las;
Good afternoon to you sir, I hope you're keeping warm and well up in the Kenai today.
Thanks for taking the time to post the story, honestly it's the stories like that which I enjoy immensely here at our cyber 'Fire.
I'll reciprocate and try to keep it brief as I'm able to.
We had family out from Vancouver Island and in those pre-911 days, we could wander down to Ben Prince's store in Oroville which was a combination surplus, Ace Hardware and a grocery chain affiliate all in one. On any given day the parking lot was jammed and it was 95% Canadian plates.
They had a really good selection of reloading equipment and supplies as well as super cheap CCI .22 ammo, so my brother in law, father in law and I piled into my wife's '90 diesel Jetta and sallied forth.
When we got to US Customs they asked the usual questions.
Where were we headed? Prince's to spend money.
How long would we be there? Less than 2 hours because we needed to be back home before too long.
The usual stuff until one agent walked out and told us to park the car "over there" and come inside.
There were maybe 4 younger looking agents, one older agent and the 3 of us who they had seated apart on 3 walls of the room. One of the young agents gave us a question sheet and a writing stick of some sort and asked us to fill them in.
The questions were, "who is the person to your left and how long have you known them, who is the person to your right and how long have you known them, who owns the vehicle, what's in the trunk of the vehicle, etc."
We started answering solo, but seeing as the other two had questions about the car, one of us - either my not shy father in law or me being me - asked if we could discuss the answers?
The one young fellow immediately laughed and said, "Sure but we're right here" to which we all shrugged and continued with the questionnaire.
There no question that my good wife owned the car but nobody had a clue what she had in the trunk other than it wasn't going to be nefarious items. I suggested that one of them could go look as it wasn't locked and maybe help us out with that one?
Then we got into whether we'd met at a fall supper, church function or exactly when, but we knew the year and the general area.
Everyone seemed to be enjoying both our exchanges because everyone was chuckling in the room.
Presently the senior agent walked up to us, took our paperwork and said to the younger agents, "You all see these three here, there ARE NOT your target audience. You folks have a great day and spend lots of your hard earned money while you're down here".
And we did just that.
Thanks for reading and all the best.
Dwayne
