That Time My Husband Almost Got Arrested at Charles De Gaulle Airport

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Funny how something can bring back a long-lost memory. Last week, when I wrote about whether or not you’re allowed to refuse your carry-on bag to go through the scanner at the TSA security checkpoint, it suddenly reminded me of the time my husband almost got arrested at Charles De Gaulle.

Years – no, decades – ago, Joe and I went to Europe on a “group trip” with a couple of other people. We were both very young (we weren’t even dating yet, never mind married. We were “just friends”) and it was a first visit to Europe for both of us.

Cell phones were in their infancy (or maybe toddlerhood) in the mid-1990s, and using them as cameras was a dream that would take several more years. So, if you wanted to take pictures on vacation, as one would definitely want to do on their first trip to Europe, you had to bring an actual camera.

Joe’s camera of choice back then was a Pentax 35mm model.

It, of course, used film. Way back when, there were rumors that you shouldn’t let your undeveloped film go through the X-ray machine at an airport because it would ruin the photos (it was actually a little more defined/specific than that [as per Kodak], but the internet was not what it is now, either, so many people heard it as “don’t put your film through the X-ray” and that was that).

So when we were flying home from Charles De Gaulle Airport (CDG) in Paris, Joe had carefully put all of his yet-to-be-developed film in a big Ziploc bag and asked the officers at X-ray to hand check them.

Maybe it was because we were in France, which had a long history of being bombed, so they were being careful. Maybe it was because Joe could only ask in English. Perhaps the guards were just having a bad day. But they told Joe no (actually, it was more of an “Absolument pas,” meaning, “Absolutely not”) and instructed him to put his film on the conveyor belt to be X-rayed.

Now, Joe’s stubborn streak doesn’t appear very often. And when he had a plane to catch in a foreign country, it probably wasn’t the best time for it to rear its ugly head. But rear its head it did, and having the film hand-checked vs. going through X-ray quickly became a battle of wills between the French men who were in charge and the young man from New Jersey who was very much out of his element.

Thinking that Joe was either going to be shot or sent to jail, being the good friends that we were, we told him we’d meet him on the plane, and left him to deal with the CDG authorities. 😉

Joe eventually did get through X-ray unscathed, but it wasn’t until they brought over the airport police (with the machine guns, mind you) and threatened that he was at risk of being detained if he didn’t follow their instructions. His film, by the way (which, thanks to threats of machine guns and detainment, he eventually allowed to be X-rayed), was developed with no problems.

Unfortunately, less than a decade later, going through an airport in the U.S. became just as stringent because we were then in the era of a post-9/11 world.

But yeah, I still refer to this as the time my husband almost got arrested at CDG. 😉

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