Friday 5 September 2008

Fun at the Customs / security

Now in Duns and have borrowed this very nice MacBook to play on while Andrew Mimms is working on my bike. His daughter Bridget's boyfriend, young Richard is here working on The Border Bikes website as he is their "webmaster" and making a brilliant job of it.

Having mentioned weight limits we tried to keep our bags within the prescribed, so having been given some nice bottles of wine and no scales available I gave some away to our friends and packed only the one large 1.5 ltr in my bag. Got to the airport, which is tiny, and at the check in discovered that we actually had loads of weight spare, enough for another couple of bottles !! But too late, off went my bag. Then to passport control, charming young police officers, and onto security - where our stuff was being x-rayed, but the lady was also double checking our passports !! then i saw a bit of paper on the machine with MY name on it. As we passed through Mrs. b. was stopped and taken away to a side room and then so was I - where I had to open my bag - but when they saw it was just an extra big bottle of wine there was no problem. I commented on the fact that i had had to leave other bottles behind and the officer thought I had been deprived of them there and was heading off to retrieve them for me - which was nice but a bit late. It would appear that had I gone in with a presentation gift pack at that airport they would have let us through, unlike Edinburgh or the big ones where everything is binned then you are forced into their tax free shops.

Our other surprise for the day was that the plane was stopping off at Leeds / Bradford airport en route, however this proved to be a short stay on the ground (raining heavens hard) but we had nice short hp up to Edinburgh where the views were magnificent as we came in and a lovely bright summer evening . Then took a taxi back to Penicuik - big mistake as we will now need to take out a second mortgage I think - who said the French were bad.

So back to last weeks story - next.

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