishly said “Yeah well…uh…kind of a funny story I guess…I left it at the hotel we were staying at over the weekend…”

Eventually all of the other people in the cohort found out as well. It was inevitable. They laughed and made jokes. It was pretty funny, I had to admit. I did make a really stupid mistake.

I got it back yesterday. So the situation is is resolved now. But the embarrassment remains. I got off the bus when we were basically ready to leave to run back to my room to get my laptop charger, which everyone saw me do, while leaving the actual laptop in the room. What’s the point of having a laptop charger if you don’t have a laptop to use it with?