We crossed the border into Canada from I-15 at Sweetgrass, Montana. The crossing was very easy and fast, perhaps due to the fact we crossed on a Saturday morning at about 8:30 am with no other vehicles in sight. When we pulled up to the booth at the border, there was no one there. After about a minute, the border guard arrived. We handed him our passports and he asked us a series of questions: Where were we going? How long would we be in Canada? When was the last time we visited Canada? How much cash did we have? Did we have any weapons on board? Did we have any alcohol on board? Is this our RV?
After answering all of these questions he returned our passports and waved us through. We were surprised at how quickly this went. Based on our research before leaving home, we were prepared to answer questions about food on board and about our pet cat. We had carefully reviewed the guidelines for food and pets and were in compliance with food regulations and had the documentation of our cat’s shots as required, so were not expecting any problems.
Being that we were in our fully loaded RV heading out for a five month trip, we were hoping to avoid a vehicle search. We have read horror stories about people who have had their entire RV and all of its contents searched. I can assure you that this would take a good amount of time and that we were grateful it went so smoothly.
We highly recommend that anyone visiting Canada review the current regulations, be polite and answer questions directly, and have your documentation in order and ready to hand over. While horror stories exist, not all crossings are difficult.
UPDATE: For the entire trip we had 9 border crossings: this crossing into Canada, our crossing into Alaska in early June, a crossing back into Canada in late August, back into USA to visit Haines, Alaska and return to Canada; 2 crossings into USA at Hyder, Alaska and back into Canada (Jeep only for these 2) and a final crossing into the USA in Washington state.
All of our crossings were fairly similar to the above description. On our crossing into Canada from Haines, we were asked about pets and had to show our print out of our cat Foxy’s vaccine records. We did not have any searches.
