FlyingHoustonian

To be fair, cowboys fans should not be allowed back in the country

Canada is not as easy as it used to be in your story sadly.

eefor jfp

My wife and son and I were there for a few days for a city break for her birthday. No immigration, no divorce, nothing unusual except that she has an EU passport and I have a US passport and Croatian permanent residence card. My son has a US passport. We went up tot he counter as a family. I don't know what he was thinking--were we trying to emigrate to Finland, or what, but the grilling was the most strict I have ever dealt with in all my days of traveling.

In retrospect, maybe if I had been alone it would have been fine--an American tourist visiting Finland for the weekend. I don't what set him off but he didn't like whatever combination my wife and I represented.

Loren Pechtel

The only place where I've had any trouble was England and I can understand why it happened although it was somewhat unjustified. This was back in 1982.

We had just spent the last 5 months crossing Africa overland on a trip that went well over schedule. My father had an earlier deadline he had to be home by so he had already flown on out, we were intending to follow a few weeks later. We then find out that that's not going to be an option, it's fly out from the city we are in or wait more than a month for the next opportunity.

Now, to compound matters we were having credit card problems there--network related, not anything wrong with the card. The end result of this is my mother (blind) and I (17 at the time) land in England with a total of $5 between us. Furthermore, some months earlier thieves had struck, they got our cool-weather clothing. (Our tropical stuff was out and being used, the cool weather stuff was packed away and it was the latter the thieves got into.) Thus we were dressed in somewhat worn tropical attire.

We know that my father is in London but we have no idea where as we had no plans to be in the city at the same time he was, thus we made no contact arrangements.

Somehow the immigration guy got it in his head that we were trying to get into England to get medical treatment for my mother. (What medical treatment could restore vision to someone without eyeballs I don't know.) We sat there for two hours before we got him to take the credit card over to British Airways and see if they would accept it for an onward flight. They had no problem with it, we were admitted. We had planned to spend a few days in London, after that experience we changed our plans and flew out that afternoon. (This was back when last minute standby tickets were substantially cheaper than normal tickets, rather than costing a lot extra like normally happens now.)



And something we noticed on that trip--the ideal smuggling device. We got pretty careful inspections from several countries in the Soviet block (I'm not counting these as bad experiences as we weren't being singled out) but no matter how careful nobody ever inspected my mother's folding blind-cane despite the fact that it was obviously hollow. (In it's folded state it was half a dozen sections of metal tubing with a cable going through them and a handle. Straighten it out, pull the tensioner on the cable and you have an ordinary blind-cane.)

WilcoRoger

Finnish-Russian railway border, mid-1990's. At the time my country had an ancient agreement still in force, providing visa free travel to Russia if one had a hotel voucher (!). I needed to go to St Pete for a day, so no voucher. I was removed from the train in Viborg, was interrogated for a while and the officer informed me in a very official language that I was denied entry to the territory of the Russian Federation and will be sent back to Finland on the next train (due in about 6 hrs or so) Then I was let go to town (!) and instructed to be back at the station at xxxx hrs to catch the train back. As I was still a bit wet behind the ears, instead of catching a cab to St Pete and doing whatever I had planned to do, I jsut went to have lunch and some sight-seeing in Viborg, called the office to buy a hotel voucher for the next day and returned to the station at the said time to be back home in the evening. When I told them my story, the Finnish border guards commented that the day before an Austrian diplomat had the same fate, except he spent all those hours under armed guard at the railway police station.

The next day, armed with my very important voucher I took the same train again. The (different) Russian officer threw back the voucher which I placed in the passport with a "I asked for your passport only" grunt.

WilcoRoger

As in doing their jobs? What's wrong in formal, anyway?

GUWonder

When it slows things down more than needed with no better results to show for it, maybe that.

They more often ask more questions than they need to ask to admit even those with prima facie evidence of being admissible.

WilcoRoger

And this you know how? How often have you passed immigration at HEL? How many data points you have?

GUWonder

I've been within observation distance of HEL passport control a few hundred times. I owe AY and HEL for my OWE status for a good number of years, courtesy of my HEL-LHR runs.

HEL isn't the worst EU port of entry into the Schengen area.

JohnnyAwesome23

There's a woman that works that post who is a piece of work, I've had the same guy twice there, and he's not as bad as her but did call AA to verify my flight home once.

Majuki

This wasn't a bad experience, but I have my own story about the great staff at Rouses Point. A little over a decade ago, a friend and I were living in Burlington, VT for a summer and decided to take a drive around Lake Champlain. We had taken US 2 north through upstate Vermont and had just crossed into New York on the bridge. Of course, we didn't have GPS and since we had decided to do the afternoon trip on a whim I had only given a cursory glance at the map. I knew that we needed to head down US 9, so when I saw the sign for US 11 South at the end of the bridge, I turned right. Suddenly, we realized we were heading toward Canada!

We turned off the road near the duty free store - I later confirmed that we never crossed into Canada - but we had passed the point of no return. We pulled up to the USCBP officer who asked us how our time in Canada was. I said with a big smile, "We never made it! " and went on to describe that we had gotten turned around while trying to find our way around the lake and were trying to continue on US 2. We were then informed that US 2 ended at the junction and that we needed to take US 11 South west to get to US 9 South. From the conversation, it seemed like we were far from the first misdirected travelers to make this mistake. The officer even gave suggestions of places to stop along the way when we told him we were heading around the lake. ^ Definitely my best POE story even though I had never left in the first place!

Asmonaut

I suspect Asian ports such as Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai are more welcoming.

DaveBlaine

Worst POE? Edgar Allan.

blue_can

Out of this list I have only been to Singapore but it was a very easy entry - a few quick questions and I was on my way.

Blogndog

I disagree -- he was a much better POE than his brother William.

exerda

My experiences have been pretty minor.

Most annoying was this past week at POS. They seemed understaffed at Immigration as it was, and the line was very slow. The airline was short on entry forms, so after some consultation with the ground, they (UA) insisted that there should only be 1 form per family, not per person (and the back of the form does ask for names & other info on those traveling with the primary traveler, including spouses and not just children).

They didn't have entry forms handy at the Immigration line, either.

After waiting in line for 30 minutes, the agent immediately says, "You both need forms. Go fill one out and get into the back of the line." He rejected many, many people in line, and wouldn't take those who completed the form ahead of others in line (meaning effectively you had another 30 minute wait ahead of you). He also spent a long time reviewing each and every form and passport, particularly for US citizens (probably 5 minutes per person).

Fortunately, other agents weren't so nit-picky and were calling over people who had completed the additional forms, to that guy's scowls. We managed to dodge him the 2nd go-round, and the agent who processed ours glanced at passports, stamped the forms and passports, and waved us through.

Not sure why that one agent had such a bad day... but he did cost us ~20 extra minutes.