All the tea in China: "Play with the Border" Road Trip to Police Station?!

The first road trip in America ended up super surprising. For the first time, I was caught by the police and went into the border police station!!!

Now, I have three life time friends!

Tiezheng Zhu was my high school classmate, who attends Purdue U. Since I came to America, we planed to do some trip together.

Finally, the "play with border" road trip gang has two guys and two girls. Though it was the first time I met the other girl and guy, we'll never forget each other now.

We picked the Niagara Falls as our destination. But the road trip was not smooth at the very beginning.

My roomie' school mom gave me a ride to the airport. After I successfully arrived in Chicago and waited my friends for 4 hours, they finally made it to the airport.

CHICAGO!!!

BUT. After we look to each other for a half hour, Xueying Wang, the other girl said over the phone: " I feel we are not in the same place!"Then we found out we were at different airports. They were at O'hare while I was at Midway.

Because the heavy traffic, I took the train to Chinatown and they drove to there as well. It began to snow. I walked around for more than one hour in the Chinatown at the snowing night, looking at the people sitting in the restaurants.

Had an awesome REAL Chinese food, we left modern Chicago, heading to Niagara Falls!!!

12 hours later, 3 a.m., snowing Niagara Falls city, here we are!

It was the thanksgiving day! So obviously, no restaurants!

Wandering in the small city with snow, life became peaceful.

Just SNOW everywhere!!!

The pigeons were super lazy.. I had to get off the car to drive them away...

The way I walked..

The other side is Canada!

Walking on the thick ice with rains... It actually colder than it looks!

Beautiful Iced Chairs!

Lovely Snowy Car!

We left in the second day morning.

I admit that the Google Maps is handy at the most times. But not this time.

We chose a way without going to Canada but somehow it led us across the border.

We paid $3.5 and then, we were on the Rainbow Bridge. (US citizens don't need Visa to enter Canada)

Until then, we realized we were on the wrong way. The google maps showed us across the border!

There's an arrow sign before we got to the Canada tolls. So we followed the sign and took photos of the Niagara Falls on the Canadian side.

Out of America!

I thought it was a toll station...

"Yeah! We traveled to another country!" We were super excited and waited in the line to go back to America until we realized the line was not a toll station.

The police were checking the Visas and Passports...

Obviously, we had no visa to travel in Canada.

The police asked us for the passport and I-20. (Zhu and Wang happen to have the papers with them)

We were asked to park the car and went into the police station.

Sitting together, we signed, laughed, talked about the future and guessed what would happen.

"Will we be deported back to China?"

"What if we can never come back to America?"

"It's not a big deal, don't worry!"

"I wanna finish the study and become a journalist!!!"

"Maybe we have to pay a large amount of money."

"We should write the experience down! We can tell our kids this magic trip!"

We were asked to stay in the building!

I imagined thousands of results in the half hour. Almost crying..

It turned out we were free easily!

A staff called us and asked us what happened. We told everything. The staff checked our visas.

He could not help but laughed after knowing what happened to us.

5 mins later, we were signed to leave.

I never thought I would have this special experience.

The half hour was like ages. It was long enough to make us life time friends.

Walking outside the police station, I breathed the air of freedom again!

The first road trip in America, travelled one thousand miles to the Niagara Falls, enjoyed the snow and the amazing Falls, caught by the police for the first time ever.