Kingfisher wrote on Jun 9^th, 2010 at 4:06pm:

Last year Memorial Day weekend finished a trip with Yellowbird. We went to check in at customs in Ely and found the officer was out of the office and the posted instructions were to come back another time. Well, it was close to closing hours for the custom office so we went into Ely, had dinner, spent the night in a motel, picked up a purchased canoe at VNO and then returned to the customs office early the next morning when they opened. We found several other groups there and had to wait about a half hour to be "readmitted" to the United States of America. Absurd? You be the judge.

I should note that we did not spend the night in Ely just to clear customs the next day. We had already decided to drive home the following morning beforehand otherwise I'm sure we would have used the "Old Salt" defense and skipped. ::)