Border Crossing

I had to run across the border this morning just to
mail some letters (we had some checks that needed to
get to the bank in more reliable time that we could
count on with Canadian post).

The US border guard made this little schpiel about how
long the lines going into the US are (which, really,
they're the same length going back into Canada)
because everyone comes down to buy things in the US
since dairy products and mail and so many other things
are so much cheaper. Then he went into the fact that
90% (or whatever the percentage he said) of Canadians
live within 100 miles of the US border and tried to
make a comparison as to what that would look like in
the US if 90% of the population lived in a narrow band
across the US.

I didn't tell him how I seemed to remember a statistic
I heard a few hears ago about how somewhere closes to
90% of Americans live within 100 miles of an ocean.
People do tend to congregate together--and they tend
to do it in convenient areas. You seldom find a large
city 1000 feet up the face of a steep cliff, for
example.

There is something to the fact that prices of many
things in Canada do suck. But that's a whole other rant.