Text 1: Two hours from check-in to the gate, by Owen Strickland

An original contemporary blog.

Nobody goes on holiday for the airport, but nobody gets anywhere without it. This was our family’s first trip abroad in five years, and I had forgotten how much of it is queuing.

Security came first. Every liquid, from toothpaste to my daughter’s contact lens solution, had to be in bottles of a hundred millilitres or less, in one clear plastic bag, and the bag had to come out of the case. Belts, coats and shoes went into grey trays. My son walked through the scanner and set off an alarm with a coin in his pocket and was patted down by a cheerful officer, which he thought was the best part of the holiday so far.

Then my bag was pulled aside. A security officer unpacked it in front of everyone and found the culprit: a full-size jar of peanut butter I had forgotten about. It went in the bin.

Passport control was quicker. We fed our passports into the electronic gates, stared into a camera and waited for the glass doors to slide open. The children’s passports had to be checked by a person in a booth, who compared each face with its photograph and asked my daughter, very seriously, what her name was.

From arriving at the airport to sitting at the gate took two hours, of which perhaps ten minutes were spent doing anything other than waiting.

Text 2: A letter from the frontier, by Miss Henrietta Vane

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1866, a young Englishwoman travelling by railway with her father describes crossing the frontier between two European countries.

Dearest Mamma, we are safely across the frontier, though not without an ordeal, which I must describe, as you are so fond of my troubles.

At the frontier station every passenger is turned out of the train, with all their luggage, into a long, bare shed lined with wooden counters. There the trunks are laid out in rows, and every one must be opened in the presence of the officers, who wear green uniforms and enormous moustaches and appear to enjoy their work. One of them went through my box as though he suspected me of carrying a revolution in it. He unfolded my blue silk, held up my nightdress for the whole room to see, and confiscated Papa’s cigars, which he says were his best.

Our passports were taken from us in a little office and returned an hour later with a great deal of writing and two stamps, for which Papa was obliged to pay three francs. A gentleman who had left his at the hotel was kept behind, and we do not know what became of him.

In all we were detained two hours and a half, the train waiting the whole while. I repacked my box upon the counter with half the passengers watching, and could not make it shut. Your loving and much inspected daughter, Henrietta.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what the travellers had to go through before they could continue their journeys.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.