Island Moosie ... Snorkeling, Eating, and Drinking her way through the islands

Moosie’s travel adventures continue
Hang on for the ride!

Travel with Moosie and you will be in for an adventure of sorts.  That’s what Hook says.

Day 1 on our way to Cozumel and I delivered what would be the event of the day.

We were first off the plane and sailed right through immigration.  As we waited for our checked luggage, the airport sniffer dog and his handler were making their rounds checking the bags.  They came over and sniffed around our carry-on bag, my backpack, and my beach bag.  First pass and I thought they were done so I bent down to pick up my backpack.  The handler stopped me and said, one more pass.  Oooookie dokie then.

Second pass… and the dog really starts sniffing my beach bag and buries his nose in there.  Sniff-sniff-sniff.  Uh-oh…

“I need to look in your bag miss”, says the handler.

“Sure thing” I answer, since I have nothing to hide.

“What do you have in here?” he asks.

I say, “my snacks”.

He proceeds to open up my brown baggie and BINGO!  He finds my ziploc bag with the half-gnawed aged gouda cheese that I had been snacking on.  Busted!!  Yes, my name is Moosie and I never leave home without my cheese.

The officer tells me that is a no-no and says he has to take it.  Oops!  There goes my cheese!  And my fresh-baked cookie from the flight that I had saved got snagged too as it was in the same bag as the cheese.  Boohoo.  Although the Officer did ask me if I wanted the cookie, but I declined as I would have had to dig in the luggage for another ziploc baggie.

My cookie that got caught up in the cheese scandal!

He proceeds to write down my name and passport number for the record.

Meanwhile I can feel E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E just looking at me and I am sure wondering what contraband I had tried to sneak in.  They were probably thinking at any minute the armed Federales would be cuffing me and leading me away.

Hook, I was sure, was slinking away, distancing himself from the cheese smuggler.  HA!  (Just a note:  The officer was actually very professional and really nice throughout all of this.)

It never fails.  Somehow or other my bags tend to end up getting the extra search.  Like the time they called me to the backroom to inspect my checked luggage in Turks & Caicos.  My Sonicare toothbrush and the various cords and chargers for my gadgets were the culprits.

Last year it was the extra inspection for the ““howlas de los gatos por Humane Society” (aka cat traps) that I was mule-ing for someone.

The year before it was a bar of soap that had one side with bumps (a massage bar soap from the Hyatt) that demanded a lot of questions and scrutiny.  They thought it was some kind of fruit?  Huh??

Let’s not even go to the time I forgot to take the laptop out of my backpack leaving Washington Dulles.  We were leaving on a 6 am flight and we were at the airport at 4 am and I had not slept the night before.  Boy oh boy that was quite a fiasco.  First they ran the backpack again through the x-ray.  Then they swabbed it for explosives residue.  The fun part was about to begin.  Apparently the machine they used to process the swab was malfunctioning and it registered a false positive.  It took almost an hour to make it through security that time.  Thank goodness they found another machine that was actually working correctly to test the swab.

But I digress…

Once through the sniffer test, our checked luggage soon made its way to us and we were soon putting all of the bags through the x-ray machine.  Nothing got flagged this time.  Whew!

I asked Hook to press the magic button because he seems to have much better luck than I do.  The previous times when I pushed the button we always got the red light.  Sure enough, he pressed the button and the magical color of green (GREEN! my favorite color!) lit up and we happily skipped on to the exit.

We quickly walked past the timeshare sharks, ignoring all their come-ons and offers of assistance, and got our tickets for the Collectivo van.

Five minutes after sitting in the van waiting for other passengers heading Norte, a couple joined us, and after the “Hello!” pleasantries, the lady exclaimed, “Oh you’re the lady whose sandwich was confiscated.”

“It was cheese!”, I emphatically cried.  Still lamenting the loss of my 5-year aged gouda…

Sniffer Dog – one
Moosie – zero

To be continued…