Originally Posted by kochleffel

I once had some difficulty entering Canada when my only reason was to have dinner.

This happened at Sault Ste. Marie. The town on the Michigan side was small, with no restaurants of interest, while the Ontario side is a fairly large city. I was a fairly young man, alone, driving a slightly flashy car that did not have Michigan license plates. The customs and immigration inspector at the end of the bridge asked where I was going, and I replied with the street address, which was almost in sight of his booth. How long was I staying? About two hours. Why was I coming to Canada? To have dinner.

This apparently sounded fishy, because he told me to park the car and go inside the building. There, a more senior agent with a strong Scottish accent (there was a lot of Scots settlement in western Ontario) took out an enormous ledger and looked to see whether I had ever made trouble in Canada before.

On the return, the U.S. agent thought it was perfectly ordinary to cross the border for dinner; people who live on the U.S. side do it routinely. He just wanted to know whether I had bought anything, other than the dinner that I had already eaten.