After my dad arrived in Portland, he discovered a piece of his car (just by a back wheel) hanging off the car probably thanks ot someone kicking it, perhaps an aggressive bicyclist who hates cars. That’s my theory, anyway. Meanwhile, a strange message was popping up on my computer screen—something to do with “run-time error” and “C++,” MS Word refused to cooperate, freezing up and not letting me even scroll down, let alone revise or print a document. Also, I left my reading glasses (in a case) behind at a movie theater after we went to see The Raven.
My dad’s car is in a good shop,
Details by Mark, not far from my apartment (he meant to drive it to Canada, and
unlike my car it has GPS). My computer spent the night at Office Depot and was
thoroughly cleaned up…but after I used it a couple times, the message
reappeared. Office Depot didn’t solve the problem, so I decided to leave my
computer behind and try to fix it after we return to Portland. I returned to
the movie theater at about noon, and my glasses did indeed make it to the lost
and found box. It was such a great relief to get them back.
We left for Vancouver at about
8:10 am, taking my car, of course. We were slowed down by some inclement
weather; I drove slower through it. Misty mountains are beautiful, but I had to
stop hydroplaning and slow down.
When we reached the border, there
were several lanes of traffic, and on the far right lane was a lane for
“Nexus.” We had no idea what that meant. I figured it was the one lane we should
avoid, so I veered off to the lane to the left of it. Skinny poles eventually
separated the right lane from the others, and the road went uphill so that we
couldn’t see traffic far ahead. I became alarmed to see almost all the oncoming
cars line up in the right lane, and my dad convinced me that it must be the
correct lane, so I slowly backed up until I was far enough to get around the
skinny poles and get into the right lane.
But within seconds I had a bad
feeling about the right lane. It looked like that lane was for people who had
special passes, and indeed we saw those ahead of us had white passes that they
appeared to stick in a machine.
Meanwhile, my dad was nervously
talking so constantly and wigging out through all of this. As we got over the
hill, we soon noticed that the vast majority of cars were in the other lanes,
after all—but I couldn’t get beyond the spiky little poles with lots of cars
behind me. So I drove up to a little booth, like a ticket booth, and
fortunately a guy was in the booth. I said, “I think we’re in the wrong lane.”
He asked me some questions, such as whether we were carrying firearms or
tobacco or alcohol, and he gave me a sheet of yellow paper and told me to pull
over to the far left lane. I did so and spoke with another guy in a black
uniform (whatever happened to dressing like Dudley Do-right in bright red
jackets?), and I parked the car as instructed.
My dad and I went into a tall
glass building with glass double doors and spoke with another agent who was
behind a counter—she asked us questions, and after relinquishing our passports,
we had to (like a few other people) sit in wooden seats at the far end of the
room. We hadn’t waited long, before we were called back up, which surprised me
because all the other waiting people were there before us. So we were only
delayed about five minutes, according to my dad.
After that, I continued driving
(my dad only did so for, say, two hours in Washington, but it’s my car and I
seriously think I’m the better driver). Arriving in Vancouver, I was nervous
about getting lost but also fascinated by some of the houses/mansions we
passed; a lot of them were Craftsman-style, like in Portland. It must have been
really popular in the Pacific Northwest, in both the U.S. and Canada.
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