It was Spring Break, finally. Five days to break out and have some fun. Get away from class, stop speaking English so slowly, it felt like you were talking backwards. It was a chilly beginning to April, so when my friend Brenda decided to rent a car and spend a few days in Budapest, I was into it.

Now, as is common knowledge, Canadians are the nicest people on earth Except the Torontonian sex pervert and his wife -- they're jerks. But, by and large, they're just so easy to get along with, especially when you're one of a dozen Americans that can name all ten provinces and two territories. So I was rather perplexed as to why so many countries in Eastern Europe demanded such high prices for travel visas for Canadian citizens. Slovakia was one of these countries, which kept Brenda from being able to traverse that fair land for all of fifteen minutes on our way to Hungary.

So we set out from Hradec Kralove bright and early one morning for a senic drive through the wintry Czech countryside and into Moravia. After three hours of driving, we get to the border with Austria in the sleepy little vinyard town of Mikulov. As I said, the Canadian government was busying pissing off other countries besides Spain in 1995, but Austria and Hungary weren't two of them.

The Czech Republic, however, was.

There I am in the driver's seat, smiling at the border guard and handing over our passports. He stopped smiling when he took a look at Brenda's. "Canadianska? Visa nah tady..." he reminded her that she didn't have a visa.

Now Brenda had made it a concerted effort to learn Czech, and was undaunted even when a woman selling fruit at the farmer's market told her she couldn't buy half a kilogram of AN apple, because they didn't have apples that big. Czech don't like anyone -- even other Czechs -- speaking their language badly. Even Parisians have more sympathy on an American trying their high school Spanish on them. As if anyone would want to speak Czech at all. Unless your a ruthless capitalist or a missionary, there is really no reason to learn it anyway. But Brenda did so she could buy useful things like, oh, fresh milk. And it came in serious help arguing with this bonehead.

Things worked themselves slowly to a fever pitch. First, she tried to explain that she did not need a visa to get into Austria. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that she needed a RETURN visa. She could go, but not come back. She tried to convince him of the stupidity of the whole things, since she held a valid work permit, was covered by Czech insurance, and paid Czech taxes. "Nah, Canadianska," was all there was to say about that.

So Brenda turns on the waterworks. "Kde logika?! Where's the logic?" I heard repeated over and over. He began to break a little. She asked where she could get a visa. And the guard made the mistake of telling here that the only place she could get one was all the way back in Hradec Kralove. Now that was just plain dumb of him, because Brenda lost it. He was looking rather nervous as she went off on him in bad Czech. He did say that she could get a visa at the border, but it would cost us half a month's salary. Of course, all Westerners are made of money, just ask Tom Cruise after he finished filming Mission: Impossible. That's when Brenda's head turned into a volcano, spun around and spewed pea soup all over me, the guard and the inside of our rented Skoda hatchback.

The guard obviously did not know that when Canadians get angry, there's a whole lot of bent up frustrations ready to be released. And release them she did. I lost track of the fight, but felt damn awkward sitting there in between them. Finally, the guy suggested we drive 25 km up the road to another town that had an international police station. Maybe they could help us. Brenda dried her eyes and agreed, but left no doubt we were getting to Budapest and getting there that day.

We switched so that Brenda could drive out some of her residual frustrations. Trying desperately to calm her down and make everything right in the world again, I suggested that even if she can't get a visa up the road, we could just throw her in the back and smuggle her over the boarder. I wasn't laughing an hour later with her under our luggage in the trunk. Brenda had interrupted the policemen's lunch to make them call Prague and Hradec, only to have them tell her that all her paper work was in Hradec and that was the only place she could get visa to come back to the country. It was besides the point the only documentation they had was her passport information, and she had that with her. One of the reasons this was just so frustrating was because the international police in town told her she didn't need one right before we left.

Now I had quit smoking the week before, but I had to buy a pack for this one. Instead of going back to Mikulov, there was a smaller crossing near the town we were in (Breslav, if you really wanted to know). So I pulled of the side of the road, we took out the bags, Brenda crawled in, I loaded them on top, took a quick picture and set off for the border crossing. The guard stops me, I gladly hand over my passport, quietly humming to myself, trying to placate the butterflies in my stomach.

"Mluvite ceske?" he asked. Since I didn't speak Czech, I said no.

"You must speak English," the rocket scientist put together from my passport. "This border is only for Czechs and Austrians, you have to go to Mikulov."

Now every dead Czech bureaucrat was laughing at us from on high. This was really proving to be moronic. But I obediantly turned the car around, let Brenda out once out of eye shot from the guard, drove the 25 km back to Mikulov, put her back in and drove up to the same border guard as before.

Since I had just finished the first half of the first chapter of a Czech language book, I understood him when he asked me where my wife was. I waived in a generally northern direction and told him quite loudly - "She bus Hradec Kralove!" He gave me a pathetic little smile and waived me on.

We made it into the free world again with out so much as a second glance. Just one flash of my American passport was all it took.

The adventure was just beginning. We had a wonderfully long spring weekend in Budapest before having to smuggle her back into the country...

ESCAPE!