Most of the time when I go on road trips there is always always a story to it. A week ago my family and I went to the States to do some grocery shopping and other errands. We drove 100km to Plattsburgh, New York, in two cars. From Plattsburgh, we decided to drove to Burlington, Vermont which is 55km.
So at Plattsburgh, we bought stuff for the house and some other junk food for our tummies. Since my mom likes plants, she saw plants at the store and she like we should get it, it is so cheap even though she was not ready to buy. Since it was only 5$(CAD), we end up buying it.
We left Plattsburgh and drove to Burlington where we had to take a car ferry in order to cross the Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont. It was the first time I had experienced this kind of ferry.
Around 7 pm we decide to come back home. Usually, when I cross the Us-Canadian border, I speak French with the officers to facilitate the procedure (poutine! all the way). There was a public notice saying that we should declare any kind of plants or anything has to be declared. So I told the officers about the plant that we bought ( worse thing to do ) they kept our three passports (mom’s sister’s and mine) and told us to park the car and go to the office. That’s when my mom starts overreacting – I should not have bought the plant! we are wasting our time for 5$. She was like tell them to keep the plant; we don’t want it; we will just leave and blah blah. It was only 5$!
In the office, they were doing an investigation on the plant, meanwhile, they gave back our passport.Thirty long minutes later, the officer told us that we can’t bring the plant in Canada and we had to dump it at the other side (USA). I was like are you kidding me; we had to drove back to the other side, show us our passports again and dump the plant and come back to Canada. We spent almost one hour at the borders back and forth just because of the 5$ plant. Surprisingly, the American officer was very nice and friendly with us and he was crying (joking) with us for the poor plant.
Out all the time I went to the States, this is the first time I had to spend more than 10 minutes for crossing the border. We end up just laughing about the plant and we were like the American officer was crying over the plant bought in his country and that he was sad that we were dumping the plant.
Moral of the story: NEVER BUY PLANTS ACROSS THE BORDER
SHiiNE 