Wed. Reminisce: Strange Transient Lives

One summer when I was in high school, our church stake (several congregations) went to Canada for a youth temple trip. It was pretty sweet. My Dad was in the Stake Young Men's at the time and helped plan it, and since he's from Cardston where our temple was, he was able to arrange economical sleeping arrangements for us (all the boys at my Aunt Melodie's and Uncle Montey's farm, and all the girls at my Aunt Jeanette's and President Walker's), and so they had extra money in the budget and we were able to go to Waterton International Park, and a few other fun things. Above is a picture of a bunch of my friends from North Dakota at Cameron Falls in Waterton. Good times. Almost everybody in that picture is married now and has kids. CRAZY! Anyway this wasn't really my story. Kayli and I were going to EFY at BYU the week after the temple trip, but my parents were staying up in Canada so we rode down to Utah with my sister Amy, her daughter Olivia, and Kayli's friend Kirsta. Kirsta's parents had just moved to Colorado, and she had stayed with us till the temple trip and the plan was that she'd meet up with her mother in Utah, who was visiting family. Her dad was in Colorado already. Kirsta's in the picture up top too. This all does come into the story, by the way.

We left relatively early and came to the border about an hour later. At the time Kayli, Amy, and I were all still Canadian and only had greencards. The guy at the border started asking the usual questions: "Any drugs, alcohol, weapons, knifes, fireworks, blah, blah, blah." All good there. Then he asked who all was in the car and Amy told him, "my two sisters, my daughter, and a friend." Then he asked if Kirsta was over 18. She wasn't. So then he asked for proof of her parents' permission to take her across the border. Well, my parents had planned for that and had given Amy a notarized, signed consent from Kirsta's parents. Amy couldn't find it. She looked everywhere.

The border patrol guy made us come inside. He took each of our greencards and birth certificates. He had Amy explain in depth why her car had Utah license plates, but yet we lived in North Dakota, only she was moving to Arizona, etc. He had a hard time grasping why and where Kirsta's parents were where they were. He called Kirsta's mom. He called Kirsta's dad. We waited two hours. And finally he told us that we lived "strange, transient lives" and let us go through.

Amy and Olivia

Pretty much the trip went downhill from there. We stopped in Great Falls (or someplace like that, I don't remember) and Amy bought us milkshakes. I spilled mine on Olivia's really nice baby blanket. Then Amy wouldn't stop for me to got to the bathroom pretty much the whole way through Idaho. It was torturous. Kayli and Kirsta memorized "Elmo's Play Day" reading it to Olivia so many times. That was torturous as well. Olivia for her part, was pretty good. Every time she started to cry, we spilled half a bottle of juice all over her or fed her another piece of beef jerky. She was a disaster by the time we hit Utah. Then in the dark, driving through Salt Lake, we saw the temple go by as we headed south, and then two hours later we saw the temple go by as we headed north. Only we hadn't realized until that time that we were headed north. The I-15 was under road construction (pre-Olympics prep) and we had taken a detour. Apparently we didn't follow it that well. Then some time around 3 AM, we were finally close to my cousin's house and Amy hit a cat.

The next morning Amy found the consent folded up in her back pocket. Umm. Yeah.

It was definitely a trip I would not want to repeat. Maybe next week I'll tell you about the worst road trip of my life.