Landed Immigrants

May 30th 2010 Today we drove to the US border in Carway, with our stamped passports, to leave Canada and re-enter it 5 minutes later, after the visa U-turn and so becoming Landed Immigrants. The US customs were very friendly in a nice new clean building. "I will not charge you the 6 dollar entry fee, as you are doing the visa U-turn" the mean looking but very friendly officer told us. We did the visa U-turn and onwards to the Canadian border and customs. What a grumpy bunch in a very old building. The female officer ripped out our work-visa, started to fill in the Confirmation for Permanent Residence (CPR) and ask me to sign mine. "That's a big one" she said. Huh? How does she know? Probably I looked sheepishly at her; "Your signature is pretty large and may not touch the green box at the bottom of the page" Ohhhhhh! OK, and yes I did touch the green box and screwed up my signature. Who cares! Joka and Emma also needed to sign their CPR and 10 minutes later we were done. Canadian Permanent Residence achieved. Unfortunately Joost could not join us, maybe he will come later. That's up to him.
It was doubtful whether we could make the trip, when we left there was 5 inches of snow and only 0 degrees and a very misty grey morning. We will try it and if need be we just turn and go home. It turned out to be a very nice day, after Red Deer the snow started to disappear and slowly the clouds broke with a comfortable sunshine. As we approached the US border, we drove thru a Blackfoot Indian Reservation. What a mess. Beautiful surroundings but deteriorating ill maintained houses and villages.
We left at 7:15AM to return at 8:15PM and drove 1100 km, it was well worth the trip. All uncertainty gone, no more black cloud for September 2011 and regained some freedom as I could go look for a job across Canada. Only time will tell where we end up.