Easter and daffodils

We got a 4 day weekend for Easter. In the US they don't get any extra days, but in Canada schools got Good Friday and Easter Monday. We decided to go and catch up with friends in Washington State, and to visit the school that we were at in 2001. We rang on Thursday afternoon to check that it would be OK to visit on Friday afternoon. Laurie, the school secretary, checked the calendar and decided that it would be fine.
We slept in a little and left mid-morning. I was allowing 1 -2 hours for the border crossing. We headed for the border and got to the crossing at Aldergrove to find that the cars were backed up to 14th Street, so we turned around and headed for the Huntingdon crossing near Abbotsford. As we took the exit of the freeway I could see the line of cars. We sat in the line-up for 4.5 hours.
When we finally got to the booth at the border the guard commented that, "The Canadians haven't done us any favours here." We wondered what he was on about. He said that when they had stapled the Immigration paperwork into the passports, they had stapled through the machine readable part of the US visa. This was like cancelling a cheque. Luckily after removing the staples and flattening the page it was able to be fed through the machine.
It was close to 5 hours since we had first arrived at the border. We knew that we were not going to make it to Allen, so we headed for Chuckanut Drive, and the shellfish farm where we bought 5 dozen oysters and some smoked salmon. We stayed with friends for the weekend.
On Saturday we got organised for a traditional Easter Egg hunt. We must have had about 100 plastic eggs that we filled with candy and money. It was then up to the adults to hide these eggs outside. They have a pretty big yard and Paula, Patty, Roger and I tried to hide the eggs in not too obvious, or difficult spots. It was then the kids turn. They came out, each armed with a bag of some description to carry their spoils. They quickly spread out and proceeded to find eggs all over the yard. They each ended up with about the same number of eggs. Daniel managed to, as well as choclolate and candy, get about $10 in coins. Bridget got about $4.
After the hunt we went for a drive to check out the daffodils. Everything is late this year because of the colder than usual, and later winter. The Tulip Festival is supposed to be on during April, but they were quite a few weeks away.
We decided to catch up with Linda, who was the principal of the school that I taught at in 2001. Sh elives out on Samish Island. She has a nice view out across the bay to Chuckanut Drive, and on a clear night can see the lights of Vancouver's three North Shore ski mountains. We stayed for a couple of hours chatting and got contact details for a couple of other people that we want to see.
This was parked in a carpark near a main intersection in town. It had lights flashing and stickers covering almost every square cm of it's body. The guys in the van were selling the stickers. Good advertising and a great way to see parts of the country.