One of the perks of being a car journalist is that you often find yourself flying places. This is great because you’re still working, but you get to experience places you’ve never been to. I would have never gone to Germany or France last year if it were not for this lovely career. It also means that you can witness some shenanigans. What’s the most hilarious thing you’ve seen while traveling?
The best bit of hilarity that comes to my mind is when I flew to France last year for an Audi event. I had never left American soil before, and I had no idea what to expect. As a teenager and young adult, I had heard all sorts of silly stereotypes about France, like the abundance of cigarettes and baguettes. As a car enthusiast, I heard about the plentiful Citroën 2CVs and Renault Twingos.
I was shocked to find out that, at least for the region of France that I was in, some of it had a semblance of truth. Pretty much every third or so person I encountered out there had cigarettes on their person or were actively smoking. I then loved to see all of the classic French cars that weird car people love here in America. But I lost it when I saw a first-generation Renault Twingo with four guys in it, and all of them were smoking.
To be clear, this wasn’t bad at all. I loved experiencing something so completely different. I also adored seeing how locals drove, and I even had a great time with the French version of the TSA. I still giggle when an agent found a kind of object in my bag and called it “le massage gun.”
I have to imagine the American equivalent of this would be when a tourist sees that America really is addicted to massive pickup trucks and that a large drink is absurdly huge.
The next memorable thing was probably when I flew out to Las Vegas earlier this year for an Indian Motorcycle event and caught the Vegas Sphere watching flights take off. Oh, to have the curiosity of a giant yellow ball.
This morning, Jason posted this photo in our Slack chat.
This is aboard an American Airlines flight. I admit, I’d probably sit in my seat, chuckling the whole time. There’s something so delightful about this sign. It’s remarkably crappy, like a flight attendant wrote it down on masking tape between flights. Yet, it’s still perfectly functional and does its job.
How about you? What’s the most hilarious thing you’ve seen on the road, while flying, or perhaps in another country?
The airport in Tucson does have a consistent amount of general aviation traffic so I’m always amused at seeing the line at the runway being Boeing, Airbus, Cessna, Boeing…
When I was walking around Tokyo, I looked over and there were two real life Mario Karts waiting at the intersection. I hear they don’t allow that anymore, sadly.
I just remembered another one. Going through security at Austin airport, at a horribly early hour (first flights of the day). There was a guy in his mid-twenties in front of me getting his bag screened. I don’t know if it was a prank by a friend, or if it was ignorance, or TSA having a good time…. but in that bag was some bondage related gear. The item in question was some kind of whip/club thing….TSA were concerned it was a “weapon”.
The look on the dudes face when they took it out and started inspecting it carefully, his entire soul fell out of his butt.
Getting Grief from Canadian customs in Regina, for having a redwings hat on my bag. He was doing it all in good humour. They called it bad taste contraband.
I was on a plane from Phoenix to Buffalo in late January, the day after the Chiefs/Bills AFC championship game. The gate agent made a little joke about Buffalo – it’s Southwest and they generally keep things causal so NBD. Then 20 minutes later (when we should have already been boarded) he said something like “sorry for the delay but I’m not sure why you’d want to go back to Buffalo anyway”- that didn’t get any giggles. He made a third comment about the Bills and dozens of people started boo-ing. Smartly, he taunted one of the guys boo-ing with a “chill out if you want to get on the plane” – I thought we were going to see shit go down.
When we were boarding my wife asked the flight attendant to please tell the rest of the crew to lay off any commentary on the Bills game when we were in the air and I heard another person do it with the attendant in the back.
When landing at Buenos Aires from Ushuaia, lot of passengers unbuckled and got up to collect their hand bags while the plane was still moving from the runway to the gate. Then, the deafening blare of terse-worded instruction from the pilot ordered the passengers to sit down this instantly.
At Lima aeroport in Perú, I saw a large glass box at the screening area and noticed a rolling pin (used for baking) amongst the contrabands. I asked politely whether I could take photo of this box; I received a firm “no”. So, no photo for the posterity…