Contraband

After two months travelling across Canada, with the last month feeling like it rained every day, we headed south across the border to escape. I was becoming a little less princess-like and a lot more witch-like! As in, I was going to start melting if we didn’t get out of this rain soon. We were a little concerned about taking the trailer into the US. Would they search us? Had we brought over items that we shouldn’t have? Would they believe us that we weren’t snowbirds and just passing through for a couple of weeks or so? We finished up what we could and gave some of our meat and fresh veggies away to fellow travellers before hitting the border.

It was pretty quiet at the border, and we pulled up to the window. Great, there were no other Canadians in sight… What were we doing? They wanted to know who we were, where we were from and where we were going. They wouldn’t accept that we were just making our way back to Ontario, stopping along the way. Clearly, they had not met us! So Mark asked if he could use Google Maps to find all the specific places we would stay: Seattle, Portland, Boise… We answered all the questions and, of course, we were asked to move over to the side for a search. Drat….here we go. Would they fingerprint us? How long would the search take? What kind of contraband were they going to find? Would they separate us and ask us questions? If they did, I was doomed, didn’t they know I am a princess traveller, I have no idea where we are going! To be honest, I didn’t even really know where I was at that moment. 

The fellow at the desk was super nice. He had a little rubber skeleton on his pen and was quite humorous. As he was going through an extensive list of what we could and could not bring over the border, a HUGE off-road RV pulled in next to our itty bitty trailer. This rig was like nothing we had ever seen before. The border guy made a joke that they were trying to show us up. They definitely looked like they had WAY MORE contraband than Mark and I, so hopefully, they would go easy on us, now. All of the border guys started to congregate and talk about the monster RV. One of them looked up the price of the vehicle, and they all took turns guessing. I didn’t hear the actual price, but it was well over a million dollars. I wish I had taken a picture of it, but honestly, I was too nervous and didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention to myself. I had just realized that we had rice, which was not allowed. Rice!? Who would have thought rice was a no-go item? Here we go, I am going to get locked up over a cup of rice. Mark was silent until we sat down and waited for the guy to search the trailer. He asked me why I didn’t say that we also had nuts and seeds. What!? I was too busy worrying about the rice that I didn’t even realize we had other contraband. Oh great… my heart rate started to go up as we continued to wait for them to search. I am a rule follower. I don’t like getting in trouble or making mistakes, and here I was at the border, not only with rice but almonds, chickpeas, spices, beans and pumpkin seeds, and I had no idea where they were grown!! We were done for. 

Thankfully, all of the border guys were too busy looking at the upgrades and features on the massive RV that nobody was really paying attention to us at all. Our skeleton pen border fellow came back with my little ziploc bag of rice and told us that we were set to go. That was it, painless and off we went. He didn’t say anything about the almonds, pumpkin seeds, or other items that we realized we had, and we didn’t stick around long enough for him to change his mind. Sooo, just in case you want to know what you can and cannot bring over the border, here is the exhaustive list. The border guy gave me an extra copy and told me to share it with my friends, so here you go, friends!

We set up camp that night, and the wind picked up; we were still not out of the bad weather! In the middle of the night, we were awakened by the slamming of the straps again! I, the princess, was thinking Mark would get up and do the pool noodle trick again. I waited. Nothing… Mark roused, and I said that I thought we would need the pool noodle again. Nothing… I asked if Mark wanted me to do it. Of course, he would say no and that would be enough to get him up and out in the rain to fix the noise so I could go back to sleep. Nope, he said SURE! What!? I was just offering to be nice; he wasn’t supposed to agree and let me go out and fix the straps in the middle of the night in the rain. Jeesh, that serves me right for being all “we have an equal opportunity marriage baloney.” So up I get in my pj’s. I asked where the keys were, where the noodle was, did I just slide it down, and was there anything else that I needed to do? Mark responded by saying that I was asking a lot of questions. I said, “Oh yeah, well, you ask a lot of questions looking for the butter, and I am doing something way more challenging than finding butter in the fridge that is the size of a cooler!” 

I fixed it without a hitch and climbed back into bed feeling all proud of myself. But really questioning who this new Lisa was… bringing contraband across the border and man-handling pool noodles like a pro? I even helped patch the tire up on the Dempster. I think I have definitely graduated from being a princess traveller. To what, I don’t know exactly, just don’t ask me where we are going!