Today’s big bad security flap made for a very bad day for a lot of people. It wasn’t the nightmare I thought it would be at work, but there was a lot of information-overload “chaff” in the morning that had me stumped, so that I gave out bad information.
Bad information! No! No!
One of our travelers was escorted from the airport at a large city in India and told that he’d have to find someplace to stay for the night; he wasn’t even flying inbound to London, which was where so many flights were either delayed, diverted, or stranded. His next flight was to another city in India… which was kind of odd, unless you consider that there’s a lot more to the story yet than we know. One news item I saw later in the day hinted at a connection with Pakistan – that the government there had been instrumental in breaking the case, and by implication that some of the intelligence originated there.
My husband David and I had been, up until a few weeks ago, planning on a trip to Britain. I hadn’t actually had time to work on it the last couple of months because we’ve been so busy, so there wasn’t a lot of time to pull things together. So we’d come around to the idea of doing another US domestic road trip again, just because we enjoyed the one we did last time so much.
So after today’s news, and knowing that air travel will be screwed up for some time to come, the road trip is looking better and better. We were thinking we’d go East, but there’s some compelling personal reasons to go West again – mostly practical considerations, like picking up some heavy boxes that my sister Timmy is storing for me. Also, we’re both looking forward to a return trip to Mesa Verde, a place we find mysteriously compelling and deeply relaxing.
Getting back to today’s events, domestic travel will be different enough, but international travel today from London to the US was all kinds of strictly enforced rules about what could and could not be carried on. By the end of the day, various airline websites had settled on common verbiage – the conference calls this morning must have been wild. There must have been a run on clear plastic shopping bags and net/string bags in Heathrow today, because that’s what the airlines wanted people to pack their “minimum personal effects” in for maximum efficiency in screening passengers. And I spoke to a couple of people who wondered whether they should ship their laptops UPS the day before they travel, or risk packing them in their checked baggage.
Tomorrow ought to be even more interesting.
