New York: Episode One

Good heavens, it’s been so long since my last entry, and so much has happened! The reason for my delay is that I’ve been putting off the monumental task of telling you the story of my recent trip to New York. Now, I feel like I can do it. I will, however, be splitting up the stories into several “episodes” if you will, in order to make them shorter and easier to read. SO without any further adieu, I now present New York: Episode One (Pilot).

Now, normally when I travel it’s an easy trip with Southwest Airlines through Dallas Love Field. However, since I was going to New York, we were required to fly another airline (Air Tran) out of DFW Airport. If you haven’t been to DFW, keep in mind (and this is absolutely true, you could look it up) that the airport itself is larger than the entire island of Manhattan. So navigating through it, is sometimes a task, but we made it to our gate AOK.

If you remember, the last time I was at DFW, I had a little trouble with the security woman (see SECURITY BREACH in the archives), but this time I had no such trouble, I wasn’t even patted down! I’ve seriously had to be patted down on EVERY flight I’ve flown. So this time, I had NO belt on, and absolutely no metal in my pockets, and got through fine. The story comes later, from inside the gift shop.

You see, my mother and I arrived at our gate very early, about 45 minutes or so before we would be boarding, so we naturally went to the gift shop to pick up magazines and what not before the flight. The shop was located directly next to one of the security checkpoint lines so we could see all the people as they passed through the detectors. Well, this wasn’t a big deal or anything until we saw one of the officers approach a 15 year old girl…

“Ma’am, we’ve had to confiscate some items from your bag that aren’t allowed on the plane.”

Oh lord, PERFECT, people smuggling things on board.

“We had to take this hairspray, it’s not allowed because it’s flammable.”

OK, maybe that’s not a very big deal, just hairspray.

“But umm… I’m not sure what you were thinking but…”

Oh great, here it comes.

“But, you absolutely can NOT have this BUTCHER KNIFE on board the plane. It’s just NOT allowed.”

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?

My mom and I FREEZE and look over at the girl and the officer as he proceeds to pull out the BUTCHER KNIFE and show it to the girl. I. Was. FLOORED. Go into your kitchen and look in that large block of wood that holds all of your butcher knives, pull out the largest one, and the knife that girl had was BIGGER than that. What exactly was she planning on chopping up while on board? I'm pretty sure it wasn't chicken and dumplings...

The lucky thing though, was that she and her family were not on our flight, at least we figured because we were several gates down from where our gate actually was. So we just went along with our own business and made our way down to our gate and eventually onto the plane.

It took a while to load in though, there were several minutes we just sat while no one else entered into the plane. A minute or so before our scheduled flight time, my mom jokingly said to me “I guess the knife girl isn’t on our flight, thank goodness.” I was thankful, we were taking off and they wouldn’t pose a problem to us. But OHHHH no, literally SECONDS before the attendants shut the door, a frantic family comes onto the plane… Knife girl’s family. Oh yes, and do you want to know where they sat?? Oh that would be the ROW across from us!

Something that was a little funny though, was that in their row was a VERY large COS (in airline talk that means Customer of Size) who LITERALLY took up two whole seats, but did not purchase two seats. So for a few minutes before take off, the girl’s mom was squeezed into about 4 inches of seat space until they moved the COS to first class because he was SO big.

This picture is courtesy of my WONDERFUL T-Mobile Sidekick 2. You can see in the right of the picture the flight attendant leaning over and telling the COS (the guy in the hat) that he will have to move up to first class.

Anyway… the now, knifeless girl did not lose her cool or anything during the flight but you better believe I had my eye on her the whole time... I also had a large child's pen (the pen, not the child was large) on hand just incase she decided to make any moves (if you dont know what I'm talking about, see Red Eye starring my dear friend Rachel McAdams).

CHECK BACK LATER THIS WEEK FOR EPISODE TWO!!!