At the border, the friendly Canadian border guards made us get out of the car, then they went through everything in the car. They searched and searched, but we were more annoyed than worried, since we had no illegal drugs on us. Still, they searched and searched and searched. Finally, one of the women came over and coldly asked us where the gun was.
"What gun?" we asked.
"We found the gun lock in the trunk of your car," she replied. "We know you have a gun."
"Gun lock??" Best Friend and I looked at each other in shock. So far as we knew, neither of us owned a gun, so why would we have such an item in the car? Truthfully, I didn't even know what a gun lock looked like, and apparently neither did Best Friend, since she turned out to be the source of the trouble. After a moment of thought, she asked the border guard,
"Are you talking about the funny bike lock?" She had suddenly remembered going to the grand opening of the new Campin' N Shootin' Superstore (not its real name) in her town, where they had given her a free object that resembled a cable bike lock, only very small. Thinking that it was a bike lock, she had tossed it into the trunk of her car and promptly forgotten about it. This would not have been so strange, except that when we retrieved the gun lock in question, under the watchful eye of the border guard, it was on a piece of cardboard that clearly had a picture of a gun on it. Now my best friend is not a blonde like I am, and she doesn't usually pull off such air-headed maneuvers, but in this case all three of us (including the border guard) realized she had been perhaps not the most observant person ever. At that, the border guard gave up in disgust and let us through. It seems people from our state often forget guns in their cars when crossing the border, and each fool is worth $500 in fines to the Canadian government. (We were not crossing at the border with our own state, but near the Thousand Islands region of New York, which is absolutely gorgeous.)
Oddly enough, getting back into the ol' US did not prove to be a problem. We crossed at the highway that goes straight down to New York City, since Long Island (or, as they call it, Lawn Guiland) was our next destination. Somehow in this area of the world they know three things about people from our state: we like to hunt and tend to carry guns around, we wear giant dairy products on our heads, and we are all HUGE fans of our professional football team (let's call them the Butchers). So the border crossing guard (who was a man) looked at our drivers' licenses more than our passports, then he asked,
"You girls Butcher Backers?"
"Oh, yeah!" we replied. And he let us through without another glance. We did run into a blockade on the highway a few miles down the road and wondered if there were TWO border crossings, but the police just glanced into our car and waved us through. (I did not yet own Erin Caitlyn O'Honda at that point, and my first car Sydney was being held together with duct tape, so we drove my friend's car, also a Honda Accord. The color is San Marino Red, so she calls him Dan, of course, although she is NOT a Dolphins fan.) We didn't even have to tell them which team we rooted for or anything.
So a word to the wise: when going to Canada, empty your car of anything you might have gotten at the Campin' N Shootin' Superstore if you are not 100% certain it applies ONLY to campin'.
Famous Hat
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