Travel Tales

There are always plenty of fun things that happen when you go through an airport. This trip was no exception.

On the way to Wisconsin I ended up in a minor verbal altercation with another passenger in the security line. I guess you may not be able to call it an "altercation" given that he didn't actually respond to me. I don't know what it is about security lines, but I have this habit of randomly saying things to people when I'd generally just keep my mouth shut. The first thing that happened was that this guy left to walk through the metal detector without pushing his stuff into the x-ray machines. Which meant that I could just push it through myself so that I could then put my stuff through, ask a TSA agent to push it through, or wait until the TSA agent noticed that our line was backing up. I chose option 1, which was probably the least smart option. But it worked just fine in this case. I got to the other side of the metal detector after sending my stuff off for x-ray, and I waited for my stuff to come through. The guy in front of me was still creating problems. He had moved all the way to the end of the belt and was putting his shoes on. I was just standing next to the belt behind him waiting for my stuff to come through. After his shoes were on, he realized that he still had a bin coming out. Rather than waiting for it to come to the end of the belt, he rammed his way back to where I was and in front of me. He just sort of pushed me out of the way with no "excuse me" or anything like it. So, I said, "Settle down, buddy." And he shrugged and walked away.

P&AF missed all of this action because we did our boarding passes on our phones. I had mine loaded ahead of time, but he had loaded his earlier and then closed it. Well, at the C & D gate entrances at McCarran there isn't any service with Verizon. So, he was turned away at the security entrance because he had no connection to load his boarding pass. He had to go back to reload the page on his phone.

On the way back we had a 3 hour layover in Chicago. We found a nice empty gate to sit at for the majority of the time. About an hour into our wait, the gate started having problems though. Several flights were routed there from other gates and then switched. There was one group of people heading to Boston who actually got on a plane, sat for an hour, and were then sent back out into the gate because of mechanical problems. At the time they were sent back out, P&AF had gone off to look for food. He left his backpack sitting next to me in a chair. A woman with her two kids came over from the Boston jetway and sat down in the two chairs next to the backpack chair. One of the kids wanted something, so they got up to go to the convenience store pretty quickly. As they were walking away, the woman tilted her head to the side and down towards me and said, "And that bag needs to be moved so someone can sit there." She didn't make eye contact or anything; she was obviously trying to act like she was talking to someone else while making sure that I got the message. I did not respond, since I felt sort of bad for their airplane mechanical shenanigans, and she did have two kids with her.

The biggest triumph of the trip was getting several pounds of cheese, some other meat, and four pounds of bacon back to Vegas with us - and still cold! We made up two little cold packages; each had frozen bacon, refrigerated cheese, refrigerated hard sausage, and a bag of frozen peas. The frozen peas were strategically placed as cold packs to keep everything cool. Each package was wrapped in newspaper and then placed in a plastic bag. The two packages were then placed in one rolling carry-on suitcase. It worked perfectly! The TSA agents did have to check the cheese to make sure that it wasn't actually explosive or tainted with explosives, but everything passed. And by the time we got to Vegas, after 10 hours of travel, the cheese was still cold, and the bacon was still mostly frozen.

Definitely a successful trip!