[Leica] Oh Canada!

[Nathan Wajsman]

The thing is, at the airports it is not that bad these days. Of course it is easy for me to say, having a US passport, but I have been here on business a couple of times within the past 3-4 years, and my companions were not US citizens and so had to go through the foreigner line at the arrival airport, and still we all came throug immigration in roughly the same time. At the land border yesterday we were asked where we lived, what we had bought in Canada, who owned the car (and they wanted to see the rental agreement once we said it was rented), how long we had been in Canada. Our “interrogation” did not take that long, but some of the other cars were in the gate much longer than we, despite having either NY or Ontario license plates.

Cheers,
Nathan

On 11 Aug 2014, at 18:24, H&ECummer <cummer at netvigator.com> wrote:

> Hi Nathan,
> Your Niagara Falls shot took me back. I used to take Chinese delegations there on every trip to Canada. If you had a little more time the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario and the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake (NotL to the locals) are well worth a few days visit to take in the plays. My son-in-law directed at Shaw a couple of years ago. Regarding crossing the border I haven’t been to the States since the LHSA meeting in Seattle a few years ago when it took us THREE hours to cross the border and there wasn’t even a whiff of an apology for the delay. So I am with Henning and Jayanand on this one although we are planning to be in New York in 2016.
> Some places are just too attractive.
> Cheers
> Howard 
> 
> Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 11:40:24 -0400
> From: Nathan Wajsman <nwajsman at gmail.com>
> To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>, Olympus Camera Discussion
> 	<olympus at thomasclausen.net>
> Subject: [Leica] Nathan's PAD 10/8/2014: Oh, Canada!
> 
> We spent yesterday on the Canadian side of the border, first taking in the awesomeness that is Niagara Falls (despite local attempts to turn it into a horrible Disneyland):
> http://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/4253606_kdsZ6C#!i=3451580623&k=cX7jChW&lb=1&s=O
> 
> Then we drove the 15 km to Niagara-on-the-Lake and visited several of the local wineries. The wine was surprisingly good; I knew that the whites would be nice, and indeed there were several good Rieslings, and of course ice wine (frost in December/January is pretty dependable in Canada?). But the real surprise were the reds, some of which had the flavour, fruitiness and structure to match what we drink in Spain, but with a unique character. And finally, we came across the town?s lone crafts beer maker, Oast House Brewers, where my wife took a picture of me holding a bottle I had fallen in love with:
> http://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/4253606_kdsZ6C#!i=3451580961&k=BqdB7ff&lb=1&s=O
> 
> The only bad part about the trip was the one hour wait to cross back into the US. For some weird reason, the level of interrogation (and hence the time it takes to process each car) is much more extensive here than at the airport; and we are talking here about a car with US license plates and with four US citizens in it. I can only imagine what non-USians go through at that border. In our case it was the Lewiston Bridge, but the Peace and Rainbow Bridges were equally backed up.
> 
> Cheers,
> Nathan
> 
> Nathan Wajsman
> Alicante, Spain
> 
> 
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Nathan Wajsman
Alicante, Spain
http://www.frozenlight.eu
http://www.greatpix.eu

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