What Luck!

It's about time we find some supper, but just now I'm probably too stressed out to eat. Man was that a close one!

Oh yeah - we're in Canada! HA! We aren't stranded on the other side of the border - which appears to be closed! Oh yeah, back up a bit. I will type rapidly as I've got only a few minutes while Kate is on her cell phone trying to reach her mother in Toronto.

So looking back for a second - oh yeah, we were sitting there waiting for the line to inch towards the gate. It kept moving, but stuff started happening.

First we're just inching into the border post on the US side, and a military helicopter lands in this field off to the right, beside the river and a half dozen military, gun laden guys get out and are milling about. The traffic is backed up over the bridge to the Canadian side's customs as it has been for hours, but we can see that hardly any cars are coming through the US customs either.

Then as we are just mounting the bridge, Kate turns around and says look, and I look back and I see a convoy of military vehicles has come along the shoulder and pulling in around the inspection point. We wonder what's going on, never thinking it's related to what we were upto, our car rental extravaganza, and the air travel issues.

The radio starts saying some other stuff about questions being raised about flights being grounded all over the place, and strange things in the sky in Northern Europe. Then music interrupts the guy, and someone else comes on with some entertainment report crap.

We laughed out loud - what was that - did they yank him off the air?

We just get over the crest of the Blue Water Bridge, and we can see that on the Canadian side there is also a helicopter down in this baseball diamond, and a pair of military trucks as well, with a bunch of guys standing around in green.

By now, we see that nothing has been moving into the US side for a while, and people are out of their cars, standing around talking. Our side is still moving. Please don't make us spend the next ten hours on the bridge we commented.

So we get to the Canadian customs guy, and we see why the delay, he stares at us, checks both our ID asks a hundred questions, and then we get to go. The traffic opens up on the other side, as people have been going through so slowly.

We speed along then, on the 402 - this stretch of open, straight as an arrow expressway, happy to be in Canada. What do we do - continue on with the car to Ottawa, or perhaps we should drop it in London and get a plane, train or Canadian car? Who knows, I've never done this one-way rental thing before.

But now we change the radio to CBC, the public radio in Canada and the mood is different. It's music with interruptions every 15minutes talking about the 'situation'. They say the borders are closed - check with authorities if you're planning to travel to the US. They say, all flights are grounded, and that something has happened to three passenger planes in Northern Europe. They've disappeared, and are presumed crashed, but nobody has seen any sign of a crash.

The US are speculating about some sort of terrorism thing, but nobody is being specific about anything. Up in Nunavut there were reports of big black square airplanes whatever that means - but that was just some hunters or something way out in the middle of nowhere they say.

The chat boards are all-aliens-all-the-time. Kate's coming back. I think we should just pedal to the metal for Ottawa, and deal with the car later. This is too weird.

I'm amazed that we made it through the border - The Canadian one is closed too. I look like a bloody genius now. Ha! What Luck.