While reading an article on travel horror stories, I started to think of my own bad experiences. Since this is Throwback Thursday, I throw it back to 2002, when my friends and I had a memorable trip.

For our second annual baseball trip, Chuck, Jim, Jason and I planned a trip to Detroit and Toronto. Leaving Friday morning, we arrived in Detroit by late afternoon. Everything was great until I realized I did not have my driver’s license. Ordinarily, this would only be an inconvenience, but it was a necessity to get into Canada. This set off a wild chain of events.

The first thing I did was contact my friend Louie, who then broke into my house through an unlocked window in search of my driver’s license. He found it and faxed a copy to me. That was better than nothing, but we didn’t feel comfortable trying to enter Canada with just that.

Next, I found a place in downtown Detroit where I could get an identification card made quickly. We were a bit apprehensive, but it had a lot of excellent reviews and seemed legit. A nice older gentleman handled everything smoothly, and we went on our way with a new identification card in hand.

We enjoyed a Detroit Tigers game Friday night and left for Toronto Saturday morning. At the border, we handed three driver’s licenses and my ID card to the guard, hoping for the best. The guard approved them and then asked for a passport, which none of us had.

We pulled out every bit of possible identifying information we had among us, but nothing was working with the guard, who wanted something government-issued. Just when it looked hopeless, Jim saved the day by finding his library card. The guard happily accepted that and welcomed us into Canada. Who would have thought a library card would save our trip?

One funny side note occurred at the Toronto Blue Jays game. When Chuck and I bought beers, the vendor asked for our IDs. The vendor quickly passed my freshly printed ID card back to me without an issue, but scoured Chuck’s driver’s license.

A second funny side note happened several years later when I tried locating the Detroit ID shop just for fun. The helpful gentleman had gotten into loads of trouble, and the business was shut down.

Of course, now we laugh about the whole experience, but at the time it would have been disappointing if our mistakes cost us the Toronto leg of our trip. In the 19 trips we’ve taken, this was the closest we came to a major problem. I guess we are pretty lucky, and we have definitely been better prepared on all following trips.

— John Wroblewski, online writer