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Thursday, June 20, 2019

World Traveller


Before every trip abroad, I like to dig around the closet for any left over foreign currency from countries we might be visiting. I was only able to turn up 17 Canadian Dollars today. Hardly worth finding, but maybe we’ll need it immediately after getting into the country, or something. Also in the closet, these silver beauties. They sure look like quarters. If memory serves, we were staying on the US side of Niagara Falls on New Year’s Eve a long, long time ago. It was really cold. Like 12 degrees cold. We walked across a bridge into Canada because there was supposed to be a New Year’s party that was bigger than Times Square. Except on the Canadian side it was negative 8 degrees, so everyone decided to stay home. We waited in a long line to get into the Niagara Casino and when we finally got to the front, I couldn’t find my driver’s license. They let me in anyway, but told me not to win any money because they probably wouldn’t let me keep it. I think you had to be 19 and I must have been 25 or 26. I didn’t win any money so it wasn’t a problem until we tried to get back into the US. There were no humans on the Canadian side. Only a turnstile that wanted quarters. The sign said it would take either US or Canadian, but my Canadian quarters were not working. After struggling with the thing for longer than I care to admit, we saw a change machine and got new quarters which did work. Walking across the bridge was uneventful. The Customs/Immigration man asked us where we were from, the practiced “USA” and not “America” got us through without any further questioning. The next morning, I found my driver’s license in my wallet and these two casino tokens in my pocket. They look just like quarters if you don’t know what Canadian money looks like and you’ve been drinking a little...