[Closed] What was your favourite holiday souvenir? Unexploded Ordanance, anyone??

Nepalese hashish was my best one.

Weirdly related, my BIL is an Israeli security professional, but previously used to work guiding tours around the Golan Heights. For a while he worked at Gatwick Airport and used to tell us the stories of things he found in security checks there. It included ordinance, but also suitcases full of dildos, and people trying to take car doors as hand luggage!

I have a piece of Stonehenge.

... not really, of course. It was a random bit of chalky rock I found on the floor nearby. But's authentic enough to impress Americans. (-:

It definitely takes a special kind of stupid to go to the airport and try and fly with an unexploded shell.

Stood on the wheel of the space shuttle @ kennedy space centr and tried to dislodge a heat shield tile as i noticed few missing , some yank dude clocked me so had jump down 🙄… so i never succeeded in that one but got rocks , room keys from trips , always gotta get something no matter how small ..

As a 10 year old strolling along a grubby Greek beach, I picked up a syringe (with needle) and pocketed it. To this day, I don't know how I didn't get poked with it in my pocket but I had a moment of realisation back in the hotel and binned it.

I was given a Kyrgiz dagger. It may or may not have caused a wee moment at Heathrow when I remembered it was in my hand baggage.
Ahem.

Not picked up on holiday, but I travelled with a power ball in my hand luggage once through standstead. That caused some hilarity as they took me to one side to search me after finding what appeared to be a bomb in my case from a cartoon, with string fuse.

Have a nail from the railway sleepers at the gates of Terazin concentration camp..

Gonorrhea

What was your favourite holiday souvenir?
Mrs FH.
Holiday romances ay. 👍😉🙃🤣

For a while he worked at Gatwick Airport and used to tell us the stories of things he found in security checks there

Stansted airport used to occasionally appear on the local news with the "this is what we seized last year" displays. Generally lots of sharp pointed things and an occasional gun.

Of all the airports and at this time of year.
Red or green side of customs for TNT

Have a nail from the railway sleepers at the gates of Terazin concentration camp..

Why would you? Just weird.

Have a nail from the railway sleepers at the gates of Terazin concentration camp..

Not cool. A couple of kids on a school trip spent the night in jail for trying a similar trick a few years ago.

I suppose they got lulled into a false sense by the relaxed atmosphere of Ben Gurion Airport and the laissez-faire attitude of its staff [GULP]

Mrs kcal headed south for a flight, day after attending a kids birthday party, when she had pocketed a plastic spark 'pistol'. Awkward moment at Edinburgh airport going through security... Thankfully it was about 18-21 years ago, so things were not quite so intense as of late.

I have a lovely massive California Pine cone from a kayaking trip there.
Bought it back in my boat (the boat was on the plane. Didn't paddle back)

Have a nail from the railway sleepers at the gates of Terazin concentration camp..

Just wrong.

Stood on the wheel of the space shuttle @ kennedy space centr and tried to dislodge a heat shield tile as i noticed few missing

Also wrong. Not as wrong, but still.

not holiday but a weird handluggage check. OK, I'm the weirdo.

I still repair punctured inner tubes. With vulcanising solution and patches. I swap out on road or trail , tie a knot where the hole is, and then put in a box in the garage until I have a few which I then fix in one go.

This one time I was on a business trip overnighter where you fly in on a late flight, straight to the hotel, no-one's going to take you out to eat, meeting the next day, fly home. So I thought an ideal chance to put half a dozen punctured tubes in my overnight bag and do them at the hotel.

Of course I got pulled by the security scan. I don't know if it was bemusement or pity on his face as I explained how much I was looking forward to the evening, just me and 40 feet of black rubber alone in my room. And then he spotted the patch kit, with the tiny 3ml of flammable solution. IDK if anyone has ever tried to bring down an airliner with a puncture repair kit, but with a quick glance to see if his boss was watching he was prepared to pop it back in the little box and give me the benefit of the doubt.

It was a great evening though.......I even filled up the bath so I could find the holes 'old skool' style.

Erm - OK...

1986, taking part in a sailing world championship in Newport Rhode Island, I decide to buy what looks like the explodey bit of a rocket propelled grenade (but with fins on the back so it looked cooler) from the army surplus place there.
Lord only knows why.

Anyway after much hilarity and a good week we headed back to JFK to fly home.

Luckily as we were pulling into the train station I decided that trying to get, what looked like a rocket, onto a plane might be a bit tricky - so I left it on the luggage rack!
I always did wonder if it may have caused some "issues" when it was found 😬

An 18" kukri from Nepal. It's a basically a sword. I now use it to chop kindling.

A much missed late friend tried to take home a slightly bent used chainring as hand luggage through security at Geneva airport after a week in the Morzine area. He had to leave it behind- they didn’t take kindly to a piece of alloy with multiple sharp points on it.

A Russian Star about 2ft across made of steel
I nicked it off the gate to a fwd air base in the Czech republic
I think it was Nymon or something similar.
Had loads of bunkers, training areas, lagers for tanks, parachute school. Alot of the plane hsngers were nuclear hardened with blast doors and rubber airlock manways

Not a holiday souvenir, but I once found a block of C4 in NDAC after the Navy Demolition divers had been doing some training on shaped charges. We spent a most hilarious dive passing it around and whacking each other with it before throwing it at the chap in the shop who ran out the back door! 🤣

A fossilised ammonite I found on a beach on the N. Yorks coast. In my final year at primary school we spent a week on a class visit to Whitby (so not technically a holiday, but close). It still gets used as a paperweight or bookend.

My dad (MGRHS) did a fair bit of work for Amnesty International in Palestine. Naturally he'd get pulled into a small room on a regular basis and questioned about who he'd spoken to and seen.

He took great satisfaction in saying over and over again "it is not amnesty international' policy to answer such questions"

Anyway, back to the point I remember him bringing back some plastic bullets through the Israeli airport and being surprised and dismayed to realise just how unplastic they actually were. Basically a normal bullet shape, or sphere shape covered in a thin layer of plastic.

I guess this must have even on one of his earlier visits, given the strip search etc that he got later on, but I'm still amazed at his courage in taking stuff like that and putting up with the associated shit.

Visiting a gem mine is Sri Lanka part of a hotel excursion we were handed a small gem(nothing valuable really) to pass around and look. I was the last and put it in my pocket.

Bit of a oh-oh moment when the mine guide asked me for it back. I told him I'd put it back on the table with the other examples.

On another excursion during the same holiday I got the assistant groundskeeper at a herbology department garden to sell me a bag of coca leaves.

not coming back but going out…. A friends wife was pounced on because she’d stepped in some Semtex at it was stuck to the sole of her shoe.

For my 3rd Uni dissertation a mate and I were offered the chance to do a high resolution magnetic survey of sub glacial volcanic lava tubes in Iceland (I'm a geophysicist).

This required us to take said magnetometer with us. Which is a 2L+ bottle sized object; lead lined with wires coming out of it.....

Even with all the required paperwork and 25 years ago it took us 4 hours to get through LHR on the way out.

Went out to our place in Spain to do some tiling. Decided to take some grout but left the box at home.

Security got very excited when they found 2.5kg bag of white powder wrapped in plastic.

@maccruiskeen - Wait...What? She stepped in some semtex? Dog muck, yes, I can see that happening. Semtex, rather less so. How TF do you do that?

Go to Harry Potter World and buy the light hidden inside a book as a present. An informed source (son2) tells me that in the X-ray machine at Heathrow this looks exactly like a bomb. Battery, check. Wires, check. Plastic Crystal blob, check. Enough to activate the full protocol including spaniel in the machine! You wouldn’t know if you were in the lanes next to it.

Brought a hand grenade back from a school trip to Flanders, circa 1983. We travelled via coach and ferry so it was ok.

Oh and don’t put a battery and some headphones (wires) near talcum powder in your bag. Sure fire bag search.