My thinking exactly.

I go up to the room because Mom has some minor but urgent task on her mind and doesn’t need me for it. After washing up I wait, and wait, and wait, but no Mom. Finally, like an hour later, I see her heading across the road, away from the hotel. I think “that’s strange”, but she’s an adult and maybe she wants to get on with the sightseeing. So I go too (there was a beach across the road), and eventually we meet there.

When we get back, we go up to the room, but Mom’s luggage isn’t there, and yet she says she was in the room and deposited the luggage there. I explain that’s impossible and tell her why; I was in the room the whole time she would have needed to be there. She can’t find her keys either, and eventually I wear her down. She was never in the room. If she did she would have keys. Besides, why would a B&E luggage thief take her stuff and not touch mine?

Next we go down to the desk and explain our problem. Our tour guide is there (thank goodness) and overhears (foreign languages and all that). The mystery is finally solved (mostly) when we explain that we each had separate keys to the room. This hotel had an old-fashioned keying system (I don’t merely mean keys versus cards. The keys and locks themselves were sturdy but clearly from another era completely).

So our guide says, “That’s impossible. This hotel only has 1 set of keys per room for guests. The front desk has another set but they never give those out.” We insist, we both saw that each of us got a set of keys. We always do that and we did it here too. I think we even saw the front desk keys to our room right there, so they hadn’t given us their set. Finally our guide says “if you each got keys it was to 2 different rooms. It’s the only way.”

And he was right! It took us another 20 minutes to figure out which other room Mom had gone to, but eventually we found it and her luggage. Oh, and her missing room keys? She had a purse with a LOT of pockets. The missing keys were buried in a particularly obscure pocket.

The point of this tale is that for a while I had talked my mother into thinking that she hadn’t gone to her room (the incorrect one as it turned out, but still). I arrived at the wrong conclusion and talked her into believing me!