Please Don't Shoot Us!!

Cartography is a fascinating occupation. Detailing what's there, how it bends, winds, rises and falls has given us directional cookbooks. We can travel in directions, as mapping makes this possible. A road atlas was an essential tool to load in a car if you were going to wander outside of familiar bounds and this has given way to new methods that combines the road atlas to software; GPS.

My father grew up in New Rochelle, NY. His mother, my grandmother was the epicenter of all family activity. My aunts and uncles homes were very close to her house, with two exceptions, an uncle who was a couple of miles from grandmas and our home, some 40 miles away in Fairfield, CT. You could walk to any of these houses within five or ten minutes, and 1/2 an hour if you walked to Uncle Tony's. I've a cousin who rode his bicycle from New Rochelle to Fairfield when he was a kid. And this makes a point about maps. He didn't use one, but knew how to get from point A to point B. He memorized the route.

Since we were in Connecticut, we spent a lot of weekends at my grandmothers. My dad lived his entire life in New Rochelle and knew the area like the back of his hand. After I moved from Fairfield to Boston, it would not be unusual to drive to New Rochelle to hang out with my cousins. Again, no maps.

As a kid, my mother father, two sisters and brother and I piled into his 56 buick and headed home from grandmas. The route was always the same; Merritt Parkway and that got replaced by the newly completed Interstate 95, which wasn't as pretty as the "Parkway". It was getting dark and this time, my dad took a different route. We were driving around for a while, when he pulled over at an intersection that had a fire station on one corner, a gas station on another, a White Castle hamburger stand on the third and I can't recall what occupied the fourth. My sister believes a police station was on the 4th corner and we ate at the White Castle. But we were stopping because my dad didn't seem sure sure of where we were or how to get home. My mother seemed annoyed, because my dad's internal mapping system might have been offended at the suggestion of him getting out of the car to ask for directions. Yeah, no maps.

We pull away and drive around and wind up at a gated fence, which was not going to lead us to Fairfield. Staring out the windshield are these two huge, overly bright lights that seemed to be speeding towards us. As the lights are getting incredibly closer, we watched in horror as they went over the top of the car and disappeared. Somehow, my fathers internal GPS had placed us at the end of Westchester County Airport. Eventually we made it home.

So right now Julie and I are taking a westward route to get to Arizona. We don't have a road atlas, but rely on GPS specifically for RV's. It loads in the size, weight and height of the RV to ensure we take safe routes to our destination. We pass comfortably under bridges, and don't worry about weight limits or safe passage. It's worked very well and our faith in it is becoming comfortable, reliable.

The route from Lake George, New York to Buffalo, NY is simple and straightforward; Interstate 90 west. Okay, we follow this and listening to the voice prompts, we find ourselves on an elevated bridge span outside of Buffalo and seeing signs for entry into Canada. We were supposed to be going to Tonowanda, NY, but we follow the GPS. Julie spots a sign that says last exit to the US, which I missed. And now we see a sign that says trucks and oversized vehicles go in this lane, which is to take a sharp right turn which we do. And, it shows this on the GPS, so here we are, in a line with a bunch of tractor trailer trucks waiting to get through an entry point into Canada. I'm good, as is the GPS.

Julie says there must be a mistake, but being blessed with my fathers sense of direction and equipped with our GPS, I assure her we are going the right way. I point to the screen showing her the GPS route. Finally, we pull into the lane and to my left is a bank of windows. None of them are open, so I'm not sure which one to stop at. Looking around, I start saying hello. A little louder, HELLO? Then I hear a voice that says "UP HERE". I crane my neck up and see a woman who is visibly annoyed.

I say hi and start to explain we might be in the wrong place when she barks at me, "What are you doing in the truck lane?" I start all over again to explain, but she'll have none of it and demands identification. My blood pressure is starting to rise and I'm getting nervous. So I stretch out of the truck window and hand her our drivers licenses. She says that she needs to see who else is in the vehicle. Julie tries to peer out my window, which is now another wrong decision, as she has to get out of the truck for the woman to see her.

Pissed off is how I'd describe the border guard, as she now wants to know our license plate information. I keep a photo on my iPhone, which I am nervously fumbling for, but Julie is out of the truck and reads the information to the border guard. Things get very tense as the guard is out of the office and demnding passports. Julie tells her they are inside the rig. Again I try to explain that we had no intention of coming into Canada, but were following GPS, to which she snarls at me "GPS is not driving your truck!" "Get your passports". Already out of the truck, Julie was going to get in the rig to retrieve the passports. I'm sitting in the truck for what seemed an eternity, but hear nothing. So I decide to see what's going on and Julie is struggling with the door handle exclaiming it won't open. Last month, I replaced the door handle with one that was supposedly easier to use. Yeah, easier to use.

The border guard tells us to hurry up, we cannot continue to hold up Canadian customs and is now forming an opinion of us (so I think), but we manage to open the Puffin. Julie believes she can get into the office to get the passports without opening up the slideout. I'm looking at the angry border guard and decide not to try a third explanation and wonder when she would have enough of our bumbling and call out the drug dogs, when Julie says she cannot get into the office. I hear the dogs barking and imagine a lot of guards assembling to take us down. We manage to open up the slideouts, and Julie is actually excited about getting the prized passports, like she won some kind of prize, while I'm imagining being laid out on the ground, spread eagle as several agents rip apart the Puffin to discover what we've been trying to hide from Customs. Actually, Julie and I are sweating. We were totally unprepared for a border crossing and the guard, the diminutive, sweet looking woman with a gun and attitude to match made the experience unnerving.

No longer concerned with the cued up line of trucks, we are treated to a severe chewing out by this godzilla of a guard. Her parting comments when handing back our documents is hoping we do not get this kind of reception going back into the US; they're not as nice.

Epilogue

We survived the border crossing and nerves have calmed down, as we are trying to find the campground located in Tonowanda, NY from Canada. Yeah, we're still following the GPS. We realize that the border guard was just doing her job, ensuring Canada's protection from myriad problems, of which we could have been one. As we reach our destination, it is a rundown motel a few blocks on the Canadian side of Niagra Falls. There isn't an RV campground so I look at the GPS settings and realize I had input the address incorrectly.

I should have brought a map.

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