(Not) Home for the Holidays
Tip It!Oh, how quickly things change… We had planned on spending a quiet Christmas and New Year’s at home, but today I checked airfares on a whim and discovered a (relatively) hot deal that will allow us to go visit family without breaking the bank. Don’t get me wrong… It’s far from free at a bit under $220 apiece. But since my wife and I don’t typically exchange gifts, this trip will be a well-deserved gift to each other.
Given that we have six people in our family, we mostly travel by car. And because we live quite far from family, we don’t travel to see them nearly enough. Thus, this should be a rather memorable trip, especially for the kids. And it will be made even more memorable by the fact that we’re departing Christmas night (around 6PM, arriving shortly before 8PM), and we’re not telling the boys about the trip until Christmas morning.
The beauty of our plan is that we’ll be home for Christmas morning, which we love, but we’ll also get to spend time with family around the holidays, which we also love. And hopefully we’ll get to enjoy a healthy dose of snow. Now for the critical question…
Does anyone think we’ll run into trouble carrying our Wii through airport security?
Published on December 18th, 2007 - 11 Comments
Filed under: Travel
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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11 Responses to “(Not) Home for the Holidays”
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December 18th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Your Wii should be fine. Just treat it like a laptop and run the main system through seperately from your other carry on bags. To be safe, carry a printed copy of the latest TSA restrictions and if anyone gives you trouble just ask to speak to a supervisor, but I doubt you’ll have an issue.
December 18th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Visiting family is always worthwhile. It’s one of the main reasons that I moved to Maine, so that I would have more opportunities to do so.
So you don’t have your older boys reading the site for a good financial education, I assume? Heheh.
December 18th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
That sounds great. For me, the biggest part of the holiday season involves being with family. I’m sure your kids will like the surprise.
December 18th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
I second Jason H. I recently brought an Xbox 360 home with me on a flight and it was fine. They ran it through a couple times because they said it looked weird in the Xray, but they said the xbox looked the weirdest of all the game systems, so you should be fine. I saw someone going through security with a Wii (and Guitar Hero III controller), too.
December 18th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
we take the wii with us all the time:)
It’s no problem, although I guess now we have to take out game systems like they are laptops if you take them through the security line.
December 18th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
You should be fine with the Wii. We recently made a round trip from Cleveland to Dallas and took it along without any problems. I didn’t even take it out of the box. I left it in the original box in a gym bag with soft things on the top and bottom.
I just put the whole bag through the machine (though taking it out sounds like a good idea).
Then, I gate checked it. We traveled with a baby so I had enough to worry about on the plane. When we landed, I picked it up right outside the plane.
Good luck!
December 19th, 2007 at 8:52 am
What everyone else said about the Wii is the truth from our experience as well.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Hi, family, good to see you! Mind if we plug in our video game so we can now ignore you?
(FYI, I’d personally want to bring the game too, but there is NO WAY my wife would let me.)
December 19th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Well, our four kids will be playing with five cousins, and they want to “show off” the Wii. Don’t worry, it won’t be on all the time…
December 19th, 2007 at 10:29 am
My mother in law did that with her IPOD. She has a sudoko game on it and ignored us while she visited.
This is the same woman who would lecture us not to turn on the TV because we were visiting. The “evil” TV as I call it.
You have kids though, you need all the help you can get. I would make sure it is packed in a nice bag and give yourself tons of extra time.
December 27th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
FMF: with any other video game system I would agree with you. However, we successfully used the Wii to break the ice a little and keep everyone socializing since it’s got a lot of quick and active multiplayer games.
Also like nickel, we only had it on for a couple of hours over several days.
This works great with Wii Sports but probably wouldn’t with a more solo game like Mario Galaxy.