Welcome home

After our ordeal crossing into the US last fall we were understandably nervous about coming back across the border.  Crossing an international border is always a little unnerving because you are in such an unprotected state between the time you leave one country and enter another.  You really have very few rights or recourse in that no-man’s land between two countries.

Marilyn’s coffee maker showed up Monday morning, just like the UPS online tracker said it would.  By the time she had discovered that it had arrived, driven into town to pick it up, returned to the campground and we had lunch it was well into the afternoon.  We were only a little over an hour from the border so we headed north and arrived at Sumas to find about 4 cars in the line ahead of us.  The line moved relatively quickly and then we were at the window. 

I gave the young fellow our passports and he wanted to know how long we had been out of the country, what we had bought and how much booze we were bringing back.  Since we had been in a drinking frenzy for the last 5 weeks we were actually under our limit, despite stocking up heavily before leaving California.  Then he said “Welcome home”.  That’s the way crossings should go.

That night we drove as far as the Wallyworld parking lot in Westbank.  A friend who lives in Kelowna says it isn’t correct to call it Westbank anymore – the correct name is West Kelowna – but apparently the sign painters haven’t got around yet because there were still plenty of signs proclaiming it to be Westbank.

On Tuesday morning we drove into Peachland to Dwight & Bobbi’s insurance agent’s office.  They got us started on straightening out the raping that ICBC gave us before we left the country last fall.  Time will tell how much money we get back but we are expecting at least something from our good claims history and based on the fact that our permanent address is now Peachland.

We made such good time at the insurance office that we were on the road again by noon.  We had a leisurely drive up the valley to Sicamous and then east through the mountains to Golden.  It was still pretty early when we got to Golden but I couldn’t think of a good place to stop east of Golden until we got to Cochrane so we decided to shut down for the night.  After we got settled in we realized that it was almost 6 years to the day since we had stayed in Golden our first night after picking up the frenchybus in Kelowna. 

Yesterday we left Golden and arrived in Airdrie in the mid afternoon.  It always feels like coming home when we pull into Alison & Camiel’s yard because we spend so much time here.  Last night we had a great leisurely meal and traded tales of travelling and boats.  They have just bought a Hunter 36 which they currently have moored in Guaymas so they are pretty excited about that.