Travel letters

Thanks for the Indy memories

Just wanted to say thanks for Chris Erskine’s story on Indianapolis [“Get Ready to Roll,” May 22]. I moved to the L.A. area at the beginning of the year from Indianapolis. The story hit the nail on the head and made me homesick for almost a day.

Brian Yorn

Studio City

Here are a few things that I, as a transplanted Hoosier, love about Indy that have never changed:

When you go into a restaurant or movie theater or drive into a parking lot, you can get right in without vying for a spot with 100 others.

When you shop at a store, the salesperson smiles at you, seems to truly like his or her job and acts as if they really want to help you.

When you put on your turn signal to change lanes on the freeway, people actually slow down and politely let you in.

I miss the genteel manners and personal concern Midwesterners have.

Rayma Halloran

Glendale

Erskine’s line about Indy being the kind of town your mom wanted you to marry is becoming a Facebook and Twitter meme among my friends and associates. I clicked the link, read his story and cried. Not the usual response to a travel write-up, right? But as someone who was born here, raised here and chose to return here after college, it’s nice to know that all the work we’ve done to make this city worth staying in is finally paying off.

Neal Taflinger

Indianapolis

What happened to my TSA lock?

I thank Catharine Hamm for her article “Theft at the Airport” [On the Spot, March 22]. I fly a lot, and I always travel with TSA-approved locks. In the last 18 months, my suitcase has been broken into six times; only once did I find a TSA card inside. Judging from some of the short check-in times prior to flights, I presume the issue might be with the TSA instead of luggage handlers.

David Mrnka

Hollywood

I am a frequent business traveler to the Orient and have experienced problems with locks three times. All the locks were TSA approved. Once it happened when I traveled to Seoul, and twice it happened on my way to Shanghai. In Seoul. I didn’t notice the lock was different until I arrived at the hotel. My original lock was missing, replaced with a gold-colored combination lock. I had no idea about the combination and couldn’t open the suitcase. After calling the airline and airport many times, I made contact with someone who told me the lock combination should be the same as the one for my original lock. So I tried it, and it worked. But how did they know my combination? In all cases, nothing in my suitcase was missing, and the airlines reimbursed me for the cost of the missing locks.

Sam Ko

Irvine