Day Eight: Canada

Canada? That’s right, we said it. Canada, we were there. We are still there. We may never return. Bye cruel world, Canada calls:

Seriously now, we were pretty happy to be there:

So Glacier National Park is actually a secret “International Peace Park”, some joint venture with Canada, dripping with symbolism and good will. We refer you to the “shaking of hands across the border ritual”, nuff said on that. Coming out of the northernmost entrance to the park we were very near to the Canadian border and faced with quite the dilemma of backtracking. Since Going-to-the-sun Road (the main road through Glacier) was closed due to the seasonal snows, we would be forced to track the 100 miles around the edge of the park back to civilization and towards Seattle. The only problem: we had just driven this stretch of road to make it to East Glacier. This is when Microsoft Streets and Trips and Sacajawea (the GPS device) had another idea. “How about a quick foray into Canada?” the temptress asked in her matter-of-fact voice. Needless to say, Jason was on the phone with both sides of border patrol within minutes.

The gist of those conversations? It should be no problem to get into Canada even though we don’t have passports: they’ll “probably” accept driver’s licenses. Getting into the US may be a different story. We’ll have to make an “oral claim” to citizenship. If they doubt us, they’ll bring us upstairs for further examination.

On the Canada side we were questioned, any alcohol, tobacco, firewood? Damn. They had us on the firewood. And two beers from Jackson Hole Brewery. Upstairs we go. Luckily, our collective records were squeaky clean enough to let us slide. But they sure as hell didn’t want us importing firewood for a profit, as we all know they don’t have very much of that in Canada.

Anyway, we’ll post more next about our neighbor to the north.

Cheers from Canada for now.