When I was in 9th or 10th grade, I accidentally left my 6-figure 19th century Italian violin on a Greyhound bus outside of Boston (dozed off, got abruptly woken up at my stop, scrambled out and didn't notice the missing violin until like an hour later). I spent the next day [censored] bricks and frantically calling my parents and Greyhound. It finally turned up in Philadelphia, where the driver spotted it in the overhead space.
Yo-Yo Ma had an even bigger heart-attack moment when he left his Stradivarius cello in the trunk of a NYC taxicab:
http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/d...9/c05wn147.htm .