Canablog

Sunday we had a day off. We did a hike in our new backyard: the Lynn Valley Headwaters park. The first part is a very easy walk that is used by many runners and elderly walkers.. After the first, gravel road, part it turn into a mor interesting trail. Very nice, but we will need to get used to all the bugs.

The walk was a 15km return trip, Robin enjoyed it as well.. Walked small parts of it, but mostly enjoyed it from the backpack..

Pictures can be found at http://gallery.brijn.nu/canada

Monday was dedicated to buying a car. Since I had waited to long with transferring funds to our Canadian account it was a bit of struggle to get all the money that we needed in the account. In the end the quickest, cheapest and easiest way was to get money from our ABN account out of an ATM, and then later deposit it at the bank.. But even if there is enough money sitting in the ABN account, the cards will still block after a certain amount.. All in all it was a bit of a juggle to get it all there in time..

The car buying process is itself was straight forward, but lengthy. We test drove the car and where happy. The sales person made up a proposal (stating the sales price etc).. He then runs this past a sales manager who has to approve it. After that we can approve it..

The next step was handled by a colleague, she took care of all the financials.. and yes... here we wrote our first cheque :-)

The last step is to get the mandatory basic insurance coverage, called Autoplan. For that it turned out that the car had to be AirCared, an emissions check that is mandatory in apparently a part of BC (???).. This took another half hour.

Almost five hours after we started the test drive we were the proud owners of a 2001 silver-grey Chevrolet Tracker 4x4 (really a Suzuki Vitara).