Canadiangeek.net

18Mar/150

Car is now safely at my house (still on the trailer for now), sorry for the novel but its been a long and interesting day.

The day started off at 7AM, I picked up my friend Robb and started the drive from Calgary AB Canada to Sweetgrass MT USA .

It took about 3.5 hours to get to Lethbridge Alberta, we stopped at the Home Depot and picked up 3 2x4's, some screws and duct tape (thanks guys). We received a call from Jim (the Stewart Transport driver), he let us know that he was running about one hour behind. From there we headed off to the border crossing, the customs agent on the USA side was a bit harsh but a common border crossing attitude, "why do you need a trailer to haul car parts, why couldn't you buy these parts in Canada? Why dont you have money, how are you going to pay for the parts". It wasn't so much the questions but the tone of voice. Regardless he let us go though.

We arrived in Sweetgrass at 11:30AM. Both of us were unable to get cell phone reception, the Stewart Transport driver asked us to wait in "the big parking lot on the US side" so we figured that meant the lot across from the duty free. Jim (truck driver) arrived around 1:10PM (on time). He opened up the back of his trailer and in i went to get my first look at the car. To be honest its almost exactly what i expected. The Fiberglass seams are a little rougher then i expected but the size and overall look of the car are exactly what i was expecting.

I backed my trailer up to his in one of the truck rest stop lanes. Jim indicated that he has done this many times and there were no signs around to indicate that this was against any rules. About 5 minutes into the move an unmarked truck with a border official in it came around to tell us that were not allowed to transfer trucks at this specific rest stop .... So we closed up the truck and headed down the road. It had snowed the day before so it was easy to tell what roads were used and which roads in the small town had 0 traffic. So we found a road with no tire marks on it (most roads in sweet grass are dead ends at the border and just have storage yards), we started transferring boxes again (no traffic around) and the owner of "at the border storage" walked over from his warehouse that was nearby to tell us that he was going to "phone the cops" and we would have to pay him to be able to move the contents over on his property.

If your reading this please never use or pay the jack A$$ that owns "at the border storage", he could have been polite about the whole thing and maybe earned some business but he decided it would be easier to threaten the Stewart Transport driver. (I will be posting some negative reviews around the web about him and his company as a result, what goes around..... )

So instead i drove to a nearby meat packing plant and asked at their head office if we could use the large lot at the back of their building. Nicest guy in the world, i honestly tried to offer him money but he wouldn't take it. I believe his words were "my guys aren't moving the boxes, you don't owe me anything". The world needs more people like him. We setup at the meat packing plant and started moving boxes over. One by one we moved boxes into the bed of my GMC 2500HD, there were a lot more boxes then i though there would be, the boxes filled the bed past the roof and filled the back seat of the truck.

Jims truck had a wood floor just like my trailer and the GTM was sitting directly on that floor (there was some cardboard between them). I decided to put the GTM directly on my trailer using the same cardboard. We then used 2 4" straps to hold the car down the the trailer and put a tarp over the car. We then used the 3 2x4's screwed down to the deck with the tarp sandwiched between them. This worked great, the car never moved the whole trip.

It was then time to head back across the border, I was dreading this part, i have imported cars before and Canadian customs tends to be worse then US customs. I got into the car line up like usual and proceeded to the window, pulled out our passports and paperwork and was greeted by the kindest most open border agent i have ever met. He showed me where to pull over and handed me a paper to hand the agent inside. I went inside and talked to the agent inside and he was incredible, he asked a lot of questions about the car, commented on how nice it was that I had all the paperwork ready. All in all a very pleasant experience. The only negative part was when it came to pay the GST (Tax), I brought the bank transfer document that showed what I paid for the kit in Canadian dollars back when our exchange rate wasn't as bad. Turns out they use the kits USD price and work out the GST (Tax) cost using the exchange rate for the day of import. This amounted to $300 more in GST (Tax).... I was just happy to get through customs so i just smiled, nodded, paid and headed back out to the Truck.

While filling out the paperwork inside the customs office i was watching out the window as people would walk by the car, stop, look at it, walk back, look again, ponder, then walk away.... you could just tell they were trying to figure out what it was.

The whole trip took 13 hours.

We unloaded all of the boxes from the truck into the garage and started checking out the new loot. Some boxes were packed tight, some big boxes have hardly anything in them. My whole garage is full of parts boxes.... I did start looking over the boxes of parts, its seems to be a mix of high quality parts and some (being polite) "budget components". I can tell that some of these pieces will never make it on the car, i will be replacing them before the cause me headaches. Its now dark outside and I'm exhausted so I'm calling it a night. I will now have to compare the contents of each box with the manifest that i was provided, I think this may take a few hours to complete.

I then plan on putting the parts together in boxes by project timeline... that way i can bury the interior in the back of the shed so it doesn't take up valuable garage space.

Then the next challenge is to get the car off the trailer, my plan is to: