In college I have had to travel many places for field hockey and lacrosse games and sometimes things didn’t go as smoothly as we’d expected.
The longest we’ve ever had to travel was during my freshman and sophomore years we would visit Upstate New York because our conference included schools from up there as well as closer to our area. Now driving to Upstate New York from my college took us at least six hours. We would get one of those big charter buses and stay the night in a hotel with our teammates, only sometimes having to share a bed. It was a bit of a fun experience in that it created an interesting team bonding situation where you were paired with different teammates to room with ever time. In spite of this, I’m still happy that my school changed conferences after my sophomore year so we no longer had to travel that far.
One particularly eventful trip to Upstate New York happened when we were playing a school in Buffalo. After a nice night at our hotel we loaded onto the bus with plenty of time to get to our game and slowly get ready, but on the way to the school our bus driver took a wrong turn over a bridge. This bridge was the bridge to Canada.
Yep, we were accidentally driving not to our game but to another country. We thought it was hilarious and took pictures of the Canadian flag that greeted us on our arrival. One problem with the bridge to Canada is that once you are on the bridge there is literally no way to turn around other than going to Canada and then having to go back on a second bridge to the US.
Our bus stopped in Canada and asked the workers for help and like any stereotypical Canadians they were very friendly and helpful and directed us to simply go over the second bridge that would take us back to the US. This marked a sharp contrast with our return to the US where we were stopped and not allowed to enter.
The coach was in a panic over our unplanned adventure and the fear that we would be unable to return. No one had been planning to leave the country so we didn’t have any passports that you’d normally need.
We all had to unload from the bus to pass the America guards’ inspection. Basically, we just had to give them our ID’s, aka our licenses, and I was so glad I brought mine because I almost hadn’t. They then asked us questions from them like when our birthday was to prove our identities and for some reason, I found this very stressful and had a lot of hesitation in remembering my birthday. Thankfully I did remember who I was after an awkward second that felt like an eternity, and I guess it was enough to pass the inspection because in spite of my temporary long term memory loss the guy let me join those who were deemed “fit to be American.” This inspection, however, was a problem for some of my teammates who did not have their licenses on them.
We were all freaked out and worried that they would be trapped in Canada. Luckily, they had their student IDs and the Gatekeepers to the motherland decided to accept this after looking up our tiny college they had never heard of and largely due to the panicked, frenzy of my coach who was on the verge of losing her marbles. I think largely they took pity on us and were a bit afraid of my coach who was worried that we’d miss our game since we were already a lot later than anticipated. But after much waiting, we finally were allowed to get back on our bus and officially rejoin the American citizenry.
We were pretty late and had to do all our changing and pregame rituals on the bus before we got to the field. Graciously the other team gave us about twenty minutes to warm up, which compared to the hour we usually take for warm ups was not very long at all but I suppose better than nothing.
One of the girls on the other team told me that people actually accidentally go to Canada a lot, but not a whole bus full…
I didn’t particularly like going to upstate New York and am happy that we don’t go there anymore, but I do think this is a fun little adventure that was entertaining and annoying for us kids and incredibly stressful for my coach.
Also I’m pretty sure we lost that game, but at least we were able to return home.
Umm I guess maybe the moral of the story is that in life sometimes you take a wrong turn, but with a lot of work and stress you can find a new bridge back home. Or if not, maybe you can just live in Canada. I don’t know, I hear it’s nice there. I didn’t like it much but I’ve only been that one time and didn’t get to see much of the place so don’t take my word for it. Maybe there’s more to it than just the entrance…