2004 Mazda RX-8

Recently we bought our FOURTH car since arriving in Canada!

Here it is...

Link to car #1
Link to car #2
Link to car #3

It's a bit of a novelty after the last few... we're having fun!

Icicles

Three weeks ago, Ben took these photos of the front of our car...




Today, March 20th (a beautifully clear, sunny, 11°C day), is the official first day of spring in Canada. Bring it on!!

A winter wonderland...

After we flew back from Brisbane - via Los Angeles - we landed at Vancouver International Airport around 5:45pm on Wednesday, November 24th, caught a taxi home, and managed to make it to our 8pm meeting!

We could see that there was snow on the ground, but as it was already dark (sunset is currently around 4:15pm), we couldn't appreciate it properly until the next day. Here are some photos of the pretty scene on Thursday morning, while we were getting ready to head for the border to spend US Thanksgiving at Donna and Terry's.

The view from our door (this is the backyard of the house we live in the basement of)...


The back of the house (you can see the doorway from where I took the previous photo)...



People walking their dogs in the lane behind the house...


Ben dusting off our car in the street out front...



The front of the house (the lower left window is our loungeroom)...


And us...



So that was a pretty good way for us to quickly realise we were no longer in Queensland!!

The snow all melted after a day or two, and since then it hasn't snowed again. The temperature so far in December has stayed above zero but is keeping in the single digits. Hopefully we'll get some more snow further into winter though... a white Christmas would be nice!

Weekend in Washington

The morning after the Paralympic Opening Ceremony, we set off to Washington state for an overnight trip with Kelly and Janae. The plan was to spend the day hanging out in Bellingham, and then stay the night with Janae's parents Donna and Terry, who have featured on this blog a number of times now!

Our first hurdle was getting across the border. This was complicated by the following combination of factors: Ben and I needed to go into the customs building to get new visitor visas for the USA (they expire every 3 months), Kelly and Janae have a Nexus pass which means they can fast-track the queue of cars at the border, they were driving our car through while we went inside, and, although they can drive anyone's car through, people with Nexus passes are not supposed to have non-Nexus people (i.e. us) in the car with them. Therefore, we had to get out well in advance of the custom officers' line of sight - and, once inside, act as though we had been dropped off by friends, and would be picked up by friends on the other side. Which was of course true - we just hoped they wouldn't enquire as to whether it was the same friends and why we would do it that way.

Shortly after we exited the car, we realised I had left my handbag on the floor in the back seat. We were hoping Kelly and Janae wouldn't be subjected to a rare car search, as it would then be hard to maintain that they did not have other people with them! We also realised that if asked about the length of our stay in the USA (overnight), it may look odd that we didn't have a single piece of luggage on us. We decided that if they asked, we'd say we didn't wear pyjamas. Or that we already had clothes at our friends' place. But that would also sound suspicious since our last USA visitor visas had expired over a month ago, so we couldn't have been there recently. What a tangled web we weave indeed...! (As it turned out, they didn't ask any of these questions, and we managed to get through without telling any falsehoods.)

As we approached the customs buildings, where lot of construction is currently going on, one of the officers directing traffic came over to tell us that people are not meant to cross the border on foot while the construction is underway: "We've been broadcasting it in the media. Didn't you hear it on the radio?" No, we hadn't. He wasn't too perturbed, but he did personally escort us to the building. Once inside, we were called up to the counter almost immediately, and dealt with by two relatively nice customs officers. The whole process only took about 15 minutes, compared to an hour the last time we did it, so we were pleasantly surprised! Back outside, we walked a couple hundred metres to the Subway in Blaine where we had agreed to meet Kelly and Janae, and regaled one another with the tales of our respective smooth border crossings. We were then ready to continue on to Bellingham.

Except...

The drivers' side electric window in our car is very temperamental, and we know never to lower it more than a few inches or it will not go back up without the help of a manual glass-gripping-and-pulling-up effort. However, Kelly and Janae, not being accustomed to our car's ideosyncrasies, had lowered the window most of the way to talk to their customs officer in his booth, and it would not come more than halfway back up again. No matter what.













It was decided that we would drive on to Bellingham, and there leave our car at an auto glass shop with instructions to fix it properly if they could, or at least get the window back up, and in the meantime we would explore Bellingham on foot.

This we did, and soon after leaving our car at Louis Glass and wandering toward the main street, we discovered that Bellingham was having its very first St Patrick's Day Parade in a few minutes' time! The residents of Bellingham were out in full force, wearing green and lining the sidewalk along the parade's route. It turned out to be a very entertaining procession! Ben took some great photos - look out for a green dog, some unique bicycles, a toilet full of treasure, a lady rowing in a bathtub, a kilted biker, and green hooves...



























































During the parade, we also noticed that one block behind us an entire bridal party was caught in the traffic jam caused by the parade blocking the intersection for half an hour! Here are the bridesmaids next to the limo, and the bride heading into Starbucks...





The rest of the day was spent very pleasantly... trying out Kelly and Janae's favourite Mexican restaurant, Taco Lobo, for lunch (Janae lived in Bellingham for 9 years)... browsing a secondhand bookstore and ending up with a big bag of books (only one was ours - we're very restrained about buying things that will add to our luggage dilemmas when we leave Canada!)... getting a few more books for free from the giveaway box outside the store... drinking hot chocolate in a cute coffee shop... shopping for groceries at the awesome store that is Trader Joe's... shopping for cheese at a supermarket where cheese is particularly cheap... and then driving to Mt Vernon, where we had burgers at the Chuck Wagon Drive-In restaurant ("best burger in Washington in 2006"), where model trains ran around the rafters, murals of country towns decorated the walls, and life-sized wooden statues of substantially mustachioed cowboys stood around. Thoroughly "Wild West" and very fun!









That night we stayed with Janae's parents near Mt Vernon. We always love spending time with them! The next morning, we drove back to Bellingham and went to Janae's old meeting there. Afterwards, we had a delicious Thai lunch at Supon's in Bellingham, and then drove back to Vancouver. And by the way, the window was up again... but not fixed. :)

Thanks guys for a fantastic weekend!