Never Again!!! Day 1
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated this blog so I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell of my disheartening, final sojourn to Canada & what’s been happening since.
The reason for the trip was fourfold, 1st to pickup my final toy, a 1978 International Scout II, 2nd to visit & say goodbye to old friends, 3rd to tie up some loose ends with mothers estate, 4th to attend my old high school reunion on Labour Day weekend.
The rough plan was a couple nights in Oshawa (only convenient place to pickup/drop off a rental car), do my Bowmanville business, move on to Cobourg 3-4 days to get Scout on road, return car & head to QC stopping to visit friends near Ottawa & the ‘Kleeker’ along the way, finally arriving in Cowansville Thurs or Fri. (so I planned)
To ensure (or so I thought) that I had plenty of time to do what I wanted, I booked an Aug 20 flight with 
http://www.taca.com , direct San Salvador to Toronto, in order to keep my promise (or so I thought) to never fly in the US agan. As the flight arrival late in the evening, I booked a room http://www.travelodgeoshawa.ca & a rental car http://locations.avis.com/on/oshawa/os4.html I saved the price of the http://www.torontoairportslimo.com by picking up the car in Oshawa rather than the rip-off airport. Also as all accommodations, that had less than exorbitant prices, in/near Cowansville were full, I booked 4 nights across the border in Richford VT http://thecrossingvt.com (turned out to be an excellent choice)!
Day 1 Aug 20/2012 (aka THE DAY FROM HELL) started innocuously enough with my neighbour driving me to Compalapa Airport http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador_International_Airport 
in my Kia. 
I should have realized once I entered the plane, that it was a precursor of the trip ahead. The plane was the oldest TACA plane I had seen, my armrest was missing the padding, the flight crew seemed (& proved to be) inept trainees (guess they figured that’s all anyone Canada-bound deserved)
The uneventful 5 hr flight arrived at Pearson http://.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Pearson_International_Airport (aka HELL’s Airport) as usual we get a gate at the far end of the terminal a good 20 min walk from immigration/customs.
Arriving at the checkpoint there are 2 queues one for residents, the other non-residents, just to see what would happen, I chose to be truthful (BAD MISTAKE) and entered the non-resident one. After another 20 min. wait I reached an agent who, upon seeing my Canadian passport, immediately directed me to secondary interrogation. 
Now these dudes take there tactics from the 
instruction book. Not liking my answer to a question the goon interrogating me grabs my passport, takes it over to a city cop and acting like 
says, loud enough for me to hear, “Check this guy out, I know we can get him on something!”
An hour later, after the cop had returned my passport, with a shrug of his shoulders, the super dude had read all the emails, looked at all the pictures on my netbook, gone through my pack piece by piece he finally decided to cut his losses, pointing to the door he poutingly grumbled “that way out” as he slunk back to the office resembling this 
character from Hogan’s Heroes. *the next morning I discovered the mouse from my netbook missing so he was also a 
Gotta Love Canada EH. NOT!!!
Five minutes after being released from interrogation I being whisked comfortably, in an airport limo, 
to the 
Oshawa Travelodge, arriving at the witching hour after, a smooth drive from Hog towns version of Dante’s inferno aka YYZ!
Tags: Travel
busman7