Fear and Loathing at the Canadian Border.

I had the pleasure of spending a solid hour or so in the custody of Canadian Customs, on the other side of Niagara Falls, before being denied entry into Canada for reasons that were never specified to me. For those of you planning on crossing the border by car into The Great White North, I would recommend making secondary plans just in case, because not only did the custom officers not pay any attention to what I was explaining to them about my trip, what I was doing, and where I was from, but they were just flat out rude in their conduct. The fact that I had an itinerary, travel maps, and proof of all the places that I had been recently, didn’t seem to sway the custom workers’ convictions that I planned to infiltrate their land with the intention of inhabiting, exasperating, or eradicating. Like I really care enough about hockey, round bacon, snow, and large populations of people who speak French, to want to stay in Quebec for any extended period of time. I pleasantly had all my papers checked and my car and bags searched... (Read: ransacked.) I honestly answered all the questions about my origin, purpose, monetary accessibility, and dietary habits and then an hour later some older guy, who I hadn’t seen or talked to, gives me a slip of paper and tells me to go back across the border. “Entry denied.” Boom. No explanation, no chance to explain anything, no chance to talk about it, and no passport back until I was already on the bridge headed back towards New York ... I did get to see Niagara fall. The falls are pretty spectacular at night, but not worth the drive by itself … Oh, and I did stop at Anchor Bar in Buffalo, on the way to the border disaster, and had some buffalo wings at the very place Buffalo wings were supposedly invented. They were a seven on the buffalo wing scale, worth eating once, but not worth going back for. A little sad, considering, but at least I have a one-upper on food conversations during Monday Night Football games.

The sad thing is that I really did want to go. I really did want to see Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City. And I wanted to see them over a four-day span, and then leave. Spend my money on Canadian things and then move on, but they didn’t want to hear that. So, that is it. I’m going to go spend my money in Cooperstown, New York instead, and then on to Boston a few days before schedule. I can’t believe that this is even an issue. Apparently, young people don’t road trip in Canada… Or, if they do, they get denied entry enough for the Canadian government to need to play “tit-for-tat” with the US customs. You just have to respect pissing contests.