Markus’ Blog

Looks like our friendly southern neighbour has yet another hurdle improvement in mind when it comes to travelling.

Starting January 2009, all citizens of visa waiver countries (yep, that includes me) will have to register with the US government online three days prior (!) to travel. The site is already online, but I think it’s voluntary to use it, right now.

The whole procedure is supposed to give authorities enough time to detect and deny entry to “terrorists”. Somehow, I am having a hard time imagining that there’ll be many evil terrorists amongst the citizens of Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

I dare barely say it, but there could be a minor positive side-effect. Instead of having to fill out I-94W forms on the spot — they are only valid for three months and especially painful to fill out at a land border crossing — these online forms are valid for two years.

Now, it depends, of course, how they’ll handle it, whether this will be an actual improvement or not. If they do it right, it’ll save me pulling over and going inside at land border crossings, which I have to do now if I don’t already have a valid I-94W in my passport.

In the end, I guess, this is another development that has to be filed under the “oh well” category. If I have to travel for business, I have to travel for business, regardless of how much I like or dislike the rules. As for pleasure travel, that’s of course my personal choice. It sure seems to be getting less and less attractive to go, though. The we can seize your laptop/gadget for no good reason rule certainly isn’t helping, either.

Yum! And yes, that’s tours as in “more than one”.

It’s great times when upcoming vacations are getting close enough to book cool stuff to do. We are already practiced winery visitors (see the Napa adventure, the Victoria adventure, as well as the Niagara adventure). It’s still fun doing it, though (one might think we are big lushes :-D), especially in Canada and even more so in BC, where we can bring home as much wine as we please (not a measly two bottles per person you get to bring with you from the US).

This time around, my parents will come along, too. It’ll be their first time in the Okanagan, which prompted this whole trip-idea to begin with. Since my parents and I come from a wine growing region back in Austria (the region is officially know as the Weinviertel — and we have tons of Heurigen there), they should get some good times out of these tours.

We’ll be doing the Signature Wine Tour by Discover Okanagan Tours and the Nothern Bench Winery Tour by Wildflower Trails & Wine Tours.

Happy September 4 and 5 to us!

It’s been a couple of busy weeks, but now everything is finally done. The old condo has been emptied (finally), the keys handed over, we are settled Downtown (for a month and a half now), our storage locker is full to the brim (and there’s still tons of stuff cluttering our lovely downtown dwelling :-)), the old mortgage has been paid off, the cheque of the proceeds has been received and deposited.

I think time has come to take a big breath and relax for a bit. Three more weeks till I go on vacation, which will be even nicer.

If (or hopefully when) they clean our apartment windows, I’ll post a few Downtown views. Right now, they are too dusty and spotty to make for good photo taking.