The Interesting, The Annoying, and The Mundane

As you can see from our earlier post, we made it to Hong Kong. Did I mention the how long the flight was?

When we first got to the airport we had a string of 3 ‘not-quite-bad-luck,-but still-inconveniencing’ experiences.

The first was right after my parents drove off, leaving us to walk to the check-in counter. I was carrying a very small shopping bag with handles that had a travel blanket, pillow, earplugs, and additional items that we wanted to keep at hand while on the plane. Before I could even make it halfway to the check-in counter, the handle fell off. To be honest it seemed like it could be the first of many potential omens that were trying to tell me to go home and crawl under the covers. Luckily the MacGyver in me had put a roll of duct tape in the other carry-on suitcase I was bringing on board. Handle repaired.

Next, we walked up to the check-in counter and the woman behind it took our passports and tickets, looked at them, then went to a room in the back to “speak to someone.” Uh-oh. It took quite a long time for them to operate the computer and then tell us that our bags would be checked through to Hong Kong. Then she turned to her ‘helper’ and asked how to get Air Italia to come up on the screen. Huh?!? She then informed us that this was Delta’s second day of flights from Burlington to JFK and they were still learning the system. Uh-oh. She printed off our boarding passes and told us that we were all set. I had to ask her if our bags were really going to meet us in HONG KONG and she assured me that yes, they would. Still skeptical, we moved on to security…

When we got to the first person in the security gauntlet, he looked at our boarding passes, unhooked a section of his line maze and said go that way, you and your bags have been tagged to be randomly searched. Hooray! I never get randomly selected for anything and now that I am carrying a small pharmacy of prescription and over-the-counter medicines, I get to be pat down and my very intricately packed items sifted through. At least we got to the airport early. I remembered Rush Limbaugh had a rough go of bringing his Viagra back into the country, and although I was NOT carrying the ‘little blue pill’ I was mentally preparing myself for the discussion regarding various antibiotics, cold medicines, and my doctor prescribed ‘scabicidal agent’. (Not really mine, more of an insurance policy that Harper will hopefully not have scabies. Still it is not a fun topic of conversation with a TSA agent.)

That was our bad luck. However, I felt that bad things come in threes and now I was done. It actually worked out to be the case because as I was being pat-down, (by a lovely girl) I was told to watch my bags as they went through their screening. I had put a combination travel lock onto my bag as a place to carry it if we bought a piece of luggage in China that we wanted to check for the flight home. A TSA agent called me over to open it and said, “Wow, I haven’t seen you since Live Y’ers.” (Live Y’ers is a YMCA sponsored after-school program that I worked for in Richmond, like a hundred years ago.) This TSA agent was a dad of one of the boys in that program. We chatted for a bit, he lightly sniffed my bag and I was good to go. Not one question about scabies.

All of this occurred in Burlington. Stay tuned for future updates of our JFK and LAX experience if I am bored and have nothing else to talk about. However, I think in the next few days we might find ourselves with something else to discuss…