01 April 2003 21:01
we went to canada one day. yeah, that was a fun experience [4]. we went up on the west side of the rockies, headed into canada about thirty miles or so (40km whatever), then headed east to lethbridge. we stopped in lethbridge for a little while. you know what? driving in canada is atrociously slow. it was two lane road with a lot of traffic, i'd hate to see it in the summer tourist season. i didn't really lose anything up there. we'd planned on being back down to US2 within four hours. yeah, that didn't happen. supposing we left at eight, noon to US2 right? no, it was in the five o'clock hour before we got there. i guess that did include the border crossing. going into canada was a breeze, just a guy with no canadian accent making kyle go dead serious.guard (while looking at our passports): are you carrying any firearms?
kyle: nope
g (nodding towards the back of the cab): what are they?
me (with a somewhat "are you serious" look): that's our luggage (looked like luggage to me anyway)
g: no, your firearms
k: we don't have any firearms
g: but you just said you were carrying firearms
k (going absolutely dead serious, you'd've thought he'd just spotted someone assaulting a john deere with a baseball bat): no sir, we do not.
g: then why did you just say yes to my question?
k: i said no sir, we do not have any firearms
g: so you do not have any firearms?
k: that is correct.
g (chuckling very lightly): here are your passports, enjoy your visit to canada.
trying to get back into the US was another story altogether. we were coming in at the start of interstate 15, a much busier place than the one booth crossing we'd gone through earlier. we pull up and there's a blond with cropped hair looking like police academy had been torturous and she was going to take it out on us (she wouldn't give me her phone number at all, either [5]). i asked her afterwards, sooo, was this random or did we trigger something? she immediately answer that it was random, but kyle and i arn't too sure. we pull up in an absolutely filthy pickup, she has to ask us what state we're from because the camera couldn't read through the dirt. kyle's wearing a stetson and has a week's worth of facial hair. i'm wearing aviator glasses (like the columbia drug lords in the 80's movies) and have a beard that some female friends told me was getting rather scruffy. then kyle comes out and tells them that he works on a dairy farm. i took a safer route and claimed to be a full time student (yeah, of the holy jihad, right :) ). they still made us come inside while they searched the pickup. they did a lousy job, we could have pulled a major amount of stuff through that checkpoint even with the search because they were too lazy to make it to the bottom of the stack in the back of the cab. how do we know that? kuz they were too lazy to put things back the way they found them. after making us empty our pockets (like i'm going to carry all my cocaine in with me) and questioning us separately, we were on our way... an hour and a half after showing up.
ignoring the fact that the p/up was probably bugged, k and i spent the next 45 minutes happily coming up with schemes for our revenge. it started out as a simple scenario of pulling up to the crossing in a pickup loaded down with goods and pulling a horse trailer. you roll up to the window and declare your goods.. " i've got livestock! i've got fruit! i've got firearms, big ones, little ones! i've got friends in iraq! i've got..." so long as you had everything legally, they'd have to pass you, it'd just take forever. then we ended up trying to figure out how to get a car up to the window and make them think it was loaded with explosives. they'd have to shut the place down for five or six hours, and then in the end they'd find out that it was fake. then we reached US2 and moved on to more important things like Big Bud.
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