Another battle won... then annoyed...

I started the day miserable today, the prospect of a return to the vehicle licence place did not fill me with joy not to mention the subsequent attempt to start the MG after four weeks in the cold on a boat...
To my surprise the vehicle place gave me what I needed without much quibbling (a temporary licence plate good for one day one the routes I specified...). The day then climbed to a new high when the MG (inexplicably) started first time at the depot.
I drove it straight to the garage where I'd arranged to get its MVI (Motor Vehicle Inspection) certificate done - it was closed - still I'd arrange to go at 3pm rather that 1:45pm when I actually turned up, I wandered off for a coffee and returned 30 minutes later to find the place open...
The MVI test seems to involve the following steps:
1. Raise the car on a jack.
2. Wobble/shake the front wheels
3. Blow the horn
4. Test the lights and indicators
5. Check the "muffler"
6. There is no sixth thing.
Seems rather easy to pass - which the MG didn't! It needed a little weld on the "muffler" which took the remainder of the afternoon whilst I ambled around the city drinking more coffee and generally having a relaxing time... I got home at 6pm! Still without plates, but only one step away now - that should only take a few minutes on Monday.
Finally today, Ellie broke her bed by swinging on it and went to bed very upset (as well she deserved to). A trip to Home Depot for timber and power tools is now on the cards for dad followed by a day of cursing as I try to replicate the broken parts.

Insurance... And washrooms...

One that really gets me here - car insurance - originally we insured on van for $3,700 (yes £1850) for fully comp. We've managed to get this down to $2,400 which is still an astonishing rip off, add another $2,000 for the MG and you've got a seriously lucrative bit of business.
On the other hand, although this doesn't make up for the $4,400, washrooms here have paper towels - not those idiotic hand-hair-dryer things which never work... I'm petty I know, but I know what I like!

At last!!!

Exactly four weeks after our house was stuffed into a truck in Glendor Road, another truck arrived at Beech Tree Run to deliver it... The only day of serious rain in a week.
Alas the dishwasher did not arrive until today - so MC embarked on a truly astonishing washing up marathon.
How we managed to bring so much stuff with us having thrown so much away is amazing, I think we need another clear out.
Ellie unpacked her own things, with the very able Thomas lending a hand.
The only casualties of the journey were our Dali picture (broken glass) and the kitchen table (broken table top). Neither particularly important, as the picture has just lost its place to a painting of a giraffe and the table was scratched to bits anyway.

Today's the Day...

Everything is starting to come together now and finally today is the day our furniture arrives! Eight nights on inflatable matresses is ample. Exactly four weeks since Robinson's pulled up outside Glendor Road, Hoyt's will be here to deliver.
It seems much longer than 4 weeks since we last sat on our own sofas! Unpacking should be much calmer than packing - most of the throwing away was done in England, just a few bags of rubbish and charity stuff were accidently brought over. Better get some sleep!

Snagging...

About ten years ago MC and I bought our first house in Bicester, about 12 miles from Oxford, it was a new build by a company called, I think, Westbury Homes. I tend to block it out of my memory as we spent many months getting the builders to complete or repair their shoddy work. The entire kitchen had to be removed and refitted as it was not square. Parts of the window frames were missing - having been removed to complete a different house. The banister was hanging off along with a long piece of plaster, the brass bracket was then screwed into the hole (left by the plaster) and plastered over. These are the ones that stick in my mind - they took months to resolve, my customer "service rep" suggested I chase the builders myself - this earned her Managing Director a Private and Confidential letter...
Anyway I swore I'd never go into a new build again, but here I am, the difference this time is that the snagging will almost certainly be completed tomorrow, a week after we moved in. We've made the odd phone call, nothing major and tradesmen have swarmed over house resolving everything. On three occasions, they have arrived within the hour. Obviously there shouldn't be any snagging at all - but if there must be... I'd rather do it here!

Lawton Drugs...

Before any comments, this Thomas' "buttock paste"! My poor little boy is trying to teeth again and has the associated painful rashes. If that's not bad enough, I'm putting pictures of his remedies on the internet. Lawton Drug's are big here, it's the first time since we were in York that I've seen my name over a shop door.

The jeans are out...

Ouch, it's starting to get cold! 8 degrees at the moment (I know it's going to get a lot colder!). We're off to the park this morning (the sort with swings and slides!) so hopefully Ellie will start to see that normality is returning!

Peggy's Cove III...

Not satisified with 5 pictures of Peggy's Cove, here are a few more...

A boat towing a boat towing a boat!

A warning in no uncertain terms to all at Peggy's Cove...

Ellie should have heeded the warnings, her arms fell off when she was careless.

Peggy's Cove II...

Thomas - as usual made a meal in a restaurant a misery.

Peggy's Cove...

Here's Peggy's Cove (link), rocks to climb on (for Ellie and I!), the ocean, blue sky, good fish for lunch and a very small community (less than 40 buildings!) of fishermen and artists as far as I could see anyway! As usual, my photo's don't do the place justice.
This is my favourite picture from the day, just a few boats in the cove. Ellie on the Rocks... The camera doesn't really show how blue the sky and the water really is. Peggy's Cove will become one of those place we take visitors, it will make a change from the continual visits to Londona and Warwick Castle!
MC and Thomas at the lighthouse.
Peggy's Cove lighthouse, I posted a picture of this before leaving the UK, now we've been there! It's a fully operational post office (for some reason?)

Swiss Air Flight 111 Memorial

We went to Peggy's Cove today, what a beautiful place. We drove out to Upper Tantallon and turned left to head towards the cove, the whole place was lake after lake and bay after bay. We stopped off at the Memorial Site for Swiss Air flight 111 which crashed close by in 1998. The first pictures are off this.The plane crashed in this bay, threes site around the bay form the vertices of a triangle surrounding the site.Next stop Peggy's Cove - the lighthouse (that little speck in the distance!), is a post office!

Oh, and more good stuff...

As I said we got "tailgated" because of the MG... One of the things we had to do was head off to the customs to answer some (we thought) tricky questions and to prove how long MC had been out of the country. We gather loads of bits of paper and headed off with trepidation - customs in Europe are such unfriendly places... Anyhow, a basic transcript of the conversation is...
Us: Hello, we are importing an MG and have been "tailgated"?
Customs: Ah, so you'll need one of these forms...
Us: Thanks
I sign the form.
Customs: What sort of car is it?
Us: 1967 MGB Roadster
Customs: Hey, Jack, can we let a 67 MGB in?
Jack: Yeah, I seen some on the roads here...
Us: We thought it would be harder than that?
Customs: Nah, (with a smile), anyhow I got coffee coming... Welcome to Nova Scotia
Case close.
How easy was that - all done with a smile. Now just got to get it past the DVLA lot, maybe I should ask the customs guys to sort it out...

Annoying stuff for a change...

Whilst I've been singing the praises of Canada, and Nova Scotia in particular, recently there are a few things that have annoyed me... So lets get them off my chest now...

The DVLA equivalent are no better than the UK, officious, suspicious and annoying!
Someone wired the phone in my house against all accepted Canadian standards meaning I've had to try to fix something I've never seen before...
HSBC are starting to foul up (although I was warned about this), we went increase our direct debit levels to fund our blowout at Future shop, they agreed to our request then failed miserably to action it... Humbug. We looked daft and had to spread our purchase over two cards.

There we other things, but they escape me for now, so I'm off to (inflatable) bed...

S H O P P I N G . . .

We have been shopping now for four and a half days more or less without a break. We both hate shopping now... Off the top of my head, we have bought (in no particular order) mop, bucket, dustpan, brush, THX cinema amp, HDD/DVDR, Roku, Zen Micro, microwave, sauce pan, frying pan, pegs, clothes horse (I feel like I'm on the Generation game...), expresso machine, sandwich toaster, regular toaster, lunch box (for Ellie, she starts French pre-school on Monday), the aforementioned leopard/zebra/tiger sleeping bag, chinese steamer thing, popcorn machine, food processor, food, vacuum cleaner, Fisher Price "Little People Garage" for Tom, Little Mermaid "Action figures" for Ellie, Hungry Hippos (for all of us it seems), photo printer, hair drier (hers), hair clippers (his!)... And the list goes on...
Special mentions for the Amp, a Pioneer with THX sound, I can barely wait for my 10 speakers to arrive from the UK - it will need 8 of them... The Roku, google it. The sandwich toaster machine - a mere $10 - ridiculus price. The popcorn machine - I thought MC was joking, but it's brilliant!
We are committed to not shopping for two days now - tomorrow we're off to Peggy's Cove weather permitting to do the tourist thing. Sunday won't be much of a problem as we still have Sunday closing by law!
Four more "sleeps" now until our furniture arrives (a much more homely batch of pics will follow when it's all in the house!) - our container has been "tailgated" meaning customs are going to open it to look at the car - they do it to all cars apparently. This has caused much running around and form filling and us being told today we need to take a driving test - having landed a mere 1600km from here to avoid just that - still we'll see about that - we won't take said test without a fight!
Our telephones continues to behave eccentrically, hopefully I've sorted it once and for all this evening. I would go to bed, but I've drunk rather a lot of Expresso tonight, so am a little wired at the moment... I'll just have to prattle on a bit more...
Now reading: Shaking hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by LGen Roméo Dallaire. I've read so much Dan Brown style trash recently I thought I'd try something different for a while, broaden my horizons and all that... This is a first hand account of the (apparently disasterous and ineffective) UN peace operation during the Rwandan Tutsi & Hutu genocide of 1994 and then failure by the permanent member states to provide sufficient support. Dallaire is Canadian so it's a bit about the efforts of my new country too, maybe I'll just read canadian books for a year? I'm not expecting much enterment from this one!

Mangetout, mangetout...

Derek Trotter eat your heart out... Anyone running down Walmart has no idea! A combo Leopard, zebra, tiger skin sleeping bag! Wow...Currently Listening to: Clare MacDonald on BBC 6 Music

Downstairs...

The basement... Bedroom 4 (the guest room) in the basement, currently housing the computer bits and bobs.
Washing machine and drier, not my domain really.
Scary looking heating system.
Family/play room...
Very clever air-exchanger - sort of climate control for a house, sucks stale air out of the place and replaces it with nice fresh stuff from outside!
Assorted cupboards and an extra bathroom also down here.

Upstairs...

Very spartan I know - like the rest of the house, this is the master bedroom complete with luxurious inflatable matress.
Tom's room or cell as it appear...
Ellie's room with a much thicker blanket than we have... Still we bought a very stylish Walmart sleeping bag today to chuck on top of it - it's truly wondrous, a picture will follow...
Our closet - walk-in - very spacious, I've cordoned off my area from the greedy eyes of my wife.
The ensuite bathroom, complete with extra large whirlpool bath, shower etc, MC and I have more than half of the upstairs for our over-the-top suite and I love it!

Too good...

I can't resist any longer...
I LOVE IT HERE. Early days I know and I'm basing my experiences solely on the service I've received since immigration and customs, but it has been uniformly and consistently above anything I have had in the past.
We have accomplished so much in a fortnight it defies belief. Driving licences. Bought a car. Covered 4 provinces. Bank accounts/cards. Moved into a house, got phone/internet hooked up. Provincial medical cover. The snagging on the house continues a pace. Banking is easy. EVERYONE is friendly and polite. Stuff is cheaper... It's GREAT!

Eat your heart out NTL...

So the phone didn't work when I tried it - could Eastlink be the new NTL after all?
Err... No... I called the fault in and the engineer was here within two hours! He identified the builders as culprits for miswiring the roughed-in telephone cables, he fixed their misdemeanor with charge and show me how to rewire the phone points in every room. Service.
I've spend the whole day putting up blinds, as it's a new build there are no window coverings at all - this has made two of the toilets (washrooms) useless. I went to Home Depot to sort out some blinds.
Me: "I'd like a selected of your very cheapest blinds please, in these various lengths!"
Assistant: "Certainly, do you have your measurements?"
Me: "Yes"
Assistant: "I'll have to cut them to the right size."
Me: "When will they be ready." (meaning what day)
Assistant: "Twenty minutes".
Me: "Eh? OK, err.. good then!"
Same as everything else I try to do here - too easy, too efficient, too little fuss and much too much smiling! 10 blinds of random width and length made up in no time for about £130.

Our House... In the middle of our Street...

Well, here's our house, 4-bedroom detached with an absurd 4 toilets, 3 baths and showers. I look out on my 'yard' and think "Got to get something bigger next year", yet it is actually quite a bit bigger than Glendor's 'garden'.
It's hard to believe we've only been in Halifax for six days - we have moved into a house which shouldn't have been ready until 1st October and have people in and out furiously finishing off the odd thing or two.

Hurrah!

For two reasons this morning...

One, here is Andy (Ellie's Godfather) and Treena with Baby Lowe, born yesterday morning at 8am. Congratulations to them all...


Secondly, we're checking out (of the hotel) and moving in (to our house) today - the longest two weeks of our life are over! Happily signing off to a few days...

Otherside...

I am aware that everyting I write at the moment has quite a positive spin mainly because I think that if you emigrate you have to be as positive as possible about everything in your new country, for example this evening we are watching the Emmy's, American Bafta's, a backslapping celebration of US TV - obviously we are cheering for Hugh Laurie, Ali G, Ricky Gervais etc. I also decided to make do with whatever is here, I am not going to import peculiar food stuffs (Coleman's mustard springs to mind for me). Tea here isn't the best - I drink coffee instead, that is very good. Missing inconsequential stuff like that is only going to make thing unnecessarily difficult.

Anyway, gone off track a bit there, I'm going to dump all the negative stuff so far in one message.

It must be said, emigrating is not for the faint-hearted - the plane had barely taken off when I forgot the reasons I was leaving, they go grey very quickly and you need those memories to stay the course! Since arriving, we have all, to some degree, been ill. MC suffering the worst followed by Thomas who is making another quite feeble attempt to cut a tooth. In a hotel room, this is not nice!
Naturally it's all relative to your circumstances, when you think of the people of New Orleans with no idea of when or if they will be able to go home this will seem a bit petty.
However, living out of a suitcase for two weeks sharing a hotel room with the kids has proven horrendous. Noticeably for the children, dragging them firstly from car show room to DVLA equivalent to insurance firm. After two days of that Ellie was unrecognisable from her usual self, naughty, petulant... Thomas missed so much sleep he became a screaming machine. They had three days in Quebec when they recovered somewhat only to be packed into the car for two days and drive a further 1000km.
As soon as that was done we carted them arould ten house, some of which made my skin creep, Thomas is oblivious to pretty much everything, but Ellie sort of understands and often describes herself as "Having no home".
The stress of actually finding a house was immense, by Friday night I was ready to offer a kidney to have more than 4 walls surrounding me! We move in without a single item of furniture, we have two inflatable matresses, 4 plates, 4 forks, 3 knives and 4 spoons - the next schlepping the kids around town will be for a week of shopping I think. At least Toys 'r' Us will be on the agenda tomorrow if we can fit it in!
And if any of us see a restaurant in the next month, I'm sure we'll vomit.
Fortunately apart from the actually stress of emigrating, nothing has hindered us at all, 10 minutes to setup the TV, phone, internet connection. 10 minutes to get bank cards, 10 minutes to get bankers drafts, things seem so simple here. There is so little red tape here (or so it seems) that our troubles have been minimized.
Tomorrow is another day and we'll be outside 133 Beech Tree Run at noon to take possesion with huge smiles on our faces, then I can start my FutureShop shopping list...

Buying Cable...

Whilst customer service is so good here, I hope I've tried not to be too critical of what I left behind, however, this evening, NTL this is for you - this is how you do it...

We dropped by to the Eastlink stand in the local mall to order cable TV, phone and internet service yesterday, we were told we could not get the TV service installed until we actually own a TV because the cable can leak radiation (zoiks). No problem we thought, we can wait for all three for a week (the TV will have to be delivered and has a lead time of a week).

Then the girl on the counter (Erica!) said "So the engineer will be with you on Tuesday....".

"Er I have no TV" I said.

To which the reply was "that's ok, we'll connect the phone and the Internet on Tuesday, give us a call when the TV arrives and we'll come back and do that then...".

CAN YOU IMAGINE NTL, my last provider in the UK, (who are worse than useless) happily SUGGESTING that they make two seperate installation visits for no extra charge simply because it would be more convenient for me, the customer. Not on your life.

Actually there was one slightly sticky spot. Erica look a little awkward when she told us that the installation fee would actually be higher than normal because it's a new house and "well, we need to actually run the cable into the house..." The extra charge? $10, so the installation cost $55 instead of $45... NTL charged me £50 to move a cable. 'Nuff said.

Juan...

I guess it's understandable that people got a wee bit jumpy about Ophelia, as we were walking in Point Pleasant park I took these photos today showing what Juan did two years ago. 70% of trees were uprooted or damaged then so you can imagine what might have happened to people's homes.

A picture of a bug taken using "Macro mode" on my camera...Tom - not very interested in goings on at all...

Calm...

Unsurprisingly we have survived unscathed the passing of Ophelia, and apart from a jolly good soaking wouldn't have noticed it at all. Still apparently hurricane Juan wrecked the city two years ago so the place is understandably cautious.

Recovery...

So today has been as good as yesterday was bad. We had lunch with some of MC's relatives eating a proper meal for the first time this week which was much needed - even Ellie and Thomas tucked in! We should have our house on Monday, but I'm not counting my chickens, I hope so though as the all important broadband is being installed on Tuesday.

Remarkably MC (rather than me) is eyeing up a 42" plasma television, I certainly won't be standing in her way.

We are getting wetter and wetter as we await the arrival of Ophelia this evening. Nothing as strong as Katrina but the TV channels are starting to go to town on it trying to make the native restless I think, "hammer crooked pieces of wood to the doors" and all that stuff. Doubt much will happen.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...

The GOOD - Lawrencetown beach, Rainbow Bay, both beautiful beach to be visited often next summer. Secondly, Mother Tucker's restaurant which tolerated Thomas depositing most of his dinner on the floor whilst not actually eating anything and then refunded us his meal because he ate nothing... I was (almost) speechless.

The BAD - still living in a single room in a hotel, clan Chartrain-Lawton are nearly ready to kill each other. The stress of finding a house quickly is one of the worst thing I've gone through in the whole process. MicMac hotel's internet connection is utterly unreliable, this is the second night out of three where it's broken.

The UGLY - Ellie's eating (or non-eating) is appalling in restaurants - she has two further chances tomorrow and Sunday after that it will be babysitters when we eat out.

We are expecting the tail of hurricane Ophelia to arrive here tomorrow the forecast is for upto 10cm (4 inches) of rain. I'm not sure our denim jackets and one small child's umbrella will be up to the job. We wait with anticipation!

Indiana Jones map!

I've always wanted one of these! Here is an Indiana Jones style map of our travels so far. Starting out in Ottawa last Friday, our journey to Quebec took 5 hours and we stay there until Tuesday morning, then a 9 hours drive to Moncton on Wednesday followed by the last 3 hours to Halifax on Wednesday morning.

What might have been...

Were it just MC and I here now, by the weekend, this would have been our garden and our boat house (and yes, that's the Atlantic NOT a lake or a big river)...
As it is though, Ellie and Thomas's bedrooms would have been in the basement and were smaller than in all of the other properties we saw. I just could not (quite) allow myself to live on the reasonably opulent upper floor and push the children downstairs so it looks like we'll get a very standard run of the mill detached 4-bed place in the suburbs! The picture does not really do the place any justice, but it's the best I have.

We saw five houses today, two very similar brand new places which we can move into immediately, one about 10 years old with curtains that made me feel ill, a lakeside place with more bizarre insects buzzing around than you could shake a stick at and some particularly vile wall paper and the above ocean front place. We liked three out of five and based on the needs of the family rather than the needs of Mark and Marie-Claude we have chosen a clear favourite should we not see anything of real interest tomorrow. It will probably be one of the new builds, very well build and finished houses with one slight snag, although the build quality looks excellent, it seems to be the norm to leave trailing cables and exposed sockets for security systems and cable TV etc. Blanking plates cost $1 each, but are not used by the builders! Odd considered the attention shown everywhere else.

I know some think I'm a bit mad about somethings - however I was particularly delighted this evening at the supermarket when in the 1-8 items queue the bloke in front of me was given a stern talking to for trying to pass about 15 items. Well done to the Atlantic Superstore for that (as pictured yesterday in "The view from the hotel").

They were pipped for the Customer Service Award of the Day however by "The Rite Fit" children's shoe shop in the MicMac mall. Ellie was sporting her new (pink - surprised?) trainers for the first time and within ten minutes was complaining that her toes were hurting. So we dropped into the aforementioned "Rite Fit" and asked if they could check the measurements. They decided we were sold a size too small in Quebec City on Monday, without question, they replaced the shoes with a larger size and sent us on our way. One gold star and all of our children's footwear business in the future goes to this shop. With snow on the way and winter boots and snow suits now on the shelves, they will do well out of us!

A warning Ellie should have heeded, her arms fell off shortly before I took this picture!

Halifax at last...

So here we are, at the MicMac hotel in Dartmouth (just over the bay from Halifax and $40 per night cheaper) - it's 9:30pm, Thomas may (or may not) be asleep, at least he's quite at the moment, whatever he is doing, he is preventing Ellie from sleeping. We have the unexpected bonus of broadband wireless in the hotel so the blog is getting hammered tonight.

We left Moncton around 9am this morning for the last 300km stretch to Halifax and drove without delay (as is the norm in these parts) for three hours averaging the speed limit of 100kmph to complete our journey. We even took the "scenic" route so as to avoid the toll road from Oxford to Truro (yes Oxford to Truro). "Scenic" in this case actually meant lots of trees and a lake. Now, this would actually seem to me like every other road in Canada, I'm not complaining by any means, it was beautiful and I love it, but classing the old main road as scenic seems a bit strong, I'd just spent over 800km seeing trees and lake! We did get to see all the gas stations, motels and restaurants rendered obsolete and closed by the new road which took all the traffic and custom away from the area. It did however take us very close to the little known town of Pugwash, much excitement for me there - I must visit one day!

Not wishing to harp on about trees, but there are so many of them here. Along with the complimentary industries, papermills (which stink) and timber yards etc. At a first glance I thought what ugly monstrosities, but on reflection they show a country which has kept its industry unlike the one I left behind. Trucks of timber and logs are everywhere yet I have not seen any evidence of a felled forest or even a felled tree, well looked after and renewed obviously.

First impressions of Halifax are that it is a quiet, clean, friendly, green and sleepy little city where we will be very happy. It has the ocean (most important), restaurants (quite important), an international airport, the ocean (worth mentioning twice) and what else? Not sure yet, we'll be finding out in the coming weeks.

A few pictures now... A boat - could my stuff be in one of those containers?


Some birds on a rock...


The view from our hotel - the MicMac, strange name I know - I was told it was very close to the MicMac Mall, Atlantic Canada's largest shopping mall. Fortunately, this is not it (as I rather idiotically thought briefly).