I never got lost, but when I was 2 1/2 I did zip myself into a suitcase… :rolleyes:
5 or 6 years old, living in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.
My parents were suppposed to pick me up at our Episcopal Church.
But nobody showed.
I decided to walk home, & got lost. I tried to flag down a police car, but they kept driving right past.
Eventualy, a friendly man helped me find my way home, where Mom & Dad had the cops over.
I was… maybe nine or ten. My little sister and brother decided they’d go bicycle riding up and down our street. Now, we lived on this street that went uphill and out of sight. That’s important.
So they go out. (this is in the early 80’s, when it was perfectly all right to be doing that, especially in our neighborhood)
And I’m reading a book or something, and then I decide to put it down and go looking for my sister and brother.
They’re not in the house. They’re not in the backyard. They’re not, as far as I can see, on the street AT ALL.
I wound up panicking full out. Called my dad’s office on the phone, and put it on speaker. No relay service, no TTY, no nothing, just me calling the office and crying. Fortunately, the receptionist recognized me and grabbed my dad, and I also had enough hearing to be able to vaguely recognize the deep voice as my dad.
When I explained what happened – I’m told Dad peeled out of the office so fast. At the time, the office was about 20 to 30 minutes away. Poor guy.
Turns out my siblings had just gone biking way up the upper half of the street and out of sight without telling me. :smack: 
They both caught seven kinds of heck for scaring the daylights out of Dad and me.
In Kindergarten we went on a field trip to African Lion Safari. There were two teachers who each took a group of kids. We were watching an elephant show and suddenly I looked around, and my group was gone. They had just left me there!! I started looking around but I couldn’t see them anywhere. I don’t remember being scared or upset but I was rather frustrated, especially when I tried to ask some random adults for help and all of them ignored me and kept walking!! Finally I recognized the other group and ran up to them and told the teacher that I was part of the first group, and the bitch DIDN’T BELIEVE ME, and to top it off, she LEFT ME THERE!!! :o Finally I gave up and just stood in one spot, and by chance my group eventually happened to come by and retrieve me. The teacher said they were all looking for me and asked where I went…I told her I was right where they had left me. >:( What a rotten day that was.
Once when I was about 9 or 10, I almost managed to lose myself in London. I was in the Tube, with my aunt, my 4 yo cousin sister and my little brother (2 years younger than me). The train pulled into our station and I got out, but the doors closed before the rest of them could!
I could see my aunt panicking, my cousin crying, and my brother looking totally lost! I had no ID, no clue of where my aunt lived, no local telephone numbers, nothing! So I just stood there and waited. I don’t remember being in any way worried about the situation… About 7 minutes later, they came back in the next train!
From then on till our holiday ended, my brother and I carried little ID cards with the address and telephone number of my aunt’s house. That was a fun vacation!
Yep. I was four or five, too young to have learned some important life lessons (this comes in later). I was at an open-air market, very crowded, with my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. My mom turned to look at tomatoes, I didn’t. I wandered along and it took me a while to even realize that I was lost. Eventually a whole group of elderly people came up to me and asked me if I was lost. I said yes. They said my family was looking for me, and that I should go with them. I have no memory at that point of even being told not to trust stangers/talk to strangers/go with strangers, so I did. And they promptly brought me back to my mom.
My poor great-grandmother was convinced she was having a heart attack.
When I was 5, my father was stationed in Stuttgart for a year or so (then, as now, they could call reservists back up whenever they damned well felt like it). We were visiting London, and were in Hamleys toy store. I got turned around a little, and then saw two people who I thought were my parents, and followed them out of the store. Suddenly I was alone, at night, on a very busy Regent St. I pretty much freaked out, but a very kind woman came by, calmed me down, and just walked me back and forth along the street until my parents spotted me.
Oddly enough (maybe), my principal memory is not of the feeling of being lost, but of just how nice and calming that woman was.
Well, we weren’t exactly lost in that we knew how to get back…
Back in the late 60s when Sanibel Island was still fairly rustic my family vacationed there for a week in the summer a couple of years in a row. One time my mom had driven us down the street a little from the cabin where we were staying and we were hanging out at this little fishing pier. Tiny little wooden pier sticking out over the water, that’s it and a couple of crusty old Florida crackers fishing or catching crabs. We were having fun catching crabs under the pier and when mom was ready to leave my brother and I begged her to let us stay. I think we were probably 9 and 10 at the time (he was older).
Mom left with our younger brother and sister and said she’d be back in 1 hour. Of course almost the minute she left we realized we were hot, bored and thirsty. There was nothing but sea water and we were to shy and embarassed to ask any of the adults fishing at the pier for assistance. We decided to start walking back and headed out on the road we drove in on thinking we’d pass mom on her way back to get us. We soon realized that the asphalt was way too hot on our bare feet and there was no way we could walk the road. The shoulder was mostly gravel and crushed seashell so that didn’t feel so swell either. That’s when we realized that all we really had to do is walk down the beach a ways and we’d be back at our little cabin. So, we grabbed our bucket of crabs and set off down the beach. We were old enough to have figured out which direction was correct but we underestimated how far. We trudged down the beach, hot and thirsty under the brutal Florida sun for about 5 hours which I figure must have been close to 10 miles.
When we got back to the cabin my older sister (she was 14 at the time) was there but mom, dad and the two younger siblings were not. We got the “you are in so much trouble” from her and then sat down to wait for mom and dad to return.
We did get in trouble but I think it was pretty much negated by how relieved they were to find us.
The crabs were delicious.
Getting lost was a real talent of mine and still is if the truth be known. This time around I shall add that this is my third attempt at replying to this thread as the previous two were lost :mad: but I am only more determined to get it submitted!
We moved house when I was about two and a half. After a couple of days, when Mum was upstairs, I decided to go exploring. Up the road, turn left and left again and Oh! where had I come from? A nice, but in retrospect rather odd, lady found me and took me into her house. She said we would look for my mum after she had finished her cleaning , yeah, she was odd. I obediently sat and watched her hoover. After a bit the milkman knocked on the door. He was already looking out for me as he’d spoken to my frantic mum, so he took me home on the milkfloat. I thought that was great but Mum was very cross.
Around four, Mum told me to wait for her by the tills in Woolworths. Not a very good idea, but it was full of Christmas crowds and a few days earlier my cheek had got burned by a stupid man carrying a lit cigarette at hip level, so she thought it would be safer. She said she would only be a minute and I went off into a daydream. Suddenly it seemed as though she’d been ages, much longer than “a minute” and I couldn’t remember exactly what she’d told me anyway. Maybe I was supposed to be waiting by the tills at the other end of the shop? She wasn’t there either and panicking I ran out onto the street and headed for the bus stops. Luckily a nice, and sensible, lady from the ironmonger’s stopped me. All I could tell her was that “My mummy has a yellow scarf on.”, so she got me to stand with her in the shop doorway. Mum came past quite soon – on her way to the police station – and it was herself she was cross with this time.
One more from when I was a bit older, primary school age. The whole family went on a guided tour of HMS Victory at Portsmouth. There were several tours crisscrossing in the maze of corridors below deck (I was very impressed that some of the floors were painted red so as not to show blood). Our tour guide wasn’t very clear so I started to listen to another one who was explaining things better. Of course my party moved off and I ended up going round with the other group, repeating about half the tour. My new guide was loads better! On the advice of the staff my parents and family were waiting at the exit – I think that sort of thing happened quite often – they were pretty relieved to see me.
This time I have saved the post, so here goes…
HAH!
I love this!
When we were in Berlin this summer with the kids, there was a nth of a second moment where one of our kids (our son) was a little slow getting off the train.
Had my husband and his cousin not stopped the train door from closing and allowing our son to exit, …welll…he would have gone on the train by himself and we would be left there going, " Oh…this is not good."
(We would have contacted the next station to get him.) but that child would have probably had spazms over the event.
Our daughter, OTOH, would have had any german wrapped around her pinkie doing her bidding.
We came home with both our own children, but with the three Super Special Stuffed Animals that the kids couldn’t leave home without.
In the old days, Sears was the biggest store, three floors+. Escalators were a new-fangled thing(I told you it was the old days) and I liked going up and down them. Of course, with four other children tagging along Mother, I was soon lost. So I went back to the car and went to sleep. Boy were they pissed. The searched the store high and low. 
I wasn’t lost – I was abandoned.
I was about 5 (seems to be the prime age for these stories) and my early-teen-age sisters had taken me downtown to the big department store. They plopped me in the toy department (a pretty good idea, actually) and told me to stay there until they got back. I don’t know how long they were gone, but it was too long for a five year old. The next thing I know a kindly older lady has handed me over to a security guard, who took me back to the offices and gave me ice cream while they tried to find my sisters.
Young teenagers do not react well when the 5 year old they are responsible for winds up in the security office. I caught hell all the way home.
I must have been around 4. At the petting Zoo. At the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. I remember crying and crying as the poor attendant plied me with candy bars in an attempt to calm me down.
I then remember crying and crying as my parents took me away from the nice attendant man who was giving me so many free candy bars.
Just for a few minutes. I don’t think my parents even knew.
New York World’s Fair, 1964.
This was right after my dad said “Now let’s stay together, guys.”
I tried to keep in step but was entranced with the place, gazing all about as we entered the Fair.
I started following the wrong pair of legs. I looked up and realized these limbs did not belong to my mom and dad. I looked frantically around, found the right legs, and heaved an internal sigh of relief as I got back into position.
I was 8 or 9, my brother 12 or 13. My parents and the two of us were in Colorado, driving around the various parks when we came to a walking trail. My parents pulled in and we got out for a walk. We split (my bro and I in one group, my parents in the next) at a fork. Somehow we got lost, off the main trail. After a half-hour of calling for my parents and hearing no response, we came across an abandoned scout camp. All previous calm demeanor was gone. I’d seen enough scary movies to know what finding an abandoned camp means when you’re two lost kids. Scary drawn out death at the hands of a psychopath.
Eventually we found my parents. I think we were lost for two hours or so. I don’t believe we were out of sight of each other for the rest of my childhood.
Once we were just about ready to leave from our vacation at someplace called Camp Wilhelmina (sp?) in Arkansas (?) and we went on a little hike or something. My brother and I took a short cut and got lost in the woods. I don’t think my parents ever knew we were lost. I was sobbing I was so scared. We finally found the path again.
My nephew Sean (age @ 9) had an argument with his mother. He just walked out of the house, barefoot. He walked all the way to our house, which is @ 4 miles away. My husband was outside doing some yard work and I heard him talking to someone. I went outside and realized it was Sean and he was barefoot. It was weird. So Mr. Lillith knew right away something wasn’t right but you have to bang me over the head. I didn’t realize he was barefoot. So Mr. Lillith suggested that I call Sean’s mother, which I did. She had already called the police. I drove him home. Then the policeman drove him around in his cruiser for awhile to scare him. His mother cried. I’m not sure that the police car thing was such a good idea, but he is not my son. We disagree on other child raising issues.
My friend Shar was from a family of four kids…the youngest, John, was 10 years younger than the others. So he was a little kid. Once the whole family gets in the van and drives off and leaes John at home alone. Nobody noticed he wasn’t there until Shar says, “Hey John, want a piece of gum?” He was in the backyard pool. Luckily he hadn’t drowned or anything like that.
Both of these happened between the ages of 7 and 10, although I don’t remember exactly when.
The first was in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Got separated from my parents and wandered around for what seemed like hours. I must have walked past that damn coal mine and submarine 50 times!
The next, and far scarier, time, was in Mammoth Cave National Park. My dad, little brother and I were hiking in the woods around Green River. I was leading the way and gradually got farther and farther ahead. Finally I realized that I didn’t know where Dad was anymore. I walked and walked trying to get back to the path. It seemed like I kept passing the same stuff. It was late in the afternoon when we got separated and it was rapidly getting dark. It was almost completely dark and I was really starting to get worried when I came across an old logging road. I started walking down it and within about 2 minutes I ran into my Dad. My parents were panicked.