Borders

Two of my father-in-law's Martinis would drop a rhino in its tracks and I drank two pretty quickly after arriving in Birch Bay on Friday evening. A couple of hours later when Kevin's parents had gone, I discovered how drunken rhinos must feel when they try to swim.

The border crossing wasn't as awful as anticipated, we were through in 40 minutes, a reasonable time for a Friday afternoon. But here's the thing. Canadians go south because there are a number of RV parks down there, people have weekend places just across the border. Many things are cheaper to buy in Washington than in BC, but we're only allowed to bring back a certain dollar value, depending on how long we've been down, it's not like crossing to mainland Europe from Britain, or rather it's more like it was in the old days.
But every time we've gone to the States recently, there have been far longer queues coming north into Canada, same when we have come back, more weekenders returning to the US than to Canada. So what the hell are they all coming north for? Things are more expensive for them, there aren't any cheap places to park RVs, although there are campsites.
Mystery.

This weekend, my son Laurence was able to come with us which was brilliant. He'd worked nights all week in order to be able to do so, and nights means working the drive-through. The pissed, stoned and downright dysfunctional use the drive-through at Wendy's at night.
So he'd deserved his weekend.
Now, having said to Sleepy that the majority of people at the RV park are Canadians, Laurence seems to have the ability to unwittingly flush out the fascists. He has been with us twice to this site and both times when he has been in the pool on his own, he's come back and told us that some George Bush supporter has started talking to him.
I'm not sure why this is, but I feel it may have something to do with his skinhead haircut and tattoos. He does look as though he's straight off the set of Romper Stomper.

We have to take our own entertainment with us. The TV gets about three stations since there's no cable installed. We have been watching the First series of Boston Legal on DVD, but we've finished that. So we usually take a couple of movies. This time, on someone else's recommendation, we had 'Music and Lyrics'.
Forget it, its an airline movie, it didn't engage any of us and it droned on.

It was hot, but it was nice to sit out and eat and drink until nightfall. The hummingbirds have gone now, we missed the thrummmm, thwack of their manoeuvring.

So, my friend Dawn has now left for Bangladesh. I hope I'll be able to pass on some of her experiences if she manages to get online at all. The monsoons have been pretty overwhelming there this year and Dawn is part of a team that will be looking at the impact of flooding.
Annoyingly, my e-mail has been misbehaving. It tells me there's an e-mail from someone and delivers a different e-mail. Bloody annoying. Dawn's last message to me before she left contains a repeat of an e-mail from another friend, although Kevin thinks he may be able to find the real one on the computer itself.
It seems that Thunderbird is having difficulty recognising borders.
I look forward to the day when that is true for weekenders going north and south.