As round-the-world moto traveler Kinga Tanajewska and her trusty BMW F 800 GS, Chillie, continue their journey, they’ve made it to the Canada-U.S. border! In total, they spent around three months visiting our neighbo(u)rs to the north, but Kinga says that she expects the U.S. leg of the journey to take considerably longer.
How long? She explains that in telling the story of her border crossing, which apparently went extremely smoothly. As an Australian passport holder, getting a visa for a few months is standard practice. However, Kinga said that when she explained her plan to ride across the U.S., then back into Canada and up to Alaska, the border agents granted her a one-year visa with no problem. (Obviously, your own mileage may vary in your personal border crossing experiences, but that’s the experience she reported.)
As she rides down through Buffalo, New York, it’s toward the end of autumn—and while it’s cold, and also damp at times, it’s still beautiful. Naturally, Kinga stopped to get a closer look at the American side of Niagara Falls. The way it’s set up, you’re able to get closer to the actual Falls than you can on the Canadian side, she said.
Overall, the plan was to cover about 500 kilometers (or 310-ish miles) to ride into Pennsylvania on her first day, where she planned to stay with a friend. Along the way, Kinga said she was looking forward to spending time riding through Amish country, but since it was a very rainy Sunday, she didn’t expect to see much activity from carriages and/or horses out on the roads. While she did spot one display carriage that was set up as a roadside attraction, she didn’t document any other interactions in this video.
Instead, one big difference that she noticed between her months-long travel in Canada and the U.S. is that instantly, there were more deer here than she’d seen before. Overall, she said that she encountered zero deer in Canada—while she saw at least five in her first day Stateside alone, riding down the east coast. (I believe it; I don’t even live in a rural area, and I used to see deer pretty regularly when I used to ride to work before the sun came up.)
New country, new adventures—so we’ll look forward to tagging along for the journey to see how the trip goes.
