Only In America

It’s been eight years since the Peach family last went to the US. In fact the last time was to New York just after 911, in the December. We hired a car and drove down to the Florida Keys for Christmas hols, circumnavigating the Appalachian Mountains over a month. That time we were very nearly eaten by an Alligator whilst canoeing a remote stretch of river hours from anywhere. This, on top of many other past calamities, got us labelled as the Griswolds.

Last week we were back in Florida and this time I really noticed the differences between us and them. The first thing was to discover how hard it is to get into the country just for a week’s holiday. It seems that even if you have booked with a travel company you now have to fill in so many on-line bits of paper just to be allowed to check in.
There is the new ESTA form (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) one for each member of a party regardless of age and then the API form (Advanced Passenger Information) which must show a first night’s address. Turn up at the airport without both of these or incorrectly completed at your peril. Once through check in, you then have to dispose of anything that resembles liquid or could turn into liquid, such as gel before moving on to remove shoes, belts and in our case the tea spoon from the cafe that the son had put into the daughters hood, though the latter wasn’t discovered until she’d made eleven trips through the metal detector.
Once on the plane and airborne you still have to fill in the two visa waiver forms and keep inside the boxes. These are handed out, with pens, moments before you hit turbulence and therefore US customs perceive all UK citizens have having extremely similar handwriting, that is extremely similar to a nerve addled woman in her nineties.

One of the first things that you may discover on arrival is when withdrawing your credit card from it’s wallet that there is no chip and pin system. All they do is swipe your card and give it back to you before you sign a slip which they never check. To test this I used my wife’s card which has the word ‘Mrs’ on it but alas it didn’t matter. When signing I started doing random signatures, resorting eventually to a simple smiley face and on another occasion drawing a little house with a chimney bellowing a curly line of smoke. I only found this surprising because we are anally obedient in the UK, I did expect that the US with it’s Homeland Security and rubber glove anti airport humour may have possibly done something about ID theft but that seems to have been overlooked. I can only assume terrorists don’t steal credit cards.

The Peach family were lucky and honoured to discover the flip side of this negligence on the last day of our holiday or vacation. Because petrol or gas was only $2.58 per GALLON or if you like 36p a litre we decided to hire a brand new, satellite radioed, Dodge Charger - an upgrade from the standard compact hire car for only $19 (£12). Our emissions have been suffering over the years from us eating raw veg and wearing sandals made from cabbages so we thought a long haul flight and a Dodge Charger was more than deserved. We’d parked this beast at The Florida Mall to do some end of holiday shopping.
After wandering around for what seemed weeks, it was decided to leave. I only wanted to go into one shop, a book shop near the exit. The others went back to that car. After a quarter of an hour I realised that the car key was in my pocket so thought it best to leave to avoid the ‘where have you been’ question. My son happened to meet me to suggest I get a move on. As we walked out of the main doors, I commented that, you know, we could just have well have been in Cribbs Causeway or Bluewater but outside it’s America, palms swaying, Hummer’s and huge SUV’s everywhere and the sound of sirens, look, three cop cars in a hurry.
We all got in the car, lowered the windows and was about to start the engine when the afore mentioned three cop cars screeched to a halt behind us, I heard someone shout, hands in the air. Excellent I thought, reaching for my camera but turned to see the kids in the back with their hands up and back at the wife who had hers raised. Looking past her I looked into a barrel of a gun and a real cop shouting, ‘put your hands up.'
I dumbly said, ‘who me?’.
I had wrongly assumed that we were about to witness a real life shoot out with the passengers in the car parked next to us except the car parked next to us was devoid of human habitation.
‘Hands up, don’t move’ the officer shouted. At this point I’d like to advise others not to make the mistake I made and say, ‘hands up or don’t move, which is it?’
Another cop menacingly came down my side and the third cop was pointing his gun at the back window essentially having us all covered. I was waiting for them to figure out that they had obviously got the wrong car and our repeated, ‘are you serious?’ queries alerted them to our English accents. Guns were lowered and apologies poured out, which didn’t placate our daughter who retorted with ‘I don’t appreciate having a gun pointed in my face, thank you very much’
One officer, who was remarkably similar looking to Arnie in Terminator 2, explained that they’d had reports that the kids had been looking under the car which turns out they had been, trying to retrieve a dropped pen from underneath whilst waiting for daddy.
CCTV picked this up and it was instantaneously decided that we were either, 1/stealing the car or 2/placing a bomb under it.
If you are an American you simply don’t hang around a car. You park, you shop, you return, you leave seems to be the normal behaviour.

As our daughter reminded us, we are the British Griswolds.
Hmm