Believe it or not, I actually wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, intending to post it here, then promptly forgot about it until I met with Isobel and Holly during the week, and during our chatting, it came up, and while I was telling them about it, I was thinking, didn’t I blog about this? Maybe they didn’t read it. Nope, I wrote it, saved it, and just plain forgot.
We were given “special treatment” when we went through security in SF.
I still think it was because when we checked in at the self service check-in desks, we were given the option of putting a next of kin person down in case of emergency, and I said we should, so we put my parents down.
What exactly is special treatment, I hear you ask?
It means that our boarding cards had a symbol on it which declared that we needed to be screened for bombs or bomb making/explosive materials.
This meant we had to go into this special chamber which blasted air at us for a second, then we had to go and have our hand luggage searched in a special area. Searching the hand luggage involved wiping down the insides of the bags, and several items with a cloth which would show up if we had been handling explosive materials. At least thats what we thought.
The people searching the luggage ignored us the whole time and chatted to each other, the man searching my hunny’s case asked him if there were any sharp objects in it before he opened it, the woman searching mine did not.
So I didn’t volunteer the information that I had 2 sets of dpns in my handbag, which was also in the case.
It didn’t matter, she didn’t even seem to notice them (too busy chatting perhaps?) and my dpns got through scot free. As did we.
It was as we were walking away with our luggage intact, and our dignity somewhat bruised, that I noticed that there was another area where they were pulling people in, seemingly randomly, and searching their cases, but this was in full view of everyone passing by. This made me feel a whole lot better!
So, my needles got through, luckily for me, as our plane was 4 hours delayed. Joy oh joy.
I cast on for the ill-fated socks and spent a good while knitting in departures. I knit on the plane, and no-one even mentioned anything.
On the way back from Aruba, I had my knitting threaded onto a piece of yarn, and my dpns lying flat at the bottom of my handbag and had no problem getting them through. I picked up where I left off.
We had a highly enthusiastic and slightly demented man sitting beside us on the last leg of our journey from Newark to Dublin, and he got very excited about the fact I was knitting and commented on the fact that they let me onto the plane with such obvious weapons……I must say, I had my own ideas about what I could do with those weapons towards the end of the flight, when he was insisting on showing us his overly decorated passport with only 4 pages left in it….and claiming that Ireland was the only country who took up a FULL page with its visa stamp, all the while showing us his passport with loads of full pages taken up by a stamp from other countries.
Oh the fun of travelling!
Don’t you just love it?
I want to go again!
