You may have noticed that my last reported location on InstaMapper is Scotland, Essy and I have been up there for a few days visiting my son and his partner. We got back (by the skin of our teeth) this morning. I’ve flown countless times and only ever missed one flight before, that was also coming home and out of Edinburgh. That was around 10 years ago and sudden snow had brought the Forth bridge to a standstill and it was from there that we watched our aircraft depart. Today the weather was fine but somehow in my mind I thought the departure time was 60 minutes later than actually printed on the boarding passes! Sudden panic when we saw the queue to get through security but we just had to wind our way round those crowd compressing systems. The large screen read “6-7 minutes to clear security”. My arse!! 15 minutes later and we reached the x-ray scanner, coat off, jacket off, belt off, mobile phone in tray, camera in tray, coins in tray etc. and then holding my trousers up with one hand I walked through the scanner – beep …. beep. “Move over here, lift up your arms”. Had a thorough body search and they couldn’t find anything. “Take your shoes off and put them in a tray”, this tray then went back out and through the x-ray machine without showing anything. So they got out a special box with a footprint painted on it and told me to place my foot on the footprint and they x-rayed my foot and put a metal scanner on it – nothing. “The other foot please”. That also showed nothing. They were convinced (I must assume) that I looked like an Al-Qaeda operative because my carry on bag then needed detailed examination including the taking of swabs from various things in it. Finally we got through at exactly the time the boarding passes said the gate closed! Of course our gate was the furthest one from security so we set off running and got to the gate 10 minutes after it should have closed and saw …….. lots of people waiting for our flight since the plane hadn’t yet arrived!!<\/p>\n
Prior to this panic we’d had a great time in Scotland including a lunchtime visit to UK WINNER: Seafish Fish & Chip Shop of the Year 2008\/09<\/a> yesterday. We also went to the home of golf – St Andrews. On our way back from St Andrews we stopped off at a fishmongers and bought a couple of Arbroath smokies<\/a>. Just had a thought …… could the presence and aroma of the Arbroath smokies have been the cause of the great interest security had in me? :-)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You may have noticed that my last reported location on InstaMapper is Scotland, Essy and I have been up there for a few days visiting my son and his partner. We got back (by the skin of our teeth) this morning. I’ve flown countless times and only ever missed one flight before, that was also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}