$25 jar of jelly

The jelly experience started off innocent enough, in the end, however, it was quite a fiasco. On Sunday night Sasha and I stayed at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pescadoro, CA. There happens to be a restaurant in Pescadoro called Duarts, which is known for 2 things – in addition to being the only restaurant for 50 miles or so – cream of artichoke soup and olloliberrry pie. I had the soup (which was delicious), but by the time we got to dessert I was awfully full and so instead of having pie I bought my mom and Sandor each a jar of Olloliberry Jam. I ended up having it the next morning on toast (seeing as how it was as mentioned before the only restaurant for miles around and we had to kill time until the hostel opened up for us to check out) and it was delicious. I was quite happy with my purchase until the airport people decided that jelly is a matter of national security and I couldn’t carry it on the plane. Now seriously people – can we PLEASE do a reality check with airport security? What am I going to do with a jar of olloliberry jelly that will put my flight in jeopardy? I have a major problem with entire institutions overreacting to things and never doing any kind of gut check to see if maybe, just maybe, they are being idiotic.

Anyway, so instead of continuing onto my terminal as intended, I had to stand for 10 minutes while they checked my bag – even after my telling them exactly what was in it and how much it was and letting them know that I was certain it was more than the ‘liquid’ amount I was allowed to carry so if jelly counted as liquid I was going to have to go back. Apparently the definition of liquid has in fact changed since I was in school and so, I had to turn around and go back to departures and ask them to check another bag. Now of course I had everything that was semi-breakable in this bag, so I had to remove anything that was definitely breakable and find some way to fit it in my backpack, and then I had to make my sweatshirt that was in that bag go a long way and wrap up everything in there. I was afraid to use the vest I was wearing as well, because apparently airlines are not worried about saving money when it comes to air conditioning the airplane.

They are, however, worried about saving money when it comes to checking baggage. I had to pay $50 to check that stupid bag! At the point when I found out this ridiculous charge I had already invested about 30 minutes in teh process of getting to that point and I had stopped caring about the fact that my credit card statement is going to be a disaster, and so Sandor and my mom will be each getting a $25 jar of jelly. The olloliberries better be pretty darn delicious!