SEP-A-2
TAKEOFF FOR THE LONG TRIP TO THE
NORTHERN LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN FROM THE
ON LABOR DAY
The three and a half acres of the wet grass at Trappe MD are mowed. The mail has been picked up and the photos of the last stages of Derwood devastation are recorded. The books on tape are turned in and a few renewed for the trip. And or bags and baggage are all locked up in the GMC pickup truck and we are on our way to IAD airport. So, we are in the best of holiday modes!
FROM THE HOLDIAY INTERVAL RETREAT IN TRAPPE, MD,
TO DERWOOD AND
THEN THROUGH IAD TO EWR
FOR TRANIST OF HUNTERS AND THEIR FIREPOWER
We have made it to Derwood for the
last look for the two or more weeks until I return here to pick up the Bronco,
which I have stashed here. I saw the
dumpster and the chutes from the top floor as the
bathroom in the master bedroom was pulverized in what looks like a typical
scene from the Israeli or Palestinian weekly news. Lots more branches were lying around from the
heavy rainstorms, but I will not be picking them up since there are many more
heavy duty trucks to churn through the
We spent a very brief overnight at
Diane Downing’s house as I slept on the couch where she hade recently had her
daughters come done with Dawn’s three kids and Shelly, the Midwife in suburban
Boston coming down also, to rendezvous with son Scott and Suze and their two
daughters (with a third pregnancy just ended) meeting them on the outer banks
where they are set up for a holiday week.
I surely hope they did not get the same weather that the rest of
CHECKING IN WEAPONRY AND PERSONNEL
THROUGH AIR TRAVEL IN THE LOWER FORTY-EIGHT
STATES, TWOARD
WITH SUCH USEFUL TOOLS!
I am in the middle of that weather
right now, in the long layover at Newark, where we are going to have to park in
the terminal for over six hours, simply because of the way that the jet traffic
flows to get us to the relatively efficient Continental flight nonstop from the
East Coast to the “real West Coast” of the Great Land. On our watches we will depart here in
We made it through the Dulles check-in with what was a very thorough but we had a few glitches in going through each of the hoops for inspection and tagging of our luggage for the carrying of firearms. We had my backpack, and the Action Packer. The former had only my clothes and gear and weighed only 22 pounds. The latter has two pistols, my little Ruger semi-auto for the collection of ptarmigan and grouse, and perhaps snowshoe hares, and then—of considerably more interest to them on the X-Ray image—Craig’s Taurus 454 Cassul—a hand canon. There big bag that Craig was checking in has seven boxes of ammo—two each for the big rifles, one for the big pistol and two for the small .22. This means that the Action Packer has one set of the handguns, and the safari gun safe has all the inactivated rifles, scopes, binoculars, optics and GPS. For this reason all the three bags just mentioned separate the guns, with bolts removed so that they are inoperative, and the ammo, and in three different locked bags—fulfilling all the regulations we could find on the best of the practices, and we included the magazine article summarizing them all for the benefit of anyone asking.
My Action Packer weighed fifty four pounds. I pulled out a few pieces of clothing and added those to the backpack which was far less than the fifty pound admissible, so my two bags were well within the limits. But Craig’s big bag is ninety four pounds, so another fifty dollars in excess baggage fee is due. I quickly talked about the gun safe so that they could inspect the rifles in the room behind the gate, which kept them from weighing it in, which saved us another fifty dollars, since the case itself without any contents added in weighs over thirty five pounds to prote3ct the sensitive gear inside. We then went to the TSA men who had to hand search the Action Packer and the other bags, and look at the handguns to see that they were not loaded. That was a bit of a charade, since the .22 is a semi-automatic with a clip in it, and cannot be seen through without taking it out and removing the clip and working the action, but the fellow was not interested in doing that, since he was so curious about the big Cassul he had seen in outline form on the X-Ray machine. He was also interested in the bottle of Scotch saying it was too much and we would have to leave on or the other behind. He said this with an almost straight face.
We got the check-in bags all certified and sent through, but then we had to get us through the check-in. For me, I asked that they take out the film bag I was carrying in my carry-on bag and hand search the 800 ASA speed single use Photo Works flash cameras. This also included taking my belt off and also having my “wafer” daytimer searched page by page. It took longer and greater care for us to get through the security search than it did to put our very high power weaponry checked through. In the busy work, the gun safe was checked in without being weighed and for that reason we DID have to pay for excess weight for one of Craig’s bag, but DID NOT have to pay for the unweighed gun safe safari case on rollers. My concern, is that we will have to go through this drill again, and again risk the excess baggage fees by the short (but expensive) commercial flight for which we have to check in again first thing in the morning in Anchorage, when the interval between those two domestic commercial flights is not a lot longer than the Continental mandated layover in Newark, where we are at this time sitting through a foul weather rainstorm.