A Couple Of Hours At The Border

 Petra and Gerhard would like to sell their motorhome in the US. But the rig is Canadian, even though it has been made in the US. Contacting CBP at the Calexico port of entry, should be a simple phone call, right? 

Well, not so fast, young man! CBP Calexico has a whole bunch of phone numbers but surly it wouldn't take long to get to the right officer with the knowledge about what to do, right?  

Wrong!

It turned out to be impossible to call CBP to get an answer to a simple question. All we wanted to know how to proceed and where to go. But we were out of luck.

So the other day we decided to simply doa pre-scouting drive down to the border to find our answers. Now, the Calexico port of entry is a big border crossing with a lot of buildings and a separate entry for commercial traffic. 

Naturally, we started at the private non-commercial entry. Entering a big nice building we soon ran into a tall security officer, who stopped us - and send us across a parking lot to a different building. There we were stopped by a CBP officer and sent into a cage-like waiting area. Finally somebody came over to see what the hell we were waiting for. Explaining our errand, he sent us over to the commercial border crossing, which is quite far away and as it turned out, not accessible for private inquiries. We had taken the car over there and had ended up in a fenced-in trap where one semi after the other appeared. The very young officer there could not help us, but we were relieved that he let us out through his gate, and after making a U-turn we got back on the road. What a mess. He had also given us another phone number, which we tried to call from the car - naturally, without any success. 

We spent about 2 hours there and hadn't achieved anything.

We also found a customs broker, but they did only Mexican stuff. 

Meanwhile, we have contacted a broker office in British Columbia. We are awaiting their answer whether they will be able to get the 2 vehicles processed for import.

The entire episode reminded me sooo much about my many battles with unwilling, or should I say incompetent, (?) government offices. On the other hand I have imported quite a few vehicles from the US to Canada and never had any problems - as long as I dealt with a small to midsize office.

Hopefully, we'll see a positive result soon.