We left Paris early in the morning and headed to Charles de Gaulle airport. I snapped a few last shots as we walked.
We got to the airport in plenty of time, and it was an interesting airport. It had these tubes for “feeding” passengers to the right departure lounges throughout the airport.
We had planned to meet up with Brian in the airport after we had gone through security as his flight left just 10 minutes after ours. Kakki had already left for the south of France. However, we discovered once we got through security that we were in a small departure lounge of only 5 gates! We haven’t been in an airport like that before, normally you go through security and then you’re in a large concourse with all the departure gates. So, we weren’t able to meet up with Brian, even though he was just a few gates away.
The departure lounge was rather nice, with comfortable seats and tables. So I sat down and did some work on the blog.
We had an hour and a half flight to Munich. Munich’s international airport was even nicer than the Paris one! After a couple of hours we boarded the plane for our 12 hour flight to San Francisco. There was WIFI aboard the Lufthansa flight, it couldn’t do much apart from send messages, but I did message the kids saying, “Hello from the airspace above Greenland; it’s not every day you get a message from your mother above Greenland, right???” 😉 Cathy messaged me back straight away!
We arrived in San Francisco at 8pm local time, which was 5am in the time zone we were used to. I was pretty sure I would sleep well when we got to our hotel around 9pm. But this was not to be….
There was a long, slow line at immigration. Finally, after an hour, it was our turn with the immigration officer. He took our passports, but oddly he didn’t ask any of the usual questions, such as “How long are you staying for? What is the purpose of your visit?” etc.. He took my fingerprints and photograph, and then Mike’s, as they normally do. For some reason Mike’s fingers weren’t being scanned properly so he had to do the whole thing three times. Finally, the immigration officer gave us our passports back and said, “Take these down to the office at the end of the corridor here”.
Hmm. We knew that wasn’t normal. I thought that perhaps they had to take Mike’s fingerprints manually since the scanner seemed to be having problems.
We turned the corner at the end of the corridor where we entered a waiting room and what I saw in there made my heart drop. This was NOT good. Surely there was some mistake! In the waiting room were over 20 people with English as a second language: Chinese, Filipino, Indian etc.. We went to the counter up the front where 3 officers were sitting and gave them our passports. They were put at the back of a long row of other passports and folders. We realised that all the people in the room would have to be interviewed before it was our turn. Oh dear…
In the room were 5 rows of 6 seats and very few seats were available. I estimate there must have been at least 25 people, possibly even 30. So we stood and waited with a few others who were standing, until we could sit down. Then I pulled out a book and started reading, knowing we were going to be there for a while. Mike pulled out our ESTA application and studied it, wondering what on earth could be wrong that caused us to end up here! Of course I have no photos of any of this, there were signs saying no phones and no cameras allowed.
One after another, people were slowly called up the front, usually with a translator. At one point a man went up the front and clearly complained about the length of the waiting time. The officer behind the counter offered a solution: he could put the man’s passport at the end of the queue. 😉 The man quietly went back to his seat.
After 2 hours, I heard a man say, “Oh no. How did this happen???” Then I heard, “Mrs Woods?”
And up we went. The officer explained that there had been a mistake. Y’know, I could have told him that when we first walked in. Ha! 😉 It wasn’t Mike that was the problem but me; there had been some glitch with the computer and it had confused me with… wait for it… a MAN who was on their watchlist. He said there was something almost the same, whether it was my birth date or my passport number, but it had brought up an alert because of the similarity. And that was that. We were free to leave.
We told him that when we had last left the USA in 2009 it was with my diplomatic passport. If only we’d had that passport this time!
It seemed rather ironic that after traveling all around the world with no incidents whatsoever, and after going through multiple countries who never required our photographs or our fingerprints, here in the USA they not only took those, but also held us up for 3 hours. Welcome to the USA. 😉 I know they were just doing their job, although I also think they should have been able to tell pretty quickly that I was not a man! Just not sure I really want to go back there again in a hurry after that experience.
We finally got to our hotel at 11.30pm after being up for 25 hours and… we slept well. 🙂
Sadly it happens more often then you realise – my parents in their late 60’s then and NZ citizens arriving back into Auckland from being overseas were separated and quizzed on whether they were who they were. Mum was questioned about dad to work out if they really were a couple ( married 52 years this year) and my father was given tax questions as a test ( he was an accountant) as his name ( actually birth certificate apparently ) was used for a fraudulent passport.
Never nice to be told to go into essentially a holding cell to prove who you are!
Oh NO! Your poor parents. What an awful thing to happen to them, especially when coming home!!!