It is on the front page of the Globe and Mail today - a car blew up on the American side of the Canadian-US Border in Niagara Falls at the Rainbow Bridge yesterday. It blew up so substantially that there was no license plate to find. There was nothing left but the engine. It incinerated.
The conclusion on the explosion is that it is not an act of Terrorism.
People thinking they were going to a Thanksgiving Dinner today are definitely delayed. There are 15 car inspection lanes into Canada and 16 into the U.S. You can imagine they were full.
Add to that - All of the bridges in Niagara were closed because of the explosion. All those cars had to turn around to go back to Canada. There are people roaming Clifton Hill wondering what to do. The other three bridges are open again, but you can imagine the wait times. We have signs on the highway giving the wait times during the peak season. I wonder what they say today.
This brings up the Canadian vs American Thanksgiving differences. A key difference seems to be that Canadians don't go on a shopping spree the day before Thanksgiving. There's no massive line-up of cars to get the Thursday before Black Friday deals.
That's partly because our Thanksgiving is on a Monday so really is a holiday. Our holiday is more low-key. We don't have huge parades in front of Macy's, football spectaculars and pressure from the New York Times to cook the perfect meal.
The next difference is that we don't head out for a shopping craze the day after Thanksgiving. So perhaps with no berserk shopping lines the day before and the day after, we generally have a more "thankful" time. At least we have a less violent sense to our Thanksgiving weekend. We don't leave the dishes in the sink to go camp out all night in front of ToyRUs stores - supposedly that behaviour is history now. Stores still open at 5am. Even here in Canada some will open at 6am - again just a little more relaxed here.
This is our favourite Canadian vs American Thanksgiving joke.
