We always pack up as much as we can the night before leaving for our return trip back home from vacation, and this time was no exception. Packing up for the return journey doesn't take quite as long as the reverse, but given the amount of things we take with us, it remains a considerable effort. In the process of which we take additional care to ensure that we don't inadvertently leave anything behind.

Although our hosts are very good about that kind of thing, when feasible, mailing left-behind items back to their owners.

On one occasion, about five years ago we somehow overlooked a small backpack stuffed with things we valued, but nothing that we couldn't live without until the next time we drove down that way to resume another vacation. So they kept the backpack for our return, and we were re-united the following June, after having left it the previous September.

On this occasion, returning home from our week's stay in the Waterville Valley, we discovered, once unpacking back home again, that we did indeed manage to overlook one item, since it was missing from our belongings. We had taken with us two digital cameras; one we'd had for years that I generally used, and another, new one with a larger screen that I had begun to favour.

I took photos with the new camera, and my husband used the older one to take photographs. We've been doing this kind of thing for a few years and it's interesting to see how his artist's eye frames photographs as opposed to my more spontaneous, casual eye for balance and aesthetics. It was the camera containing his photos that was missing.

I tried to email our hosts but the email address contained on the website must be warped, since my mail was simply returned to me. We thought about telephoning, then decided not to on the theory that we had looked very carefully around the cottage, all three of us, before we left, to make certain we left had nothing behind. We theorized that we had somehow lost the camera elsewhere.

And then, several days later, an email enquiring whether we were missing a camera. Evidently the next family who had stayed at the same cottage had discovered a camera in its case under one of the beds (!).