Goodbye Amerika!

Short Version:
We head for the border via the booze/cheese/gasoline store, acquire a little person, and make someone cry.

Long Version:
Our final morning in Amerika dawned... actually, we have no idea how it dawned.

We arose reluctantly and eventually, bleary-eyed and thick-tongued and full-bladdered. Between the beautiful shining espresso machine and Wendy's fresh-baked scones it wasn't long before we were feeling good again, though, and we hit the road north excited to be travelling, and looking forward to seeing the Candians again, but also somewhat sad that we had to go, and determined to return to hang out with Scott and Wendy again, and to take in some of Seattle's trails, on a day with less standing snow and leftover rain.

Wendy had pointed us at a super-cool store in Mount Vernon, halfway to the border, and we stocked up on booze and cheese and gasoline before plowing onwards and upwards. We joined a queue of vehicles at the border, and hadn't been sitting long when a young Border Police officer approached the driver's side window and started asking me questions about where we were from, where we'd been, what our plans were, what did we have in the van... His ginger moustache made it difficult to take him seriously, but we were doing pretty well, right up until the point where his patrol partner, who had sneaked (or possibly walked normally, peering into each of the Reaper's rear windows) around to the van's far side, knocked on the window next to Janine's head. The surprised leap she performed was one of which Yelena Isinbayeva would have been proud, and the next round of questioning saw us somewhat less composed than we had been beforehand. They eventually had us drive on up to the booth, where the bloke asked many of the same questions, using the same sneaky-trick, "Let's see if we can get these potential scoundrels to contradict themselves" style employed by his mobile colleagues.

And then we were free to go, onwards into Canada, where I immediately exceuted a chewing-gum fail, biting my tongue hard enough to draw a significant and unstemmable flow of blood, only a little of which ended up in my beard. It had stopped by the time we reached the ferry terminal at Tsawassen, and cleaned up reasonably well, although I still garnered more than a few strange looks as I stood, shabby and unkempt, in the Arrivals waiting area. Maybe it was the fact that I was staring intently at all the really short people; I was trying to spot which of the heavily-bundled midgets was my smallest sister, but given how disreputable I now look I probably looked like I was sizing children up for bed and/or oven.

Smallest sister acquired, we carried on driving, under a river and up into the hills, to North Vancouver, where we hid the Reaper and arrived at the family doorstep clutching booze galore and gifts aplenty for smallest sister's big sister on her birthday. She cried when she saw us, because of happy surprisedness, and then we all ate delicious foods and drank some drinks and left the dirty washing in the Reaper overnight, because a task that monumental is not one to be attempted late in the day, and especially not when there are illicit imported alcholic beverages to be consumed, and for such a good cause!