In late 1999, at the Mr. International Rubber contest in Chicago, the registration packets included a flyer for Rubbout 9, to occur March 31-April 2, 2000.  Once I got home, I re-established contact with Bill, and shortly after the first of the year, he sent me a small packet of info about the weekend.  If you’re familiar with the concept of a “Relaxacon,” Rubbout is similar: a low-key weekend event centered around being social rather than a contest or a bunch of workshops.  Rubbout 9 was to have five “events”: a Friday night gathering at a local bar, a Saturday afternoon rubber/leather/etc. swap meet, a Saturday night private party, a Sunday morning brunch, and a Sunday afternoon beer bust.

     I made tentative plans to attend, but I knew I wouldn’t formalize them until about a month before the event.

     I had trepidations about attending, though.  While I’ve been to Vancouver a half-dozen times — I grew up in Washington state — the last three attempts did not go well.  In about 1982, my family took a trip up there and identified a place we wanted to have breakfast at the next morning; when we got to the restaurant the next day, it had burned down during the night!  (This was part of a decade-long string of travel disasters I had.)  When the World Expo came to Vancouver (1986), I was in college just three hours south, but plans continuously fell through and I couldn’t go.  (I didn’t even try for the Gay Games in 1990.)

     The worst one, though, was in about 1993.  My parents were living in Bellingham (30 minutes south of the border), and I decided to go up there to the Lotus Club for some Canadian country-western dancing (now a lesbian nightclub).  After a 45 minutes wait at the Lynden border crossing (not the main one, in Blaine), I got to the border, and they asked me to pull over to the immigration offices.  There, they patted me down and thoroughly searched the car — presumably for drugs, although they wouldn’t tell me what they were searching for.  (Not really a thorough search, though: I could come up with a half-dozen places to hide stuff that they didn’t come anywhere close to.  On the other hand, its only the dumb criminals they even expect to catch.)  I guess it’s that I was, hmm, a white male under 30 from California in a rental car by myself, going up to Vancouver just for the evening via the secondary border crossing that set off their buzzers.  Imagine!  Needless to say, they found nothing, and I proceeded across the border.  I stopped at the duty free shop to change some money: “Oh, I’m sorry. We can’t change money here.  You can do that on the American side of the border.”  (After 45 minutes in line and 30 minutes of futile drug smuggling searches, I don’t think so!)

     So I headed into Vancouver.  I could just use an ATM.  Of course, this was in the days when VISA and Star were one system, and Mastercard was with Cirrus in the other, and ATMs did only one of the two.  Every Canadian ATM I could find was VISA/Star, and I had a Cirrus ATM and a Mastercard.  To make matters worse, though, I was used to American ATMs, which are typically on the outside of the bank building, so anyone can use them.  Not in Canada!  Every ATM was enclosed in a locked bank lobby, and if you didn’t have that bank’s card, you couldn’t get in.  (It was only after following someone into a lobby that I found out the VISA/Star/Mastercard/Cirrus crap.  I understand that today — and maybe then — any Canadian bank’s card will let you into any ATM lobby.)  So after about three hours of torture, I said “To hell with this!”  (As the song advises, I blamed Canada!) and drove back to Bellingham.  I swore to never go back to Canada again.

     In May 1999, I had to break my vow in order to attend “Rainbows Know No Borders,” the annual convention of the IAGLCWDC, hosted by Big City Hoedown and the C.C. Wranglers.  Getting into Canada that time wasn’t particularly easy, either.  When you drive in, they want to see your driver’s license (heck, you can end up with more of a third degree driving into California!), but when you fly in, you have to do the formal customs thing, which means they need your passport (or a certified birth certificate).  Did I have a passport with me?  Hell, no.  (I don’t even have one anymore; the last one expired a decade ago.)  And it’s only Canada, after all.  (I bit my tongue and didn’t actually say that.)  The ended up letting me in, but only because I looked so trustworthy (heh).

     So this time, I would minimize my troubles.  I tried to get a passport, but the timing was too short, and my mother couldn’t find my expired one, nor (at first) my birth certificate.  (She finally did find it, sent it to me, and I’ve mislaid it.  Sigh.)  So the obvious solution was to fly in to Seattle ($109 round trip on Alaska) and drive up.

     In the meantime, I offered to make a web site for Rubbout for Bill to help promote the event, but he was very reluctant to do so.  (I’m still not quite sure why, but I think he’ll be open to it for next year.)  I did promote it to The Rubbermen of San Francisco Bay (our local rubber/latex club), and I eventually put up a single page of minimal information — photocopy of the flyer, schedule of events, recommended hotels — with Bill’s permission.  (Here is the page for Rubbout 10, taking place in 2001.)