A Sacramento-area woman lost her ring on a trip. Here are tips for travelers
The last time Lynn Mosher knew she had her wedding ring, she was on a red-eye flight to Orlando from Sacramento just before Thanksgiving.
Mosher was en route to see her daughter and her daughter’s partner. She was in the plane bathroom when she noticed that her ring, which her late husband Robert Mosher Jr. had given her, was slipping. Lynn Mosher had gained weight following her husband’s death in 2015 and had her ring resized. Having lost weight since then, the ring had become loose.
“As I was washing my hands, I felt the ring start to slip off my finger and so I just reminded myself to be more careful, pay attention, make sure that it doesn’t slip off again,” Lynn Mosher said. “I actually should have put it away at that moment, but I didn’t.”
Sometime after Lynn Mosher landed on the morning of Nov. 26, when she was in a car with her daughter and heading to breakfast, she realized the ring was gone.
Every year, large numbers of U.S. residents travel during the holidays. AAA projected that 122 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more between Dec. 20 and Jan. 1.
Lynn Mosher’s experience is a reminder travel is a time when cherished items can easily go missing. The Transportation Security Administration estimated “approximately 90,000 to 100,000 items are left behind at checkpoints each month.” That doesn’t include items lost or abandoned elsewhere in the travel process. A spokesperson for Sacramento County’s airport system said its lost and found has included a prosthetic leg located in a parking garage.
But there are also steps travelers can take to protect keepsakes.
Lynn Mosher’s story with her husband
This was not the first time Lynn Mosher had a wedding ring go missing.
She and her husband met on Valentine’s Day in 1979, when she was a student at Sac State. When they got married a few years later on May 22, 1982, they couldn’t afford much of a ring, she said. Eventually, on a trip to the Caribbean around their 10th anniversary, her husband purchased a diamond which he had fitted to her original wedding band.
In early December 1995, Lynn Mosher lost this ring one day at her job at the customer service center for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. “Thank God the customer service center wasn’t open yet, because I yelled out, ‘Nobody move! My ring fell off my finger!’” Mosher said.
She retraced her steps back to her car in search of the ring, to no avail. Later, she and her husband combed through her vehicle “literally to the point of taking the seats out of the car to see if it fell off,” she said. This was also fruitless.
At Christmas a few weeks later, Robert Mosher gave Lynn Mosher the ring she recently lost. He had it made at Thornton & Sons Jewelers, which is now located in Vacaville. Lynn Mosher thinks her husband had the ring made while the shop was located in Dixon. He worked for Clark Pest Control in Vacaville, she said.
“I was very touched by what he had designed,” she said. “The ring was actually two different rings, and when you looked at them separately, one of them, of course, had the diamond set into the band, and the other one didn’t have a diamond set into the band.”
She added, “When you put them together, they both created a heart that wrapped around the diamond.”
A couple of years later, Robert Mosher suffered a widow-maker heart attack around his 40th birthday. He survived, but with considerable damage to his heart. On Jan. 18, 2015, he was taking a shower when “his heart just finally gave out.” He was 57.
In the months after her husband died, Lynn Mosher went through a brief stretch where she thought she didn’t need to wear her ring anymore. “I went without wearing that ring for about a week and I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.
Their daughter Jessica Mosher, who Lynn Mosher had traveled from the Sacramento area to see in Orlando, was amazed at her mother’s composure once she realized the ring was missing. She knows the importance of that ring.
“It’s a tangible thing of her relationship with my dad,” Jessica Mosher said. “They were together for a really long time before he passed, and I know he’s still the love of her life and always will be.”
Protecting keepsakes
It’s safe to say that items can wind up in the lost and found department when people travel, whether intentionally or not.
“When I first started at the airport, there was a prosthetic leg in the lost and found,” said Scott Johnston, a spokesperson for the Sacramento County airport system. “Someone had left it in the parking garage and they never claimed that.”
The process can be complicated by attempting to pinpoint when the item goes missing. Johnston noted that a boy had recently contacted them that he’d gone through an area for the Transportation Security Administration — which handles security screenings at Sacramento International Airport — and that he thought he’d left his retainer behind.
The county contacted the TSA, which didn’t have the retainer. The boy has since gotten a new retainer, Johnston said.
The day that Lynn Mosher lost her ring, she filed a report with Southwest Airlines, who didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Sacramento Bee. Lynn Mosher also encountered silence. “I didn’t find a way to actually speak with anyone,” she said. “You just submit a report online.”
Within a couple of days, she realized she should also file a report with Orlando International Airport. She filed with a concierge service where a person will search the airport for the lost item.
Lynn Mosher thought that when she put in the report for the concierge service, she was also filing with the airport’s lost and found. Angela Starke, a spokesperson for Orlando International Airport explained via email that the concierge service was run independently of the airport. Starke wrote that the airport’s lost and found team had no record of Mosher filing a claim.
“Orlando International always wants to connect the right parties with their lost items,” Starke wrote.
As of Dec. 15, Lynn Mosher held out faint hope her ring would be located. Anyone who finds it is encouraged to contact The Sacramento Bee.
For travelers who want to avoid navigating Byzantine paths by phone or online to find lost items, there are some preventive steps according to Shep Hyken, who is an expert on customer experience and is based in St. Louis.
“If you’re going to be traveling, you do need to be aware that lost luggage is a reality,” Hyken said. “The good news is, it’s less of a reality than it used to be because they’ve got much better systems, the airlines do.”
Hyken noted that carriers like American Airlines track bags. For individual items, there’s also the option to use a smartphone to attach an AirTag.
“I have actually an AirTag in my passport case with my passport, because it allows my phone to track wherever that item is,” Hyken said.
For Lynn Mosher, there’s one other thing she acknowledged that would have been helpful in her situation.
“If you’ve got a ring that you love and it’s getting loose on your finger, take it off and get it sized immediately,” she said. “Don’t take a chance of losing it like I did.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
