Two thieves actually, but first, some background. When we camp in RV parks or campgrounds we usually store our food bag in the ladies’ bathroom overnight, primarily to keep it safe from raccoons and bears but also because hanging our food from a tree is a small inconvenience that we try to avoid. That was until all of our food was stolen the other night...
When I went to retrieve our food the following morning it was gone, I didn’t think much of it and went to the manager’s office to pick it up, it was obvious to me that they simply moved it after cleaning the bathrooms that morning. Sadly, they never saw our food bag – our first clue, the thief struck between 10:00pm and 8:00am when the bathrooms were cleaned.
At this point I had to break the news to Andrea and we started knocking on trailers. Someone from the park must have taken it, and not by accident, we had just bought groceries the day before and were planning to take a couple days off so our bright orange food bag that read “Bicycle food – Please don’t move” must have weighed 50 pounds. I got a little carried away buying groceries that day and we actually had to store more food in another smaller dry bag overnight as well.
It was terrible, every door we knocked on was answered by a friendly face, and after hearing about our missing food most of them offered us some of theirs or a lift into town to resupply. Our second clue, the people at this RV park were way too nice to steal our food.
At some point between knocking on doors I noticed a small security camera was pointed at the bathroom doors, awesome! We went back to the office to replay the footage from the night before. Luckily for us the park was recently brought under new management and they had installed the cameras less than a week before. Unfortunately, they were still getting the entire security system in place and the camera pointing at the bathroom doors was not actually being recorded… nuts. But there were a number of other cameras around the park that were recording and showed the bathroom in the distance. So we fast forwarded through the footage and came up with nothing.
It didn’t help that it had been raining buckets all night and it was still raining pretty hard in the morning, we were wet, hungry, upset, hungry, really hungry. Thankfully there was a can of beans strapped to my front rack so we sat under our tarp and had breakfast. I went back to the office to give them our phone number and they were kind enough to refund us for the night. And that’s when we cracked the case. The manager was still watching the security footage in real time when I walked in and there they were. Two people walked into the park just after midnight with empty backpacks and just over an hour later they walked out with very full bags. It was so clear, watching them strain under the new weight in their bags, the smaller of the two even had their hands under their backpack to support the weight of it.
Seeing these people brought the right amount of closure I needed to get over our missing food. The quality of the footage wasn’t very good and there would be no way of identifying these thieves so the case was closed.
It’s a pain but it could have been much worse. A good reminder that we should put both locks on our bikes overnight.
Stolen food is no match for roadside pie
It rained a bunch so we rented a yurt, sooooo cooooo!
Dinos
Cleaned our drive trains before riding on the beach... sand everywhere
What's for dinner? nothing.
Sea slugs on a big rock
(Author: Nyle)