Tag: passport

Apple Pie meets Maple Syrup

On a visit to Detroit with my brothers last weekend, I was surprised to discover just how close the city streets are to the edge of the United States. Walk out of Detroit’s downtown Renaissance Center through the south doors (yes, I did just say “south”), cross Atwater Street, and you’ll find yourself standing on the edge of the Detroit River staring at Canada on the other shore.  Almost has you thinking in metric, “eh?”

Canada is south of the U.S. – who knew?

Here’s something I probably learned in middle school and promptly forgot: the border between Canada and the U.S. runs right through the middle of Lake Erie (and the Detroit River). It’s as if Americans and Canucks had a long drawn-out discussion about who deserved the lake more, and then clinked glasses of Budweiser and Molson with, “Okay, you get half and we get half”.  The same thing happened with three of the other four Great Lakes (America somehow got all of Lake Michigan) and that’s why – at least in Detroit – Canada lies to the south.

The view of Canada from Detroit

Not that you’d know it’s Canada, mind you.  Aside from the giant red and white flag billowing on the far shore, the streets, buildings, cars; everything looks exactly the same as America.  You might as well be looking at Saint Paul from Minneapolis.  And Windsor (the Canadian town you see) is so close you might as well swim for it.  The Detroit River is only a mile wide at this juncture.  I kind of wondered what would happen if I did swim for it.  Would a flurry of border patrol boats appear out of nowhere to haul me in?

Instead, my brothers and I kept it legal and drove across the Ambassador Bridge (there’s the Detroit-Windsor tunnel if you prefer).  It felt a little strange to hand over passports just to go to dinner.  And once we sat down at our Windsor table we were greeted with a hearty “Happy Thanksgiving!”  Thanksgiving?  Had we gone through some sort of time warp?  Oh, right – Canada celebrates Thanksgiving in October.

The view of Detroit from Canada

Naturally we asked our server how Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving.  She thought about it for a moment and said, in her wonderful Inland North accent, “Oh, y’know, we gather with our families and have the meal.”  That’s it?  Not even an embarrassingly-large, dozens-of-dishes, eat-’til-you-burst meal?  Just food with family?  But in fact, Canadian Thanksgiving is pretty much the same as “down south”.  Explorers crossed the ocean, landed safely in the New World, established a settlement, held a feast of thanks, blah-blah-blah.

Pumpkins make sense for Canadian Thanksgiving

Despite our server’s succinct description, the Canadian Thanksgiving meal includes most of the dishes we enjoy on this side of the Detroit River (including turkey).  Canucks also celebrate with parades, Oktoberfests, and other festivals.  There’s even a “Thanksgiving Classic” courtesy of the Canadian Football League.  Makes me wonder if the Detroit Lions somehow found a way to play that football game along with every (U.S.) Thanksgiving Day game since 1934.

Ambassador Bridge

As we crossed back over the bridge after dinner, two thoughts entered my mind.  One, the waterfront houses on the Canadian side of the Detroit River have a view of the United States all day long instead of seeing their own country.  That seems a little odd.  And two, I wondered whether goods and services in Windsor (or beyond) would be worth leaving the U.S. for, instead of just purchasing the same in Detroit.  You’d have to pay the bridge/tunnel toll both ways for a little Canadian Bacon (or backbacon), which might compromise the benefit.  You’d most certainly run out of pages for the stamps on your passport.

Earlier I said something about “almost” thinking in metric.  No, you really do have to think in metric in Canada.  As soon as we crossed over the Detroit River, our car’s GPS changed directions into kilometers (clicks) and meters.  Suddenly the next turn was “100 meters” away instead of “300 feet”.  Believe me, it’s a little disorienting watching the meters count down (slower) than the feet you expect.  After several bottles of wine at dinner (liters?), at least we could still navigate back to the bridge.  Otherwise this post might be coming to you from “up north”.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Setting Little Booklets Free

In Breaking Away, the charming little movie about bicycling and broken dreams, there’s a scene where Barbara Barrie talks with her son about her passport. She’ll never really use it, she says, but she carries her passport all the time so she can present it proudly if ever asked. With newfound hindsight, I should’ve held onto my wife’s passport as tightly as Barbara Barrie held on to hers.

If you have a passport, you know the drill.  Every ten years you have to renew the little book.  The process is cumbersome, even online, because the authorities ask for almost as much information as they did the first time around.  Everything goes into the (re)application except a copy of your birth certificate.  Three pages of personal information later, you print, date, and sign, attach an unflattering black-and-white selfie (no smiling!) and mail it in together with your expiring passport.

So far so good with the hindsight.  But as soon as I went to the post office last October I made a big boo-boo; the so-called fatal error.  The desk clerk convinced me to send the application through regular mail.  “Save your pennies”, I remember him saying. “After all, you’re sending through one government entity to another government entity.  What could possibly go wrong?”  So I saved my pennies… and that’s the last I ever saw of my wife’s passport.

Did this machine eat my wife’s passport?

Okay, maybe not ever.  Perhaps the little booklet eventually finds its way home after completing whatever misguided tour it’s been taking.  Or maybe, as our travel agent was quick to suggest, it was mangled and shredded by the sorting machine of an automated postal facility.  Or maybe #3 – the one that has me staring at the ceiling into the wee hours of the night – it’s the latest identity of the head of an international drug cartel.

Laugh or feign horror at my expense, but you can’t blame me for wandering to the worst case scenario these days.  The outside of the mailing envelope said “National Passport Processing Center” while the inside contained what obviously feels like a passport.  Easy pickings, especially for an enterprising minimum-wage postal worker.  My recurring thought: why didn’t I fork over the fifteen bucks for a secure, insured, overnight envelope?  Because I’m cheap, that’s why.  Ah hindsight, thee be a cruel character.

Where o’ where did you go, little book?

Not that you’ll ever need it (because you’re learning from me) but there’s an easy process to report a “lost or stolen” passport.  You provide as much information as you can and if you’re lucky the authorities identify and “decommission” the missing booklet, reducing it to mere paper and plastic in the hands of another.  But that still left my wife with no passport, which meant filing a new (not “re”) application.  Dig out the birth certificate, take another photo, make an in-person appointment with the local post office, and pay another application fee.  Mercifully, I watched that application get sealed into one of those secure/insured mailers before disappearing down the conveyor belt.

My first inkling of identity theft hit when our credit card company informed us of a $500 charge from a merchant in Germany, a company I didn’t recognize (and couldn’t begin to pronounce).  My second inkling hit when our travel agent tried to make charges for the trip we needed the passports for, and our other credit card was rejected.  One inkling makes you pause, but two inklings?  That pushes the big ol’ panic button.  But the god of credit cards must’ve been looking down on me favorably because the first charge was cancelled while the second charge was only denied because our travel agent had an old card on file.  In other words – to my knowledge – we’re talking random events instead of identity theft.

There’s a happy ending to this story. (Actually, it’s more like an intermission since the authorities sent me a letter saying my wife’s passport is still lost or stolen until it’s not.)  We have new passports now, which means no renewal process for another ten years.  Our compromised credit card was cancelled and replaced.  And we froze our credit in case a “new wife” out there tries to open accounts.  I’m not convinced that’ll ever happen but I’m breathing easier as the months pass by.  And rest assured, I’m keeping our little booklets secure so nobody can, you know, “break away” with them.