One small mercy it seems of travelling with little children, particularly a loquacious one, is that they are conversation starters which helps with glum, over worked border agents once in a while.
My experiences of travelling to Trumpland before it became that are mixed, with more than one weird conversation around my reasons for coming to America. My Nigerian passport couldn’t have helped I suspect, a letter from my then employer notwithstanding, but then I was a single bloke, visiting an ostensibly single woman in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma.
On this occasion the almost five year old piped up that she was in America to attend a wedding, an unprompted factoid which drew a smile from the border agent. That she has a British accent, apparently indicative of intelligence to Americans might also have counted. Bottom line, biometrics, passport scans and all went much smoother.
Given how much frazzled we were feeling after yesterday, I’ll take the (small) win!

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