The Travelodge 2012 Lost and Found List
Llanelli town centre (Photo: Hywel Williams)
Your Geo Quiz clues are:
Harry Potter’s magic wand, a bucket of live crabs, a valuable collection of stamps, and more than 75,000 teddy bears.
All those items have something in common – and we’ll get to that in a moment.
First the stamp collection. It was found in a town in Wales.
The town’s famous, in Wales at least, for its rugby team, its local brewery and for tinplate production. There’s so much tin plating done there that the town is nicknamed Tinopolis.
So can you name this town on the southern Welsh coast in the county of Carmarthenshire that looks out on the Atlantic?
The answer comes courtesy of James Pieslak. He’s with Travelodge which has more than 500 hotels in the UK. They’ve compiled a list of things left behind by the 10+ million customers who’ve stayed at one of their 500 hotels in the past year. The “lost and found” list includes everything from a magic wand to breast implants, from a diamond encrusted iPhone to a bucket of live crabs. As for the valuable stamps, an American traveler attending an antiquarian show in the Welsh town of Llanelli (roughly pronounced “Clanethli”) accidentally left them behind in his hotel room.
A few other unusual things show up on the 2012 Travelodge “Lost and Found” List:
A winning EuroMillions ticket
Keys to a Bugatti race car
A stamp album worth a quarter of a million dollars
A set of London Olympic tickets
A trunk of chocolate bars
A diamond encrusted wedding ring
A Persian Chinchilla kitten named Porsha
A suitcase full of vinyl records
A set of false teeth with diamonds
A Rolex watch
A Tiffany engagement ring
A pilot’s training manual
Joseph’s Dream Coat
Pantomime Horse
7,000 copies of Fifty Shades of Grey
76,500 teddy bears
A bucket of live crabs
The 3 books most often left behind in Travelodge hotels during 2012:
Fifty Shades of Grey E.L. James
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest Stieg Larsson
Is there anything YOU regret leaving in a hotel room?
Or did you go to extraordinary lengths to get something back?
Better yet: is there anything you wish you’d left behind in that hotel room?
At The World, we believe strongly that human-centered journalism is at the heart of an informed public and a strong democracy. We see democracy and journalism as two sides of the same coin. If you care about one, it is imperative to care about the other.
Every day, our nonprofit newsroom seeks to inform and empower listeners and hold the powerful accountable. Neither would be possible without the support of listeners like you. If you believe in our work, will you give today? We need your help now more than ever!