@FinsToTheLeft linked to an article from Budget on the requirements for insurance in Canada and getting a nonresident’s insurance card.
FWIW, my daughter has had to travel by herself internationally (when she was 15 and 16). She’s returned to Taiwan by herself and gone on an exchange program to Europe.
She has dual American and Taiwanese citizenships, and permanent residency in Japan. We made damn sure that it’s really clear what’s the situation.
My WAG is that taking a much younger child is going to be something you want to be much more careful about.
if you have everything, it shouldn’t be a problem, but just have all the documentation.
Even a single parent needs proof to take a minor child across the border.
I once witnessed a father put his wife and child onto a train and then leave. When we got to the border, the customs guy questioned her very closely asking if she had the father’s permission. I was even considering going up to the custom’s officer and describing what I had witnessed, but he finally let them procede.
And this shows the randomness as we’ve never had a problem or been asked about it in the many times only one of us has taken one or more of our kids overseas or back.
I wound up making a reservation with Budget since they had easy to find info on the web and it seems pretty straightforward. Just tell them you will be taking the car to Canada during checkout and they will give you some sort of yellow card to keep in your car that says you are covered insurance-wise.
Now we, or actually my stepdaughter, just needs to get the proof-of-grandparents paperwork all taken care of.
Did your “no issues” include telling the rental agency you were taking it to Canada? Did it include having an accident in Canada?
This thread is about two overlapping problems.
Taking minors who are not your offspring across the border. Which may result in you getting jacked up by the immigration cops at the border going either way. The only defense is bringing sufficient paperwork to satisfy the most suspicious border patrolman.
Taking a rented car across the border. Which will be totally fine unless you get involved in an accident in the other country. Or unless the rental car company has a rule against that and is tracking your car while you’re violating their rules. The defense is telling the rental agency your cross-border plans and complying with whatever else they may ask of you.
I’ve rented cars in Canada and driven them to the US, I rented a U-Haul truck and drove it to Canada. Apart from having to return the U-Haul to a US location, I had zero problems with either the car rental agencies or on either side of the border. That being said, as others have mentioned, you should probably check with the car rental about crossing the border with it before renting.
Definitely a consideration. I can’t speak to any potential medical issues, but I was once flying from Canada into the US with my son, at about that age, with no wife present, and the immigration agent started asking him questions like whether his mother knew he was traveling to the US with me. I started to answer and she basically but politely told me to shut up, she was asking the child. It’s a border consideration that may catch some by surprise!
I am taking a European cruise leaving in a few days. The cruise line just sent us some final documents including info about passports, visas, permitted and prohibited items, etc.
Relevant to this thread one of the line items in the document says:
International Travel with Minors
The U.S. government requires that minors under 18 years of age traveling alone, with grandparents, or with one parent/legal guardian only, carry a notarized document signed by both parents or by the parent/legal guardian not traveling with the child. We require you to obtain such a document, noting the age of the child, relationship to traveling adult(s), dates of travel, and destination. For example, in the case of divorce, the parent with legal custody must sign the permit, and the accompanying parent must carry proof of this fact. In addition, if the child’s surname differs from that of either parent, you may want to carry the child’s birth certificate.
Not relevant to this thread (I hope), but I noticed that summary doesn’t address the situation of a widowed parent traveling with their child. Kinda hard to get that absent parent to sign anything now. A death certificate can surely establish that that person is now dead, but how to tie that person back to the living spouse / parent and kid?
There’s a large can of worms there if anyone wanted to have a policy that all children leaving the country had to have a full paper trail linking them to all the adults accompanying and not accompanying them.
I was wondering this same thing. Not even dead - what if one parent has just disappeared and there’s no way to contact them? Or lives halfway across the country? Or some other reason they aren’t able to get something notarized together? Which I’m sure is not an uncommon situation.
My larger point is that ref all the kerfuffle about RealID, there are vast swathes of US citizens and US residents whose paper trail is convoluted or has gaps or is simply missing entirely.
Draining / paving that swamp is part of what RealID is about, and any sort of requirement for an absolute paper trial for minors traveling abroad would essentially require draining / paving the very same swamp. Plus draining / paving the marriage & divorce records swamp.
Only difference is that nearly everyone drives or has a state-issued ID card DL-equivalent, but nearly everyone doesn’t travel internationally w kids.
Like in the middle of a contentious divorce where parent B doesn’t want to give an inch / give an inch w/o other concessions even if they don’t otherwise care if the kids go to a soon-to-be-ex’s family event - wedding, funeral, holiday dinner, etc.
I got more grilling going into Canada on a bicycle than we did a couple of days earlier with 40 gallons of propane (& all appropriate Transport Canada paperwork, which they never even asked about) & said bicycle in the back of the pickup a couple of days earlier.
Hijack\] Sorry, but I just gotta tell this (true) story. Many years ago, probably nearly 50, my wife and I were driving with our three children to the US. The customs guy asked where the kids were born. I told him that our daughter was US born, the older some was born in Switzerland and the younger one in Canada. He asked me, "What are you, some kind of professor?". "Guilty as charged" I replied.\[/Hijack
Wow, scary stuff! It wasn’t something that would even have occurred to me as being an issue!
It can still get hellishly complicated – e.g.- due to name changes because the mother remarried, or the kid himself goes through a change of name for whatever reason. Of course there should (in theory) be a paper trail for all this stuff, but we don’t live in a perfect world, nor a world where we are inclined to carry around a briefcase full of interconnected documentation.
The custodial parent would need a court order in the absence of the other parent signing.
My wife and I always had a notarized document when one of us travelled alone with one or both kids. Luckily we had lawyers in the family so notarizing was no big deal.
It was some years ago but I was in San Diego and every rental car company I checked (the big, main ones) explicitly prohibited driving the car into Mexico. I assume this was related to possible crime, police corruption and difficulty getting their car back if it is impounded for whatever reason.
Things may have changed since then, I do not know, and I imagine Canada is much less likely for the rental company to worry about.
Nevertheless, be sure to check with the rental company. I imagine in Seattle this comes up a lot.
Notarizing is easy. Most banks, some libraries, and every UPS store can do that. Getting the document(s) legally sufficient is the long (read expensive) pole in that tent.
There are a lot of reasons I miss my late wife. Having a no-cost lawyer to hand 24/7/365 is one of them.