Unchecked Baggage

I'm thinking about travel today.  These last few months have been full of travel for me.  Generally when I travel I am enjoying the ride....when things are going my way.  But my, let the airlines mess with my ability to get home just because I don’t follow rules that I didn’t even know about,  and I get a bit ugly.    Did you know that you can’t check a bag if you arrive at the bag check with under 45 min. left before the flight leaves?  Even if  it’s  44 minutes before the flight leaves?  Even if you try reasoning with the airline Nazi that you have a bag full of newly purchased Ikea treasures that must get home?  Then asked what one was supposed to do with said  unchecked bags?   Why, you are just supposed to lolly-gag down to the other end of the freakin’ airport and book another flight!  Why not just tell me to wait for the flying monkeys to come by?

Being the resourceful woman I am, it dawned on me that daughter Katy was flying out of the same helpful airport the next morning, so I oh so calmly called Bonus Daughter Beth, who had just dropped me off,  to haul ass back, which she did, and we dumped the uncheckable suitcase back into her car and then  I zipped into the security line—told my sad story to a nice man in blue who sent me to a nice woman in blue, who let me into the Magic Security Short Cut Passage to another Blue Man—and I’m thinking, Whooo Hoooo I got it going on now!  And then realized I was behind the Griswold Family.  Whooo Hoooo for them!  They’d never flown before!  Probably because they had passel of kids and had to save up all their box tops to afford the trip!  Did they know they needed to take off their shoes?  NO.  Did they know you have to take your laptop out and put it in its very own bin?  NO.  Did they really need 5 strollers and a baby buggy for this trip?  Apparently so.  So now, by the time I get up to the convertor belt, I’m stripped down to my Cuddle Duds.  Except for the stupid iphone that apparently someone put in my back pocket.  Which means when I get to the scanner I have to take this potentially explosive device back to the conveyor belt to be scanned.  And then I have to have the naked x-ray, which I could care less about, except that because I had held the dynamite iphone in my hand, I had to go over to another blue man and have my hands wiped down for explosives (if he’d wanted to check for explosives, he should have wiped down my forehead because by now I swear the top of my head is going to blow off! )  I go back to the conveyor belt, which should be belching out all my accouterments  but NO, the Happy Traveling family’s many bags have created a bolus in the bowels of the belt and nothing is coming out.  I’m considering crawling in after things and the line begins to move.  Finally I have my bags in my hands, my shoes on my feet-- and people, I don’t know what a 56 year old woman looks like running down the halls of SFO, but I’m sure it’s on the surveillance video.  I get to my gate.  Oh yes, they have boarded, oh yes, they have already shut the door and pulled the walk way away.  But the Nice Man radios the plane…..will they let me on?  We wait, and wait and wait just long enough that the top of my head is starting to itch with explosive powders again….and they open the door and let me run down the corridor—where they are pulling the steps back up to the plane, and I have to hand over my “carry-on” to be packed in the trunk or handed off to the flying monkeys--at this point I don't care.   Then, it’s penance time.  I  do the Walk of Shame—everyone on the plane knows it’s ALL MY FAULT that they have to sit there another 20 minutes waiting for take off.  And you know what?  I don’t care.  I’m in my seat. My belt in fastened. No body parts have exploded.  I’m heading home.