Hello from Montréal, Québec.

Close

How's it goin', eh?

We’re just a simple everyday American couple with an Airstream on their honeymoon trying to get into Canada, eh.

Canadian Customs didn’t make it so easy for us. As we pulled up to the international border along I-89 and approached Saint-Armand/Phillipsburg, the male agent (who was very accommodating, by the way) asked if we had any guns. I almost said ‘yes’ for the fun of it, but we decided to come clean. We weren’t that cool.

“Nope”.

“How about any animals?”, he asked.

“A cat in the back”, we said in unison.

“Is the cat healthy?”, the border patrol agent asked with a heavy French-Canadian accent.

“Yes”, we said. Because she is.

“Any, uhhh, firewood?”, the border patrol agent asked.

Menace

“Yep! Two bundles in the back!”, I proclaimed cheerfully. I wanted to be an honest American.

“Oh, you can’t bring firewood into Canada. You’ll have to pull over down there and wait for a customs agent to meet you about the firewood.”

Shit.

A half hour later, we’re still sitting in the truck, no border patrol agent to be seen anywhere. Melissa finally hopped out of the driver’s seat and went inside to ask what the holdup was. The agent inside never had any plans to come out and meet us. He simple told Melissa that we had to turn around, drive back into the USA, dump our firewood, and then come back into Canada. Ugh.

As we made the u-turn back to the States, we promptly noticed the line into the US was significantly longer than the line headed into Canada. So while we sat and waited, we devised a plan to dispose of the firewood.

“What are we going to do with it?” Melissa asked.

I said, “We are going to get off at the first exit and throw it out, either on the side of the road or in a trash can. I don’t care at this point”.

You see, every moment we dilly-dallied with this firewood debacle was a moment we were not enjoying poutine. We even considered simply leaving it on the other side of the US Customs checkpoint, pulling a quick “yewey”, then head back into Canada. Then we brushed that off as too brash.

Eventually, we made it up to the front of the line. Our US Customs agent, who looked like John Ratzenberger, asked us how long our trip to Canada was.

“A half an hour”, we said. Then we explained the firewood stuff to him.

“Oh, firewood. Yeah, you can’t bring that into Canada. You’re not even supposed to cross state lines with firewood. You see, there’s these beetles. Anyways, you can just pull to the end of the building and dump the firewood right there. That’s where we tell everyone to do it.”

That was the first piece of good news we’d heard all day. What we considered too brash was standard operating procedure. I love America.

We dumped the firewood and looped back toward the Canadian checkpoint. As we pulled up to the booth, we noticed we now had a new female customs officer. She asked us the standard set of questions the first guy did, although slightly differently. Then she got to the pet question.

“Any pets?”, she asked.

“Yes, one cat”, we replied.

“Can I see the papers?”, she asked.

Oh. The papers. We thought someone might ask that. Fortunately, we thought ahead and had the vet email us a PDF of Luna’s rabies vaccination records. The problem was, we didn’t bring a printer, so we couldn’t print the document out. So, being the tecnologically advanced duo we are, Melissa handed the customs agent her iPhone displaying the PDF of Luna’s vaccination records. I saw her head start to smoke.

“I can barely read this”, she said.

Melissa explained that you can use your fingers to scroll and make pinching gestures on the screen to make things bigger and smaller. The customs agent didn’t seem to care.

“Next time, I need the paper”, she said.

Or, we could have simply gone in her office, emailed her the same thing she was looking at on the iPhone, had her print it out, and then let us go. Same difference.

She let us go.

As we barreled down the highway towards Montréal, Melissa’s heart was palpitating with thoughts of being denied entry a second time because of the cat. As the Québec countryside rolled by, our border crossing experience, which ended up being more of a nuisance than anything else, faded into excitement in anticipation of visiting the city of Montréal. We planned up front to stay here two days, because we’d heard such great things about it.

Well, we had our first night here, and it did not disappoint. That’s the topic of our next post, which will again be accompanyied by a video update. Stay tuned.