Years of traveling for business and pleasure have given me some interesting encounters at the borders. Once while traveling to Halifax Nova Scotia to teach a service school, I had to also make sales calls in Toronto Ontario. So, I booked my flight to go from Chicago to Toronto and then to Halifax. The return to have a layover in Toronto to allow me to make my calls there. Arriving in Toronto from Chicago I had to clear customs before continuing to Halifax. For no explained reason they took me to their office and began asking all kinds of crazy questions that I didn’t even understand. Approaching an hour in their office i was in danger of missing my connecting flight. So, I got a little uptight and said “I have a flight to Halifax to catch. Just like that he says OK and stamps my passport. to this day I have no idea what was going on.
Traveling to Ottawa Ontario for a fire investigation, I was brought to the customs office because I didn’t have a letter on company letterhead stating that I was being paid by a US company and would make no money from Canada. It was a sunday afternoon and no way to get in contact with anyone in the States. After more than an hour I said to the lady that I should have put that I was in Canada on pleasure, not business. She promised me that if I did something like that I would be banned for life from Canada. I assured her I had intentions of doing such which calmed her down. She finally let me go with my promise of carrying such a letter.
My next trip I made sure I had such a letter on company letter head. It was rejected because it was all typed and didn’t have a pen and ink signature with date. After that I carried unsigned copies that I signed someone’s signature and dated on the plane.
Crossing the border at Vancouver British Columbia by car, the border guard wanted to look in my brief- case. I had some of our valves in there. He asked if they were company products. I assured him they were. He asked what they were worth. I told him “Not much”. He said,” well in that case go ahead”.
Martha and I were coming back to the States through the Detroit area. The US guard kept calling her by different names, looking for a reaction. They must have been looking for missing women being smuggled out of Canada.
I have so many more stories to tell. I will save some for later blogs.
