My White Person Problems
They’re not huge, but they’re mine.
A few months ago, my husband and I decided to borrow my mother-in-law’s SUV to move our hundreds of books from Canada to Michigan, ahead of our international move. The whole point of this exercise was to save money on moving costs. We had a seemingly perfect plan. We would fly from our home city to California for a family celebration, fly back to Michigan, and then drive the SUV back to Canada to pick up our books.
Except that it is illegal to drive a foreign-plated car across the border to Canada unless you are the owner of that car. My husband’s mother can drive her car across, but we can’t.
We didn’t know this.
Apparently, Canada has an illegal car-importing problem. People drive American cars across the border and then import them without paying the importation fee. This costs the Canadian government millions of dollars.
After my husband admitted to the border guard that the car was not his, he ordered us to drive to an adjacent building and stop. Once there, we were surrounded by six armed guards in case we tried to escape.
They made us turn around and drive back to our parents’ house. All told, we wasted three hours driving to and from the Canadian border.
