Colateral Damage

We stopped and cleaned out the car, witnessed some interesting ammish fellows all wearing the same silk striped shirts, wearing odd hats, and had the same nasty beard going on, at the stop area right before the boarder in Coutts. Then we got in line at the boarder. I handed our paperwork over, Birth Certificates, permission slip from Jake saying I can take his children over the boarder, our Adoption decree from the day before and me and Allen's Drivers Liscenses. We were asked questions why we were entering Montana, "because we were driving through to Alaska for relocation" Why were we relocating, "because my husband that is flying to Alaska got a job in Palmer" Doing what, "working as a Surgical Technologist in the Operating Room at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center" How do I know him (pointing at Allen), "he's my cousin, helping me drive through with my children" Do you have any guns or ammunition "NO" do you have anything that you plan on selling before you leave Canada? "No, other than my 2 year old son that won't stop crying(LOL)" LOL, we would rather have you keep him if he's crying LOL. Enjoy your drive Maam, "Thank you" and into Canada we went. The first sign we saw said 110 on it, WHAT THE CRAP!!! we're going to go from 75 to 110??? Sweet we're living in the wrong Country, OH WAIT! that's Kilometers LOL, so those of you that don't know, neither did I LOL, good thing that it has kilometers under mph on my speedometer. AND I have a GPS Jake got me so I moved things over from mph to km. phew!! 65 mph we went through Canada, once again we were on unfamiliar territory. weird roads with weird signs, weird trees that looked as if they might have come from a Dr Suess book, they were similar to pine trees at home but from the bottom to the top they started out with short branches and at the top they swayed very strange like. Oh and weird cities too. We drove through the night, we got gas after being into Canada a ways at about 9pm or so, my card wouldn't work as debit, but it would with credit....kind of weird (like everything else) didn't think anything of it really, we heard ehh about 20 or so times :). So on we went we didn't need gas until about 1am, I took my card in before we started, the gas attendant said go ahead and pump your gas then come back in. So I filled up. Then went in, My card wouldn't work with debit, or credit, I had a total of like $5 in cash. I asked the guy if he could type in the numbers, he just looked at me like a retard, so I called Jake at midnight his time. I was nearly in tears, I decided to use the ATM, that wouldn't work either, it said "bank unavailable" So, I asked the attendant if I could go to a different ATM. He said that if I took my van out of the parking lot, he would call the police on me and I would be arrested for theft of gas. But there was Truck Stop behind the gas station with a 24 hour Restaraunt in it. The ATM wouldn't work there either. What was I going to do? So Allen offered to stay if I could go get money from somewhere. We decided to use a 24 hr Western Union that was down the street. Allen was my collateral Damage :) He stayed in the gas station and got FREE coffee so the Attendant wouldn't call the cops on me, I drove to the Western Union and waited for the cops to come and get me.....j/k. Remember Allen was my colateral :) I waited while Jake and his mom got money to me :) I knew my prince could save me if I called him for help. The funny thing to me was it was in Canadian money, it looked like it was from a monopoly game or something a little bigger, but it didn't look normal to me, LOL. I know I was in Canada, but I've used US dollar my entire life. The other shocker to me was the other language around me. Everyone said Ehh. And your option for other languages wasn't Spanish it was French. On the CC swiper the options were in french. What a switch up dude. At 3:30am my time I took the money and ran...... back to get Allen, paid the dude $49.91 and then asked the guy for a picture, he didn't speak french. Later I found out that he could have typed in my CC # Which worked for every other gas station in Canada. We wasted a good 3 hours of driving time. I should have listened to the spirit when it said, "STOP AND SLEEP". I got a wake up, just not through sleep. Lesson learned. On we went trading drivers back and forth.