Oh, Canada!

This is our plan for the day...

a little jaunt north to get our passports stamped :)

We departed from Joint Base Lewis-McChord...

for a 3 hour tour drive to the border.

We drove past this city with a very recognizable skyline:

Seattle!
We'll visit you on the way back :)

The official International Boundary:

We'll be in Canada in a nanosecond.

Actually, make that 40 minutes...after we get through the border guards...aka:  Immigration and Customs

You can tell the who are the Canadian locals:
convertible top down while it is 44* and cloudy!

We had a lot of time to people/car watch while we waited for our turn.

Look who we spot heading back into the United States---

it's Scooby Doo and Shaggy in The Mystery Machine!  :)

We're all craving Scobby Snacks now :)

We're next, yippee!

The kids are definitely ready!

Well, getting through the border was a little tougher than we thought.  We didn't expect the guard's questions to be so "difficult".

1.  "Where do you live?" Um...rootless right now.

2.  "Where do the kids go to school?" Um...in our rootless RV.

3.  "When is the last time you transported your firearms?"  Um...how do you know we have firearms?  I digress...last Sept. when we put them in storage.

4.  "Why would you make this long trip without your firearms?"  Because we knew we wanted to go to Canada to get our passports stamped.

Those were just a few of the questions.  We took much longer than the car in front of us!  We were ready for her to send us to the "Secondary Inspection" area, but praise the Lord... she smiled, stamped the kids' passports, and said, "Enjoy Canada."

Whew...

The kids didn't really understand stand the interrogation and said, "Wow, she was so nice!  She was asking so many great questions to get to know us!"  :)

Yippeee... new stamp!
Costa Rica, USA, and Canada

Oh, Canada!

Believe it or not, we drove 3 hours one way, waited for another 40 minutes to get through customs...all without a plan on what to do once we got here.  We didn't even have a Canadian map!

We just wanted to look around and grab a snack and some postcards before heading back.  We almost made it to Victoria, but decided since we had no navigational aids besides my excellent sense of direction (seriously, I'm the GPS on our expedition)... we decided to enjoy the countryside and then head back to Surrey for our snack.

We actually had no intention of stopping at a McDonald's, but most of the shopping and stores 10 miles across the border looked just like America!  Subway, Pizza Hut, etc.  Everyone wanted ice cream so we decided to check this out for grins.

It's kinda hard to tell from this picture, but our white, American pick-up truck in the middle of the photo dwarfed all the cars in the parking lot.  In fact, it was really tight in the parking lot!

We were so surprised at how nice this McDonald's is!  That is a fireplace over Faith's head!  It felt so good on this chilly day.

And in the top right corner of the photo...

Hockey was on, of course!  :)

Even though we had chilly temps this day, spring has arrived in British Columbia.  The flowers were so pretty and unique.

Time to head back to the good 'ol USA.   

Ah, more Immigrations and Customs lines...

I {heart} my homeland.