One is a family heirloom: My dad's Iver Johnson .410 shotgun. I'm not sure how old it is, but I'll be researching that. I know that it's old enough that when he acquired it in the early 1950s, the stock was rotten. One of my uncles hand-carved a new one from a walnut stump. I have a childhood memory -- presumably early 1970s -- of him taking it somewhere to get the metal reblued.
The other is a Henry lever-action .22. It was my brother's "fun gun" for plinking or whatever, and my daughter is buying it from Mike's widow.
After looking over our options, we decided to just check the guns as baggage for our flight home.
Which meant buying a case meeting all the gummint specifications. Fortunately I found one that would hold both firearms (and my brother's Ka-Bar Marine combat knife) nicely for about $30 on sale at a local farm-type store.
The real problem was the locks. TSA or whoever requires at least three -- one in the middle and one at each end. I bought a regular padlock for the middle and two smaller ones for the ends. Then it turned out that the small ones were too small. So on Sunday morning I ordered two larger ones for delivery from Walgreens via Instacart rather than have to go running out to stores on a travel day. But they were out of the ones I ordered, the prospective replacements looked like they might not be big enough, and I canceled. We stopped at Target on the way to the airport and I bought two that were plenty big, so that I wouldn't have to run out to the car, then run back to trade them in.
We left very early for the airport, because I didn't want to get jammed up if they were troublesome to check in.
They weren't. The ladies at the American Airlines desk had us all taken care of in about three minutes, two minutes of which was me getting the locks off and on. At the other end of the trip, Tamara had to sign for the case.
I see that while I was out of town, Florida's legislature passed the bill doing away with permit requirements for concealed carry. But I guess I won't be carrying either of those concealed.
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