I am in a tiny airport just outside Paris.

I was just informed by an inordinately pissy French check-in guy that my bag is too large to carry on.

This bag has been carried on in London, Ireland, Scotland, Venice, Palermo, Portugal, Berlin, Prague, a tiny little town in the South of France, and the US of Freaking A.

It weighs significantly less than the average American newborn.

He informs me that the weight limit for carryon bags is ten kilos. My bag weighs eleven and a half. That’s about twenty six pounds, and it’s everything I need to live comfortably for months.

It also doesn’t quite fit into the little box they use to check for size.

He goes on to tell me that it will cost twenty euro to have unidentified hairy men stomp my belongings into a paste.

Ryanair, of course, cannot guarantee my ever seeing my bag again, or that said hairy men will not actually urinate on my things.

“I guess I’ll just get rid of some of this,” I say.

My left eyelid starts to twitch.

“Give me my passport. Now.”

Here’s tricky part. When I travel, I travel light. I’ve always figured that I’ll hate all of my clothes by the end of the trip anyway, so why lug around more? So my bag is pared down to absolute necessities and a few souvenirs, which I routinely leave with my friend Jon when I route through London.

There is nothing to throw away.

I pace up and down the airport concourse, trying to think my way out of this. Twenty euros is about thirty dollars right now, and while I could pay it, something inside me balks.

I’m gonna beat this pissy little French guy.

I begin by scanning the people waiting in the airport restaurant, trying to find someone who looks like they’ll watch my laptop, my heaviest possession, while I check in.
I settle on two guys who look like they fought in Nam. They have aggressively long white beards, Harley paraphernalia, and look like they might be concealing ear necklaces.

They also look like they’re willing to Stick it to the Man.

With knives.

“Er, hey,” I say, trying not to look shifty.

“Um, I’m trying to check in, and my bag is, like, a kilo over? So I was wondering if one of you might watch my laptop while I…”

One of them (the one with the longest beard) grunts, and with a creak of leather, shifts over in his seat towards me.

“They say we’re not supposed to do that kind of thing,” he says, giving me a Sincere Look.

“Um, well, yeah they do,” I say.

(I am hoping, at this moment, that he is the reigning Master of Irony.)

“And on that basis, I’m gonna say no.”

(He is not.)

“Fair enough.”

So I continue to pace, my eyelid twitch speeding up, unable to imagine leading a life where pissy little French men are permitted to commit extortion.

And then I have it.

I’ll throw it away.

I run into the spacious baby changing bathroom, and look around wildly. There are three amusingly complicated garbage cans ranged against the walls. One of them has teeth, apparently for grinding used diapers into some kind of horrible mulch.

They’re all too small for my laptop, but they’re also really light plastic. So I scoot one about an inch out from the wall, and pop my computer behind it.

I start to panic as soon as I get in the check-in line.

But its okay, I remind myself. Most people are way too polite to ever use the baby changing toilet, and there are only about five people ahead of me.

(Sigh)

I really ask for it, don’t I?

The woman in front of me is secretly a scout for a family of about seven Italians. Instead of waiting in line with her, they have sent an emissary. When she gets to the head of the line, it’s just… stupid. The various family members start popping up from behind us, all gesturing wildly at the stack of passports the bewildered check-in girl[1] was holding. Four or five random Italians would appear, then a few would wander off, then another guy showed up, left, and started shouting. This continued for about ten minutes, with an ever-changing blob of Italians, while I got increasingly concerned that some diaper-changing woman had just hit the baby changing jackpot. It got to the point where the check-in girl would just wave a passport above her head, furiously pointing at a picture. Someone from the back of the line who vaguely resembled the picture would wave a hand above the melee, and holler something in Italian. The check-in girl would sort of shrug, type something into her terminal, roll her eyes, and go on to the next.

When it was finally my turn, I was a mess. The pissy little French guy was working just one line over, I’d “hidden” my liquids in a plastic bag under my dinner, and somewhere, a biker dude thought I was going to blow up a plane.

Plus I’d been acting suspicious as Hell.

My bag weighs in at eight kilos, and falls through the metal grating of the bag size box. I’m in.

I find my laptop where I’ve left it, and slide through security.

The moral here is simple: If you ever find yourself in a spacious airport bathroom, look behind the garbage cans. Especially if they have teeth.

And the pissy little French guy?

Screw him.

(Yeah!)

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[1] I was in another line. For some reason.

I have no problem with airport security. Everyone involved knows the entire process exists to create a false sense of safety. Airlines cannot afford fear in their passengers, and passengers won’t fly if they think they’ll be blown to kingdom come. Of course, any idiot[1] can work out at least a dozen ways to blow up a plane that haven’t been tried yet, and will therefore not be detected by said security. Interestingly, the rate of Creative Solutions to Modern Aviation increases exponentially the longer passengers wait in security lines.

Security, or attempting it, is not the problem.

The problem is sunscreen.

For those of you who haven’t been blinded by my skin lately, I’m an extremely white person. In Sicily, my host was amazed when, after nearly a week in the sun, my color was upgraded from Traffic Safety Reflector up to a more sedate White.

The reason I wasn’t lobster red after fifteen minutes was thanks to the modern miracle that is sunscreen. Which, over here, costs more than, say, half a tank of unleaded.  It seems like the wonderful off-brand stuff just isn’t available. I have to buy from L’Oreal or whatever just to avoid blisters. All this adds up to hoarding. When I find any kind of sale, I buy a ton of the stuff.

And we all know about the airlines’ one quart-sized ziplock bag per person rule, right? ‘Cause you can’t, apparently, blow up a plane with a mere quart of liquid. And we all know that terrorists never team up and, say, combine their liquids once on board.

Nah.

So I’ve had to get really creative, and figure out how to sneak the stuff on the plane.

To begin the story, it wasn’t always so easy.

My first trip out of the Frankfurt-Hahn airport ended with the security dude having facial twitches and doing his best to approximate Man Having Baby. Apparently a liter-sized bottle of sunscreen causes seizures in certain Germans.

But that was before I had The Method.

First of all, I’m traveling on the cheap. And the cheapest airline in Europe, Ryanair, charges for anything extra. Checking a bag costs an equivalent of thirty dollars, so I have to take everything on board with me.

Second of all, I’m white, and a girl. So I have more leeway than, say, a black male chemistry teacher.

Here’s what you do.[2] Take everything that’ll actually fit in that quart sized bag, and put it in. You’ll be left with about a gallon of miscellaneous leftover liquids. If possible, try and keep the leftover stuff in the gel/wax/cream family. Most of the detector devices can’t see these. I checked.

Then wrap these up in something innocuous, like a sweater. They just have to be inconspicuous. The next step is what the Chinese refer to as a paper tiger. Fill a plastic water bottle about halfway with water. Put it in your travel bag in the same area as your Illegal Liquids[3]. Make sure it’s not all the way full. You want this puppy to slosh.

When you go through security, hand over your quart sized bag. The whole concept here is to appear like a completely placid idiot[4]. Then take a deep breath. When your bag goes through, the alarm will go off. The bored, illiterate security dude will ask you to open your bag.

Do it.

“Discover” the bottle of water.

“How on earth did that get there?” You twitter, batting your eyes and giving the distinct impression that your brain has fallen out.

He’ll give you an ingratiating little smile, try to feel you up, and you’re on your way.

I think my favorite part of this whole procedure is how well it works. On my way out of Sicily, disturbingly, the whole thing got though, water bottle and all. I was tempted to tell them to wait, run off, and come back with a five-gallon bucket of chicken blood, just to check.

And in Stanstead, a London airport, the security guy performed one of the most thorough bag checks I’ve ever been subject to. He found everything. But what he failed to notice was that my little quart sized bag was sitting underneath my laptop in the plastic bin. So, having found everything down to my nail polish and carefully disposed of my sunscreen[5], he politely ran off and provided me with another plastic ziplock bag.

Apparently, he said, I didn’t know how security works.

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[1] Ahem

[2] If you’re a white, unemployed, nomadic girl.

[3] Like, say, conditioner.

[4] Ahem.

[5] Which involved a bomb squad, five cops, and a Loyalty Oath