National Sovereignty = natural arseholes? Not necessarily.
I have a friend who in the pre-Euro days only realised he had drunkenly stumbled over the Netherlands-Belgium border when he went into a fish'n'chip shop and thought 'wow, the prices are really high here'.
My own experience with the US border guards was mixed. Inland in Texas, I met a guard who ruined my day at a checkpoint (though I wasn't in danger of being detained). But at the border at Nogales, the entry to Mexico is just a turnstile, and on the entry back to the US, the guard just waved me through with a bored look on his face, passport unexamined.
I agree though that you have to be prepared, and you have to just shut up and play the game if they're being fractious.
I rode my bike over the Italy/Austria border once (along the Drava river), and the only way you could tell was that the signs stopped being in Italian & German and were only in German
I have a friend who in the pre-Euro days only realised he had drunkenly stumbled over the Netherlands-Belgium border when he went into a fish'n'chip shop and thought 'wow, the prices are really high here'.
My own experience with the US border guards was mixed. Inland in Texas, I met a guard who ruined my day at a checkpoint (though I wasn't in danger of being detained). But at the border at Nogales, the entry to Mexico is just a turnstile, and on the entry back to the US, the guard just waved me through with a bored look on his face, passport unexamined.
I agree though that you have to be prepared, and you have to just shut up and play the game if they're being fractious.