Canadian snowbirds are packed, vaxxed and ready to head south — so long as U.S. border traffic doesn’t snarl them

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This article was published 06/11/2021 (1101 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ann Harkness is champing at the bit to start her annual migration.

For 13 years, the retired teacher and her husband, Steve, taunted the winter freeze by packing the car up each fall and driving south to Winter Haven, Fla., from Kingston, Ont., to while away the cold Canadian months until the spring thaw tempted them home again.

Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to that routine. For the first time in more than a decade, the Harknesses stayed home for the winter.

But this year, with winter fast approaching and the U.S. border finally opening to non-essential travellers Monday, Harkness and an estimated one million snowbirds like her are hearing the call of the mild again.

“We’re very excited to be able to go this year. Absolutely,” she said. “Everybody’s fully vaccinated, we’re ready to go. As soon as that border opens up.”

Therein lies the rub. Canada’s snowbirds have been waiting for this day for 19 months, ever since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a come-home-now call in March 2020 as it became apparent the world was entering a coronavirus pandemic.

Since that time, the Canada-U.S. border has been closed to non-essential traffic, which, much to their dismay, included snowbirds.

Some snowbirds found their way around the border restrictions last winter by flying into the States and having their cars or RVs delivered to them there. Others, like Harkness, decided the risks were too great and stayed home.

But as of 12:01 a.m. on Monday, those restrictions will no longer exist. And thousands of snowbirds will line up at border crossings across the country.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection won’t say how much extra traffic they’re expecting at their border crossings Monday, nor will they say if they’ve brought in extra staff to accommodate the expected crush of winter asylum seekers.

They will say, however, that they expect large increases in traffic volumes and extended delays at the border.

“We ask that you are patient with our officers as we embark upon further reopening cross-border travel to help reduce wait times and long lines,” said CBP field operations executive Matthew Davies, during a briefing, adding that travellers should plan extra time into their schedules.

Harkness says she has no desire to wait hours at the nearest crossing, east of Gananoque, Ont. Their migration plan is to pack up the car with supplies such as paper towels and toilet paper, plus the food they can’t get in the U.S. — all-dressed and ketchup chips, Kraft peanut butter, Cheez Whiz and peameal bacon, among others — then wait.

“(It’ll) probably be the next day or the day after,” she said. “We’ll kind of wait to see what we hear about the border on the first day and then we’ll decide from there.”

Once that decision is made, they’ll hit the well-trodden — or -driven — trail south with their snowbird counterparts, snaking through the sinking latitudes, through the inevitable lineups in South Carolina, where the four-lane highways narrow into two, until 24 hours later they arrive at their Winter Haven.

There, they’ll begin to settle in. It’ll be a little bit more work this time, after a year’s absence. They had somebody looking in on the house while they’ve been away, but the “tenderness and touches” that make a house a home will have to come from them.

Ann will immediately start getting the house in order. Steve, she says, will want to help, but will really be thinking about going to play golf with the boys.

“Just get out of the house. Go golf and get out of my hair,” she will tell him. Her golfing days — of which there will be six months’ worth — will start when she’s feeling settled.

Even though there’s a widespread sense of relief that the border is open and snowbirds can start to make travel plans, there are still many preaching patience.

“Most of the snowbirds that I have recently been in communication with are holding off — they’re not planning on going on the 8th of November,” says Evan Rachkovsky, spokesperson for the Canadian Snowbird Association.

“They’re going to wait till later in the week or even wait a couple of weeks before they end up taking the trip down.”

Still, there will be those who brave the border mayhem Monday. That group is most likely to be the RV owners, said Rachkovsky, and the reason is that, for those who live in their RV’s full-time, their Canadian campsites usually close up at the end of October, leaving owners eager to get to their motorhomes to new homes down south.

“We have heard that, basically all across Canada, RVers have parked themselves close to the border in anticipation of crossing into the U.S. right at 12:01 on the 8th of November,” said Rachkovsky.

There are some new issues the winter migrants will have to contend with on their way down.

First, proof of vaccination will have to be shown at the border to get into the U.S., and — at this point — a molecular COVID-19 test within the last 72 hours to return to Canada.

Rachkovsky also pointed out that with the migration south so concentrated this year, hotels and motels along the way are likely to be at a premium, so pre-booking for an overnight on the road should be part of a snowbird’s travel plans.

One further wrinkle: a number of the toll roads have moved to cashless payments since Canadians last drove those roads in numbers — Rachkovsky advises picking up an E-ZPass transponder on the way down.

Like Harkness, Gary Bouck plans on spurning the cross-border lineups. Bouck, a retired DuPont worker, and his wife, Donna, stayed home last winter — the first time they’d passed on their annual trek to Daytona Beach in the last 10 years. Normally, they would be hitting the road to Florida from eastern Ontario at the end of October to begin their winter retreat.

This year, anticipating the crush at the borders, he’s taking the long view. He’s going to wait out the crowd — he hopes.

This year, he plans to start driving at the end of November.

He’ll miss a month of sunshine and sand, but he suspects it’ll be a much more relaxed drive south.

“I think there’s going to be quite a line at the border,” he said.

“We’re in no hurry to get there. November is not bad here. We had pretty good weather last year. But we’ll be happy to get there. We’ll get to the beach, get in the sand.”

Canadian snowbirds like Harkness and Bouck spend between three and six months of each year south of the border, primarily in Florida, Arizona and California, injecting billions of dollars into the U.S. economy.

In Arizona, they are worth an estimated $1.4 billion annually to that state’s economy. The 350,000 Canadians who overwinter in Florida spend an estimated $6.6 billion there in a non-pandemic year.

For Harkness, if she needed an omen that it was time to go, it was the flash snowfall that hit Kingston and a few other parts of Ontario last week. With six months of warm weather and golfing ahead at the end of their journey south, that, she said, was a surefire spur to get the car packed up and on the road.

“It was just snowing two seconds ago,” she said on Wednesday. “It was just one of those fast, cold snows.

“(I thought,) ‘We should go. We should go.’”

Steve McKinley is a Halifax-based reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @smckinley1