Tuesday, May 15, 2012
I was born with a great imagination, and as I was flying over
the North Atlantic Ocean one week ago on my way to Britain I thought my mind’s
eye had a pretty good idea what this trip would be like.
Suffice to say I had no clue. This experience has been more
than anything I could have possibly dreamed for myself.
I don’t
even know where to begin. My editor would say to start with the most important
thing and even that advice is difficult just now because there are so many stories
trying to jump through my fingertips to the keyboard.
The
eight-hour flight to Europe was long and I didn’t sleep a wink. How could I? I
was alight with anticipation not to mention that I could not take my eyes off
the near full moon that shone in the night sky and through my airplane window
for the entire journey.
We reached the north coast of Ireland and England just
before dawn and at 39,000 ft and clear skies it was a sight to behold as the
cities below were lit up in the colour of gold.
When I
landed in Amsterdam for a 10-hour layover I felt like I could do anything. The
world was my oyster.
But even
oysters wind up in nets.
The time
and space continuum froze for me when six Dutch security guards gathered to
ponder an anomaly in my carry-on luggage as it passed through the x-ray machine
at the boarding gate for the flight to Wales.
I felt
like a foreigner in a foreign country. Wait a minute—I was.
Another
guard appeared and took my passport from my trembling fingers and pulled out
his mobile phone. All I heard was my birth name and “Cardiff, Wales” tossed
about in another language.
I was
convinced I was a goner. My identity would be red-flagged at every airport on
every continent. They made movies called “Missing” and “Vanished” about these
kinds of things.
I looked up and there were the wide-eyed faces of all my
co-passengers who were sitting pretty and in the clear and staring at my folly.
Security
was backed up for 15 minutes as I waited for “special ops” to arrive. I was
sweating like Arnold Schwarzenegger when his wife found out about the
housekeeper, but I also was as clueless as Alicia Silverstone about what could
possibly be in my possession to cause such an international incident.
Eventually
a guy who looked like Alan Rickman (the actor who played the bad guy in “Die
Hard”) arrived wearing a flack jacket and walked over to me after looking at
the x-ray image and promptly said “tell me everything that is in your
bag—exactly.”
My mind
went blank and all that spilled out of my mouth was “Well, I ate all the
chocolate.”
It was
hopeless. My nerves shot, I couldn’t remember but four of the some 25 things I
had packed in that bag.
“Mr.
Flack Jacket,” with a stern, heavy accent and with big blue vein throbbing in
his forehead, held up his hand and said, “I will get your bag and we will open
it together.”
I had
nearly everything pulled out of the bag onto the table, naming off each item as
I went as eight security guards stood around the contents. Suddenly one of them
pointed to the earplugs for my iPhone and a metal belt clip on the “travel
approved” silk zip bag that had contained my passport.
Mr.
Flack Jacket nodded and left and I was free to go.
If it
weren’t for the streak of white hair that had suddenly appeared on my head,
there’d have been no evidence of the incident—unless of course we counted the
huddle of passengers who had all moved to the other side of the room when I
stepped through security to sit down amongst my fellow flyers.
The rest
of the trip was “crackin,” but that’s another story—or two.
No comments:
Post a Comment