A few years ago I went on a road trip.

My old van—stacked with surfboards—brought me all the way to the south of Portugal, a good 1500 miles from the little town in Holland I grew up in. On my way down I surfed the French, Spanish and the northern Portuguese coasts.

I had a wicked time surfing about, and covered a lot of ground on Europe’s coastline. After surfing Portugal for a while, I had only ten days left of my surf trip. I decided to head back up north again. A new swell was going to hit the south of France and the ocean is much warmer over there, too. Nice!

Surfing France, I came out of the water one day and looked up at my van. I immediately noticed the door of my van had been forced open.

What a mess! My belongings were all over the show. My iPod and most of my stuff was still there, but my wallet was gone, along with the ninety bucks and my debit card.

What do you do when your wallet gets stolen and you’re in a foreign county? I didn’t have the slightest idea… Or did I?

I had to block my card! I drove to the nearest Tourist Information Centre. In my best French I explained to the girl behind the counter what had happened. She let me use their phone, and I tried to call my parents… They weren’t at home.

So now what do I do?!

Why didn’t I ever write down the phone number of my card supplier and bank?

While I was standing there trying to figure out what to do, the thief still had full access to all the money in my bank account!

In the far corner of the tourist office I noticed a computer. I went on the internet and found the phone number I needed to block my debit card.

It’s crazy how relieved I felt after blocking my card… My money was safe again, and hopefully, the thief didn’t get too much money out of my account, yet.

Nobody could get to my money anymore…

Hey, wait a minute… That’s including me!

I had a little food left. Luckily enough I had done some grocery shopping in the morning. There was also 8 dollars and 12 cents in the ashtray. I always keep my change there, just in case… This meant I had enough food and money to live on for at least a few days!

With a solid week still left in my holiday, I really didn’t want to go home. And I couldn’t even get home if I wanted to! With that $8 and only half a tank of gas, there was no way I could make it all the way to Holland. It’s at least 700 miles.

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I decided to hang around the beach and surf every day for the rest of the week. But there was always this little voice in my head saying: “Hey dude, how are you going to get home?”

I thought of so many ways to get money sent to me, but none off them worked. I was in my surf van at a random beach, so how were my friends or parents going to send me money anyway? And another problem came in to play: I had to be back in school in 2 days!

With only 2 dollars and a few cents left, I decided to ask one of my new made friends if he could help me out. He was a French guy I met surfing two days earlier. This "stranger" kindly offered to loan me a hundred bucks.

This was such a relief, but I was hoping that hundred dollars would be enough to get me home. But I also didn’t dare to ask for any more. After all, would you give a guy you just met on the beach a hundred bucks?

I decided to take my chances and head home… Driving very slowly to conserve gas I pulled up my parents’ driveway some twenty hours later. I drove all 700 miles and had just half a gallon of gas left in my tank… Wow, I just made it!

After getting home I immediately wired the borrowed money back to the French guy. I used my mom’s online banking, which meant the French guy would have the money in his account within a day.

As soon as I had my new bankcard, I withdrew the money and gave my mom back her hundred dollars.

After all this road trippin’ hassle, I decided to sign up for online banking myself. You know, just in case.

I even opened another checking account with another card. This way, if I lose one card I will still have the other. Well… That’s if you don’t keep them in the same wallet of course!

Having a checking account made it possible for me to give the French guy back his money and pay my mom back, too.

Why don’t you go explore Elevation's website and see if you can apply for a checking account yourself?

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Oh by the way: Check out this little card with handy phone numbers!

It’s what I keep in a few different places just in case my wallet gets stolen again.

Make sure you don’t only keep these numbers in your wallet, ey!

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