Journal #5286

Okay, funny story for you guys.

Me and my couple of friends, both are girls, like to hang out every now and then. It usually ends up with us sitting in the house / car being boring, but this time was different.

We decided to go down to Detroit's river front area.

Going down Jefferson Avenue we took a wrong turn (by the way I'm not driving), but it wasn't just any wrong turn, you see.

This turn happened to be where the tunnel to Canada is.

So we pull off to the side of the road in a "Authorized Only Parking Space". My friend driving gets out of the car and waves to a border officer as to what to do because we wanted to turn around. He tells us to back out and pull through, or so we thought, the search area for people coming into the United States. So he stops traffic for us and lets us go through to the search area.

Little did we know, we were about to be searched. An officer takes the car keys from my friend who's driving, and he asks for all of our (3 of us) identifications and we have to step out of the vehicle.

When I went to reach for my back pocket to get my license, the officer seems to freak out and tells me to "calm it down" or something like that, but I get my wallet anyhow.

So we're now standing outside of the car in the search area of the border passing to Canada. They start asking us questions, like what we were doing in Detroit and where we were going. So we explain.

Everything seems fine so far. However, when it comes to the driver, it turns out she forgot her license and any other form of identification. They inform us that it's illegal to drive without a license, like we didn't know that.

They make us go sit inside the detainee area where they keep you as they search your car.

At this point, 2 or 3 officer are going through the car, top to bottom. I'm watching them out the window as they pop the trunk and hood of her silver Mustang. They took covers off the engine and took out every little thing inside the car and put it on the roof.

Standard procedure so far, I was expecting all of this as soon as I knew the driver forgot her license.

So we're sitting in the detainee area for about an hour and a half total. During this time, a half-dozen Iranians came through on passport / ID troubles. Kinda funny.

Anyways, they also contacted the driver's Mom, who had to come there, with her license, and take us home.

Luckily they let my friend drive home. Otherwise it would cost $8,000 to get the car out of the impound.

Her mom drops us off and you can tell she is highly pissed still.

tl;dr: DONT MAKE WRONG TURNS ONTO THE CANADA - US TUNNEL.

I was detained by Customs and Border Protection, had my ID taken, and sat next to a half-dozen Iranians for an hour and a half.

Thanks for reading.