Remember how I said that I had an interesting experience after having dinner in Windsor? After that happened, I said I'd be a little more wary of entering Canada for a single meal. Well, apparently I wasn't wary enough.
The next day after our initial adventure, we ended up in a place called Port Huron at about 2PM. We had to be in Detroit the next morning for a flight, but other than that, there were no real restrictions on our schedule. Now, this town is called "Port" something for a reason; it sits right next to one of the Great Lakes. That means that it's awfully close to Canada. If you were to drive over, say, a nearby bridge, you'd need your passport. We both happened to have our passports on our persons.
So, we figured we'd explore a little farther inland than the night before. We weren't planning on staying long, and we even figured we'd be back before dinner. That would save us any headaches at the border, we figured. Consulting a map, we picked out a town as a destination, and then figured we'd turn around from there. There are two roads to that town, so we'd take one of them to get there, and the other one to exit the country. It seemed like a fairly sound plan.
Did you know that Canadian customs officials don't take day trips into other countries very often? We discovered this almost immediately after reaching the border. The fact that we had flown in from fairly far away and had known about this trip for months, but we still only had vague plans to drive to some Podunk town, confused these kind officials. Once again, they asked about our backgrounds, criminal records, if we'd ever been denied entry to Canada, who we knew in that town, and all sorts of other questions. No fewer than three officials ran us through the same battery of questions.
In the end, a confirmation of our flight the next morning was enough reassurance for these officials. We weren't there to migrate illegally, nor were we going to cause any other form of ruckus. Still, they wrote very explicit instructions on our passports. The stamps we received were only good for one day, and they expired at midnight. I didn't think I'd ever seen that before, truth be told. But hey, if it got me to my destination without a fourth set of questions, I was perfectly okay with it.
We joked that there was probably a GPS unit secretly hidden in our car, just waiting to blare alarms if we register from our stated course. We didn't stray, though, so rain was the worst of our concerns. Luckily, we didn't have any problems when crossing back to the American side, either (even though I gully expected another barrage of questions).
As it is, I think the moral of the story is that the Michigan-Canada border is not my friend. I'm going to have to give it some space until it decides to be nice to me again.
The next day after our initial adventure, we ended up in a place called Port Huron at about 2PM. We had to be in Detroit the next morning for a flight, but other than that, there were no real restrictions on our schedule. Now, this town is called "Port" something for a reason; it sits right next to one of the Great Lakes. That means that it's awfully close to Canada. If you were to drive over, say, a nearby bridge, you'd need your passport. We both happened to have our passports on our persons.
So, we figured we'd explore a little farther inland than the night before. We weren't planning on staying long, and we even figured we'd be back before dinner. That would save us any headaches at the border, we figured. Consulting a map, we picked out a town as a destination, and then figured we'd turn around from there. There are two roads to that town, so we'd take one of them to get there, and the other one to exit the country. It seemed like a fairly sound plan.
Did you know that Canadian customs officials don't take day trips into other countries very often? We discovered this almost immediately after reaching the border. The fact that we had flown in from fairly far away and had known about this trip for months, but we still only had vague plans to drive to some Podunk town, confused these kind officials. Once again, they asked about our backgrounds, criminal records, if we'd ever been denied entry to Canada, who we knew in that town, and all sorts of other questions. No fewer than three officials ran us through the same battery of questions.
In the end, a confirmation of our flight the next morning was enough reassurance for these officials. We weren't there to migrate illegally, nor were we going to cause any other form of ruckus. Still, they wrote very explicit instructions on our passports. The stamps we received were only good for one day, and they expired at midnight. I didn't think I'd ever seen that before, truth be told. But hey, if it got me to my destination without a fourth set of questions, I was perfectly okay with it.
We joked that there was probably a GPS unit secretly hidden in our car, just waiting to blare alarms if we register from our stated course. We didn't stray, though, so rain was the worst of our concerns. Luckily, we didn't have any problems when crossing back to the American side, either (even though I gully expected another barrage of questions).
As it is, I think the moral of the story is that the Michigan-Canada border is not my friend. I'm going to have to give it some space until it decides to be nice to me again.
Comments
Post a Comment