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).

500 mile drive...

We left Quebec City at 8:50 this morning and now at exactly 8:50pm I'm writing this in Moncton, New Brunswick (eleven hours later as we have actually changed time zone). Roughly 9 hours driving time, poor Thomas strapped into his car seat for a whole day. He got a few viewings of Baby Einstein and Ellie watched Charlotte's Web and Toy Story, the onboard DVD player is a life saver and the car-fridge is genius! Ice cold drinks and food all along the drive. While everyone slept I had plenty of time to review my new music acquisistion:

Kaiser Chiefs (Employment) - excellent, truly a "Bumper 12-track Compendium", doubt they have many fans in Halifax, I will have to try to popularise them with the neighbours, if we have neighbours that is! "Everyday I love you less and less", a song for Tony Blair I think...
Keane (Hopes & Fears) - hmm, a bit whiny for my liking with some quite average stuff thrown in at no extra cost, but I can't argue with 5 quid for the excellent singles.
Killers (Hot Fuss) - Great stuff. Needs another listen tomorrow.
Kasabian - Cut off in their prime by the screaming Thomas awakening, it was sounding very good until Tom's unnecessary and unwanted accompaniment.

Some weblog gold dust today...

Having just driven past Bristol and Bath (but long before Salisbury, Canterbury and Sussex - they certainly have an originality when naming places over here!), I drove ("I drove" indicating MC, Ellie and Thomas were all asleep) past "Potato World: A Museum". Yes, a museum devoted to the potato, this ranks in its strangeness alongside Croyde Bay's "Gem and Rock museum" and a little way ahead of Brighton's very own "Fishing Museum" (although now renamed "The Fishing and Surfing Museum" in a crass attempt to atract a larger patronage). Obviously I was curious, but fortunately not curious to deflect from my target of Fredrickton and then Moncton.

A few kilometres (as that's what they have over here) I arrived in Florenceville, the self proclaimed "French Fry Capital of the World", slightly bizarre potato product obsession developing in this area I thought. Then the smell hit me. CHIPS (or French Fries even), the whole town reeked of CHIPS! I excitedly woke MC with the question, "What can you smell???", "CHIPS" was the immediate answer, as we drove we saw why, an emormous McCain factory accounts for the majority of the town. In the few minute it took us to pass through, lorry-load after truck-load of chip (french-fry) lorry (truck!).

The drive was incredible - apart from a short stint of roadwords after Riviere du Loup, traffic was not light, it was non-existant, steady 110-120kmph. Kilometre after kilometre of open road. I've only once driven so happily before - that was at 4am just outside Birmingham!

Recent pics to follow...

Tomorrow Halifax and the search for a house.

Kassandra...

Hardest thing for Ellie is missing her friends I think (apart from the irregular meal times, strange beds, huge car journeys et al). In Quebec she already has a new good friend who longs to play with her.

Happy Ks and Days...

What a place, today I picked up four albums:

Kasabian
Kaiser Chiefs
Killers
Keane

Four Ks by coincidence, I didn`t even have to move rack to pick them up. How much did they cost altogether - about 25 quid. That`s what CDs should cost! More stuff for Ellie to learn on our impending long drive!!

Other matters of immense important, the Ashes are back where they belong, Shane Warne can take 40 wickets home with him as long as he remembers he dropped Keven Pietersen on 15!
Matter of little importance (given the cricket), Villa lost 4-0 to West Ham and I honestly (for once) don`t care!!! Cricket is king today.

A back issue, our time in Quebec...

Our last evening in Quebec, okay, I'm cheating and backdating this entry now I've got a real internet connection! Three days with MC's family before heading out to Nova Scotia. Family stuff all weekend really, catching up with MC's family, her (huge) sister, Kathleen, is currently having an extended stay in hospital in order that her (gigantic) twins (see why she's huge now!) get to stay inside her for as long as possible. Soon to the mother of three (all boys), the oldest being 15 months - ouch and good luck!

Pics here of Ellie, Thomas and Alexis (the 15 month old big brother in question).

Alexis has yet to enjoy the benefits of siblings (rivalries and friendships). Here is parked between Ellie and Thomas. Sizing up Thomas with a little apprehension.
Certainly unsure by the looks of this picture.
A wise decision I think...
Such a glorious morning led us to decide on a trip to Old Quebec during the afternoon - pity it immediately went gloomy as we left. Here's MC's mom, Yolande and Denis with Thomas.

Finally, Ellie emulates Cher... Fortunately she was slightly better attired!

Dialup...

Crikey, my first time on a dialup modem for a couple of year and what a culture shock! Suffice it to say there will be few updates and even fewer pictures until I get on a faster connection!
Most excitingly, I have turned right on a red light for the first time!
Today I booked accomodation in Moncton, New Brunswick and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia for the remainder of the week after that hopefully we will be close to having a house and will take off for a holiday within a holiday until we can move in.
I`ll blog on my laptop from on and upload when I can.
I hope the dark weather remains in the UK, particularly around the Oval until tea time tomorrow!

Parc Omega

A break in our journey from Ottawa to Quebec and another one for the kids, a Canadian wildlife park, bears, bison, deer, ibis, moose, wolves etc. As schools are back in it was very quiet so it was a great time.

Ottawa Children's Museum...

Some compensation for Ellie and Thomas today when we spent plenty of time at the children's museum in Ottawa, loads of stuff to play with from around the world. Ellie enjoyed herself immensely, Thomas had a good time too, at least until he tried eating paint.

I tried out a new hair do on the mini stage whilst Ellie tried out the Harry Potter kit.

Likes and dislikes in Canada...

Early doors, I know, as Brian Little would say, but so far I have the following observations in the 69.75 hours since I arrived:

People smile a lot more here
There are Canadian flags EVERYWHERE and no-one seems worried about offending the minorities
Customer service is excellent so far
Companies proclaim as part of their logos "A Proud Canadian Company"

Pedestrians and cars are both allowed to go at the same time; if there are pedestrians, the car MUST give way. This is dicey, so far we have almost been runover twice and MC nearly hit someone yesterday. More car needed!
You can turn right on a red light if there is nothing coming - this will just take some getting used to I think, it's just disconcerting when you are driving over a crossroads and someone comes out of a red light street!
Books (especially hard covers) are generally more expensive here

So that's it so far, I can certainly live with the "bad" stuff!!! We've been to the children's museum today, pics of that to follow as soon as I've downloaded them...

"What is love?"

A song by Howard Jones, that's what. Perculiar what you hear over on the radio, today it was "No one is to blame" also by HJ - this got me running through all his "classics"...

New Song
What is Love
Pearl in Shell
Hide and Seek
Like to get to know you Well

I started to yearn for my crate of CDs currently on route somewhere in the atlantic. First thing in the CD player when it arrives (and after I buy a new CD player of course) will be Howard's Greatest Hits! This made me think of my friend, Andy's, website, where you can vote on various artist's of the 80s greatest songs!

Currently reading: Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour - only a few pages in, but it seems like it will be excellent!
Just finished: Digital Fortress by Dan Brown - I don't know why I do it (actually I do - it's because I bought all of his books in one go...), just as bad as his other books, the villain is utterly implausible AGAIN, dire, formulaic pap.

Spam, spam, spam, spam...

Seems my blog has become the target of comment spam, so I have had to switch on word protection...

Jetlagged and Thomas the monster...

5am, lying in the bath while the children slept reading my book for two hours!
As planned we returned to DVLA equivalent and surrendered our driving licences in return for Ontarian ones, arriving at 8:20am mean we were back in the car before 9am equipped with our new documents.
We collected the car insurance and a banker draft to pay for the car - banker drafts are issued on the spot here, no 24 hour wait like in the UK.
All our errands in Ottawa are done now apart from collecting the Caravan (!) on Friday morning.
Lunch at Zak's Diner was horrific, Thomas decided scream his way through the whole meal and also managed to throw a toy dinosaur that the waitress gave to placate him onto another group's table - nice. I hoiked him out early and brought him back to the hotel, here I discovered a free internet hotspot in the lobby, whilst Thomas flirted with the old ladies, I got my email! Then off to the room where jetlag took over and suddenly it was two hours later (4pm) and I was very disoriented as I woke up with Thomas crying (again).
How can someone as angelic as this be so bad - these looks will save him according to MC...
Tomorrow we can reward Ellie and Thomas' patience (and often tortuous lack of patience!) with a trip to the children's museum.

Dull stuff...

Dull stuff today - we had to get driving licenses, buy a car, arrange insurance etc, etc. Off we went to the driving licence office - or so we thought, slight problem when we discovered they only renewed licences at the office we had gone to, they did not issue new ones. The office we needed was on the other side of town... We dropped into Capital Dodge Chrysler and left about an hour later having bought a Dodge Caravan people carrier. I make no excuses for this whatsoever! It's common as muck, non-descript and has the worst name I could imagine. Still it goes fast enough, has mass storage space, cruise control, it can seat seven and has a rather nice DVD player for those long journeys to and from Halifax.
So leaving the garage $28k worse for wear, off we went to the driving license "zoo", as we arrived at about 11:30 it was packed and wait times were around 2 hours, fortunately we have the luxury of abandonning this for the day and returning tomorrow at opening time.

Last stop of the day we called into the Co-operators to arrange insurance, we were told "You can have an appointment in four weeks"!!! Err... HELLO! Straight back out of the door and off to find a yellow pages.

The second place we tried had a one week wait - still no good and then we talked to Scrivens - and they sorted us out and relieved of another astonishing sum of money $1800 for six months insurance! I may be starting to regret shipping the MG out here!

7pm, bed and dreamless sleep for 10 hours.

More Ottawa...

My new capital city... It's so quiet, we've driven at rush hour through the business district, we've walked through around the city on a hot sunny day and the there is SPACE! And lots of it! Here's the parliament building...

Ottawa...

We landed in Ottawa at 6pm local time and actually took longer to clear passport than we did to deal with Immigration and Customs. This was largely because I'd prepared all of our paperwork (as everyone should) prior to arriving! By 7:30 we had our hire car (a Buick Allure - not the most manly of vehicle names, but a really nice ride!). We were in our hotel by 8:30 and the whole day had gone very smoothly. Mixed emotions after the last few days and it seems strange that this time the ticket was one way.

Goodbye and good riddance!

to the hotel at least!

No hot water at the hotel, we started calling room service at 7:30 and finally had a shower around 10:30, I went to fetch breakfast and got a bottle of OJ that had already been opened and drunk out of. Quality place.

I looked out of the window of the Canadian Affair 757 as we took off from Gatwick and thought "What have I done?". The rolling country side looked wonderful, I quickly forgot my reasons for leaving the UK. Fortunately by the time I landed I had recovered my memory!

Last Supper...

Last supper, fittingly at my favourite restaurant in Hove, Leonardo's, with some good friends was fun and not so sad. Here's Thomas and Tomasi (head waiter), great guy always looks after us and especially the kids so well.
Omigod, we arrived at our hotel for the night at Gatwick and found that it is a building site almost on the runway... Fortunately the sound proofing was much better than we thought!
Half an hour after, she left us, Catherine who is borrowing our car until November called to say she had been rear-ended - that's quick! The tow bar (a legacy of the previous owner) protected the car from almost all damage.

Goodbye Mom & Dad for a while...

An eventful day, we said goodbye to my mom and dad for now. That certainly wasn't easy, I could say lots about that, but will just say a big thank you to them for being so supportive over the last eighteen months. Their attitude has always been "Do what you think is best for your family" - to them that is the obvious and only way to think. Brilliant parents.

It all got a bit too much for Thomas...

Last day at "home"...

We leave tomorrow and are spending our last hours with my parents before we leave on our big adventure so I'm not going to waste much time, but suffice it to say, this is the hardest day of all.

Next post sometime next week from Ottawa or Quebec City.