I don’t see how it’s possible to rack up frequent-flier points without racking up mishaps too. There will inevitably be delayed flights, bad meals, drivers who take the long way around town, lost scarves or hours spent wandering in a jet-lagged daze because your room’s not ready. Despite these annoyances — all of which I know well (I still miss the hand-knit gloves I bought in Copenhagen and left on the flight to Stockholm) — I’d always thought of myself as a lucky traveler. Until Lisbon. That’s where, earlier this year, I was felled by hubris, the tragic flaw of Macbeth and many of us who were raised in New York City.

I paid no heed to the concierge when she implored my husband, Michael, and me to take the sleek black tour bus across the street and steer clear of the No. 28 tram, a trolley that goes through the center of the city, passes a clutch of monuments, curves around, so that the shoreline comes into view periodically and majestically, and then stops on a hill with a vista. Mentioned in many guides as the ideal way to get a quick lay of the land as well as to be pickpocketed, I thought I could beat the odds. I’m sure it was the good-looking guy in the porkpie hat, the one turned toward me when everyone else on the tram was facing front, who got all my credit cards and my spunk too. I sat on a bench at the end of the line and cried.

Michael says that the first full sentence I uttered after I discovered the theft was: “Don’t tell the concierge!” I really didn’t want to hear her say, “I told you so.”