REJECTED: BLAME CANADA

REJECTED ? BLAME CANADA

Obviously we made it to Canada because our anniversary blog was written from Vancouver, but we had to write about our experience getting in. We just wanted to wait until we were safely home in the States before bashing the border patrol. The following is the true story in its entirety.

You learn to deal with rejection pretty quickly when you start a company. After the weeks, now going on months spent peddling t-shirts on beaches, at festivals and in bars all across America with virtually no problems at all, we thought we had seen everything. But nothing could have possibly prepared us for what we endured at the Canadian border.

We spent a long weekend in Seattle and decided to head up to Vancouver to see the sights and visit Bridget’s friend Kim who she met while getting certified to teach yoga. We never had any intentions of attempting to sell shirts while we were there and because of that, it never even occurred to us that there might be some stipulations when you are crossing borders with commercial goods. (Okay, sometimes we just aren’t that bright).

Well…apparently we set off some red flags. Maybe it is our angelic, innocent, youthful faces. Or maybe it’s the fact that we have no tattoos, are citizens of the U.S. of A and aside from our superior taste in hip hop, are basically as white as two white kids can get. I’m sure we’re a drug dealer’s wet dream when it comes to choosing mules.

Another red flag could perhaps be that we have been on tour for three months straight, have no real itinerary, and when they asked us when we were planning on going home we just stared at them blankly.

“Please park your car over there,” the immigration officer in the booth instructed us to do after taking peek in our over-packed trunk. He wrote some code on a piece of paper and told us to go have a friendly chat with the customs ladies and they would take a “quick look” at the inventory in the trunk.

Flashback one week (it could possibly be two weeks at this point): When we recently stopped in Santa Cruz, we did a quick inventory count and repacked all the shirts in white garbage bags and taped them with silver duct tape. At the time we laughed at how much it looked like the kilos of cocaine you see in the movies and how hilarious it would be if we got stopped at the border and searched. Joke was on us. We did get stopped and our car got searched with a fine toothcomb. Apparently in Canada a “quick look” is metric for 45 minutes and judging by the fact that they looked in every nook and cranny in the car and under the car, we are pretty sure they were looking for more than just t-shirts.


Not only did they search everywhere, they took an inventory of everything they encountered…the glove compartment (walkie talkies), the cooler (chips and salsa; gatorade), the side door pockets (SweeTarts; ibuprofen), all of our bags and of course, the trunk. Good thing this morning we took those cap-gun muskets out of the area where the spare tire is kept or we really would have had some questions to answer.

We basically laughed hysterically the whole time we waited in the customs/immigration building watching them through the window as they searched our trunk. Eventually they would come upon what probably at first glance looked like a drug smuggling jackpot, only to realize it was bags and bags of t-shirts reading “R U THAT FUCKING COOL?” The ridiculous search definitely gave a whole new brilliant meaning to the “MADE YA LOOK” shirt as well.

We never knew that when your car gets searched at a border you are not allowed to be present, but then again, the way civil liberties are treated in this country these days, we are just glad they didn’t come in after searching our car, put bags over our heads, tell us we have “the right to remain silent,” give us a good old-fashioned body cavity search and realize when they took the bags off our head, realize that we were in Guantanamo Bay.
We know that supposedly you are innocent until proven guilty, but that’s not the way customs officers behave. They treat you like you’re guilty piece of shit from the first question they ask and the fucked up thing is, you start to wonder if you are. They are masters of intimidation. Here is just one of the many ridiculous excerpts from some of the conversations we had with these power-tripping d-bags.

Officer: What is the purpose for your visit?
Bridget: We’re going to see a friend in Vancouver for a couple of days,
Officer: And how do you know this friend?
Bridge: We met each other in my hometown when we were getting certified in yoga together.
Officer (skeptically): Yoga huh,..so what, you’re a yoga instructor?
Other questions included, but were not limited to: Where do you teach yoga? How do you pay for your trip? How are you two related? How do you get certified in yoga? Where are you running your business from? What is the name of your business? What do you sell?
How long have you been on the road?

You would think we had third-world orphan children in our trunk that we were trying to sell on the Canadian black market, and not t-shirts that said “Support Global Cooling.”

Well…to make a long story even longer, they turned us away, made us sign something that said we were “ALLOWED TO LEAVE CANADA” (Gee thanks for letting us go back to our own country. What a typically Canadian way of saying. “You’re application to enter Canada is being rejected.”) So we had to go drop off all of our merchandise in Bellingham (thanks to Alix’s brother Joey for stashing our stuff for two days) and then try entering Canada again. Getting rejected from Canada…yikes. That’s more embarrassing than getting rejected from Mexico.

The border patrol dude going back into the States was the biggest d-bag of them all:
“If you aren’t planning to sell those t-shirts in Canada then why are you trying to bring them across the border?”

Cuz we’re living out of our freakin’ car you idiot. Can’t you tell that by the fact that it’s packed to the fuckin’ brim, we have Rhode Island plates and we’re in Washington fuckin’ State?

To make things even more annoying and ridiculous and proving yet again how ineffective all this bullshit posturing really is at the borders-- when we went back through, certain that we had been red-flagged and would get searched again, here is how the conversation went…(everything in italics is what we wanted to say but couldn’t):

Officer (to Sean): “You gotta gun?”
Sean: No. (I’m wearing a purple-collared shirt, do I look like the type of person that would be carrying a gun?)
Officer (to Bridge): You get into Europe with just your driver’s license?
Bridge: No. (They didn’t have a problem with it an hour ago when we got rejected. And yeah right Canada, you wish you were Europe.)
Officer: Ok, well, next time you come, you have to have a birth certificate or a passport or you’ll have to deal with immigration and trust me, you don’t want to deal with them.
Bridge: Ok. (Yeah, we know, we just spent about 20 minutes with them.)
Officer (to both of us): When was the last time you were in Canada?
Bridge & Sean: About 10 years ago. (About an hour and 15 minutes ago before they made us turn around.)
Officer: Ok, have a good time.

WHAT? ALL THAT BULLSHIT—THE QUESTIONING, THE 45 MINUTE CAR SEARCH, THE LONG CONVERSATION WITH CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION—FOR NOTHING? And you just let us pass? We almost wish we had been searched again, it would have at least justified the procedures. But no. Nothing. Didn’t even make us open our trunk to take a peek. The conclusion that we’ve come to is that the first guy was sure we were smuggling drugs and when they came up empty-handed, got pissed and made us go home.


We are pretty sure PHETASY is now on some friggin’ watch list. It’s so typical. All the illegal drugs that get smuggled in our borders every year, and we get treated like criminals for innocently and ignorantly having some t-shirts trying to save the world. Go figure. Proving yet again, how backwards everyone’s priorities are and what a worthless waste of time and taxpayers money the war on drugs, the war on terrorism and basically any war against something you literally can’t kill really is. But that’s another essay for another day. Until then, we’ll just check out the scene in Canada.