Grenoble airport

Having heard tales of it being a bit of a cattle Market on a Saturday I am happy to say it's nowhere near as bad as that. Yes it's small and very busy but we never had trouble finding a seat and there are snack bars outside the departures entrance, in the deptartures area and after security. The staff were all friendly and displayed a sense of humour. The only trouble came from a fellow passenger at check-in! A lady with an injured leg was wheeled up by a porter to the front of our queue immediately before me. Her husband had all their bags. It didn't seem to have occured to them that they'd need to show tickets, passports and medical docs - and as the check-in guy asked for them these came to light slowly one by one. Meanwhile the husband, in handing over bags for the wife to fish out all the documents had manouevred her wheelchair so it prevented our queue from accessing the next check-in desk over so we were stuck waiting for them to sort themselves out while the other queue had both the other open desks to use.

During all this the couple must have been clearly able to see the many notices about no ski boots (or helmets) in handluggage - they were on the screens and on large signs on every check-in desk. Yep, you guessed it - next thing the check-in guy asks them is what's in their rather large handluggage ......!! The bloke then starts repacking their luggage, by now having positioned himself and his possessions across the entrance to TWO check-in conveyer belts with stuff everywhere, totally oblivious to the bottleneck he was creating. The staff just looked on with bemused expressions. Thinking all was done, he then replaces his handluggage on his trolley at which point the wife asks if he doesn't need to check his boots in too as well as hers .....!

We meanwhile were trying, with the group of blokes behind us to whom we'd been chatting, to stifle the giggles - we were early enough that there was no concern about time! Eventually they got sorted and I got my bag on the belt and horrors, it said 15.4Kg though Margaret's travel scales had said it was 14.8 when packed. As we watched though, doing only a partial job of resisting the giggling, the scale repeatedly went up to 15.6 and down to 15.0 randomly while the blokes were helpfully recommending the opening of the bag and removal of the largest knickers I could find to reduce the weight! The check-in guy, although not entirely sure of the content of the humour in the conversation (probably just as well) was smiling along quite happy with my bag's weight and we all then completed check in uneventfully.

On getting to security though, I was asked if my bag could be searched and the chap stuck in a gloved hand, and withdrew it, looked at what he had hold of and said, in a surprised tone "oh, it's an orange"! I still am not sure what he thought it might have been!