Arrival at JFK

As we taxi to the gate at JFK, I'm thinking that although today seems a bit nuts, at least I've had a nice sleep, been comfortable and had spare seats by me, so I haven't needed to chat to people who think that because I'm British I may know their Aunt Morag in Dundee.  
In the 80s I remember ending up JFK absoultely shattered after a standby trip with American Transair on a TriStar.  We turned up at Gatwick to find we were actually routing Gatiwck-Milan-Paris-JFK and even then we may have needed a tech stop in Bangor or Gander.  Economy class in the 80s with no entertainent....but I was younger.  Anyway, on arrival at JFK, there's always a queue.

Except today, there wasn't!  Straight to immigration, yippee, I do all the fingers and thumbs and photos and the nice guy draws an ominous looking yellow line across my customs form and asks me to follow him.

After 10 mins wait, another immigration officer calls me to his desk for a chat, he can't see anything wrong with my ESTA.  He mentioned the several trips to the UAE, perhaps understandably that's one trigger.  Off I go, only for the nice customs people to do some 'secondary screening'.  

This took about 20 mins, they'd apparently never heard of Tier Points runs (the immigration guy was fairly clued up...he said he'd had several people doing same day turnrounds in Hawaii never mind 2 days like me)...I had a gathering of 4 people in the end, half of whom were doing the actual inspection of my travelling life and Calvins while the others asked about Air Traffic Control matters.  Now New Yorkers can be a little brusque at times; these guys were very chatty and quite OK.

When one of them picked up my camera and had a look at the photos I was beginning to regret taking the Daily Mirror headline of earlier....instead, he was more interested in the ID of my daughter.

He tested the camera works...as you see here...having emptied everything out and tried to understand my photocopy of Aircraft Museums of Hawaii, Honolulu Airport spotterswiki etc the thing that seemed to cause most concern was my spreadsheet of Tesco Clubcard accounts and why I was bringing it on vacation with me.  Explaining a Tier Points run was relatively simple by comparison to trying to explain why I seemed to have 60x strings of 16 digit numbers with all sorts of notes and codes.  It will seem funny to look back on but it wasn't just now....I was visualising 'declined entry to the US due to clubcard violation'. 

Anyhow, all's well, I was allowed to continue my journey and I'm now in the Days Inn.   :)