Getting out of town

Took the 1145 flight from Toronto to Boston. Got to the airport at 0815, and rocked up to the kiosk. There was an offer for an upgrade to First for a nominal fee, so we took it. This increased our luggage allowance to 3 bags each, but we still had just the one each. No saris bought yet, remember?

We then queued to the bag-drop counters. This is something of a misnomer, as we don't drop out bags here at all. The idea is to get the bags tagged (by the agent at the counter), and proceed to the queue for customs. Today, it appears that there were not enough customs agents in (deja vu, anyone?), so the queue extended along behind the counters, for the full length of counters, then out from behind the counters and across the check-in hall, round the corner, and about another 20m beyond that. Total from the entrance to the customs hall to the end of the queue, probably a little over 100m. That's the queue to drop our bags after tagging.

As we were making our way slowly along the snaking queue, staff would come down and call for pax on flights leaving at 0915, then 0930, then 1000. These people were whisked away to the front of the line, which only slowed the rest of us further.

And then we made it to the door. Yay!!

Inside the door were two Disney queues, one to the right and one to the left. We were directed to the one on the left. By the time I had made it to the end, I calculated that it folded back on itself 9 times, and each fold took 11 lengths of tenser tape, at about 3-4 people per length. So that is about 360 pax in our queue. The other queue, I discover to my chagrin, has folds about a third as long as ours, so that queue only holds 100 and change.

So do the maths. Both Disney queues were full, totalling about 480 pax. The snake queue probably adds another 150. So, when we got there, there were well over 600 people waiting to drop their bags.

Did you notice that I called this a customs queue? We STILL had our bags. No, this is not a repeat of our boarding the boat angst from not many weeks ago.