It takes over an hour to get through the border, snaking very slowly up a steep hill. My old jeep doesn't like it much; by the last ten minutes it is blowing a lot of blue smoke. I keep turning it off to save gas as I have an almost empty tank - gas in the lower mainland is now at the unbelievable price of $1.30 a liter and yet still .99 just over the line so I want to fill up once I cross. I do as soon as I am over the border and I figure that I save $18.60 on gas alone. I save another $20 on two bottles of wine from the one grocery store in Point Roberts.
I pick up my Kindle and its lovely pink case (a great deal at $15.99), along with another package (more on that in a later blog), at The Letter Carrier - a great service for those of us who live in Canada and want to purchase online from sellers who, for some mysterious reason, won't deliver to a Canadian address OR want to tack on another $20+ to ship it.
I head over to a little cafe, the same one I went to two weeks ago when I picked up my underwater camera case. They have free wifi and lots of plug outlets. I order a shrimp sandwich and sparkling mineral water and plug in the Kindle to charge it up. It immediately knows it is MY Kindle - if you buy it from Amazon and have an account with them, then it comes registered already. A page automatically loads, welcoming me personally to the Kindle world and then loads a set of instructions. Reading through them, I find out how to turn on the wifi option and, once I do, SURPRISE!! - it begins to download all of the books I have purchased in the past two weeks on Amazon in anticipation of owning this great little device, and all without me having to do a thing. I am loving this gadget more by the minute.
I find reading on it a little awkward at first; I keep inadvertently pressing the page forward button - there is one on the left and the right and I am not sure which one it is I keep hitting but I soon get into the habit of placing my hands just below them (it mostly happens when I am typing on the tiny keyboard). As I read, each page loads very quickly and before long it feels just like reading a book. I have put off buying one of these because, avid reader that I am and being a very tactile person, I love the feel of a real book in my hands and turning the pages. But the dilemma of having enough reading material for a six week beach vacation pushed me into finally buying one. And you know, I don't think I am going to miss holding up a heavy book while lying on the sand as much as I thought I would.
I have Stephen King's Under The Dome on it. Try holding that aloft for a few hours.
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Her comment was that she went and bought wine in Pt Roberts a few years ago and brought it back the same day and had to pay duty and taxes and wanted to know if I hadn't declared mine. I did declare everything, it was all laying on the seat beside me in plain view. I think with the free trade agreement that we now have, the border guards let much more through than they used to.
