I am on the road and opened my laptop. All of my bookmarks and the bookmark bar are gone.

Sorry to hear about this problem. Did Firefox display any unusual messages when you started it? Are your bookmarks available through the Bookmarks sidebar (Ctrl+B)? One possible reason for not having your bookmarks would be if Firefox was not able to access the Places database file that stores bookmarks and history. Since the file might have been locked by another processes, restarting the laptop usually is the best first thing to try. Sometimes Firefox might start up in a different profile than your usual one. Check the first section of the following article for advice on that: [[Recover lost or missing Bookmarks]].