Open Jaw

I fly somewhere for lunch or dinner often, especially if I have found a cheap deal. Once a TSA agent spotted me when I was at SAV for my return flight home. I handed him my ID and boarding pass, and he says to me: "Why was your trip so short." I answered with "How did you know?" He then told me he had seen me arriving earlier in the day. I told him I had found a dirt cheap fare from JFK to SAV on B6 with a same-day return. He thanked me for the cheap fare info and wished me a safe trip.

airplanegod

Done it many times with many US airlines/airports with no issues.

That being said, why is Canada so strict? It seems they are stricter than the US with everything Customs/Immigration related.

Taoyuan

I seem to always have bad luck with Canada customs. In December, I got sent to secondary and they went through all the pictures (thousands) on my phone, etc.

Kagehitokiri

a lot less traffic in canada, so more time to be strict

kochleffel

I've had more problems entering Canada than any other country, including East Germany and Czechoslovakia back in the Red days, but most of the issues were understandable. Once, at Victoria, BC, arriving by the car ferry with a friend who had constantly bought fruit as we drove through Washington, and who had also eaten most of it, I admitted that we still had one Yakima peach. That would have been OK if we had been able to find it in the car.

Then there was the time, at YHZ as I was going to stay in a rural cabin -- owned, as it happened, by the same friend -- the agent reasonably suspected that I had brought gifts for the friend or the friend's family. In fact, I hadn't; I planned to wait until I saw what the cabin needed and buy something there.* But the agent clearly didn't believe that, and I was a bit surprised that they didn't search my luggage.

This friend wasn't implicated the time I was driving to Ottawa for a walking-club event, nine walks over four or five days spanning the Canada Day holiday. The agent at that crossing found the idea especially ludicrous. Who would come to Canada to walk when you can walk at home? I should probably have said just that I was coming to see the fireworks on Parliament Hill.

*I have also seen this suspicion from another point of view, on a night train from Vienna to Zurich, quite a few years ago, when I was sharing a Liegewagen compartment with a grandmother from Vienna and some of her grandchildren. What especially aroused the Swiss agent's suspicions was that the grandchildren had been staying in Vienna while their mother, in Switzerland, was having another baby, and he insisted (probably correctly, I thought) that the grandmother must have been bringing gifts for the new baby. Much more recently, I traveled the same route by day train, but with the Schengen agreement, there was no immigration or customs check at all.

kochleffel

It did occur to me then that my story would have seemed more plausible in Quebec.