A House, A Car and A Visit to A Beach!

It's late here and I should be sleeping but I thought that seeing as I haven't written for a few days I should otherwise you might think we'd dropped off the face of the Earth.

Yes, we finally have a place to lay our heads! It's been a long road but we have finally negotiated for a short term house - 2 months. The house is brand new and we can move in tomorrow. In fact, it's so new that it's not yet finished so we will put up with the builders for a few weeks. The gib dust will make us feel at home, having just been through a renovation. It's not really that bad, they are just putting the finishing touches on, like installing the gas fire which they did today.

Anyway, it will give us somewhere to live for the next couple of months until we get jobs and decide where exactly we would like to live.

So, that's the house. I'll post a photo when I have one but forgot to take my camera today.

A Car!

This is a frustrating story. We have spent a couple of days this week looking at cars. We have decided that we would like an SUV, some of you will laugh! The roads are so much bigger here and there are a gazillion trucks so we thought something bigger would be good - also we need to consider the snow. Okay, so you're still laughing - for those of you who don't know, in NZ I always cursed the SUV owners because, driving a car that was low to the ground, I couldn't see past them. Now, I understand why they drive them.

Anyway, enough of that. We test drove a few - yes I actually drove on the wrong side of the road! We decided on two, a Nissan Xtrail which felt good to drive and had all the extras but it was black and I'm not so keen on that - it's been so hot here, the idea of getting into a black car just doesn't appeal. We also liked the Pontiac Torrent which is a nice looking car and felt nice to drive also. It has heaps of room in the back for our long legged daughter.

We agreed on prices for both - around the $18,000 mark with tax and on-road charges - you have to add all sorts of things to the price so if you think you're buying a $15,000 car, you end up paying about $18,000.

I rang an insurance agent only to be told that you can't register or insure a car without an Ontario drivers licence so we couldn't complete the deal! You can imagine how frustrating that was!

The most frustrating thing that we've found here is that no-one seems to know what the hell is going on! Every person you ask gives you a different answer - even if they work for the same company! Anyway, so the end result is that we now have to sit our drivers licences to be able to buy a car. So we've arranged to rent a car for another 2 weeks so that can happen. It's funny, we can drive a car but just not buy one!

So that's the frustrating part of the week. Now for the good part!

A Visit to A Beach!

Yesterday we drove to Windsor which we thought was going to take about 2 1/2 hours but ended up taking more than 4 hours. Chris and Cristina wanted to go to a lovely beach but they thought it was a lot closer than it was.

The cool thing about this was that it is just across the river from Detroit.

This picture is of a dead body we found washed up at the beach! They do say that Detroit is very dangerous.

No, not really, it's of Seb - he just looked like he was dead lying in the water so I took a photo of him.

This one is of Detroit - Jesse took this photo out of the car window while we were driving alongside the river.

Ok, it's well after midnight so I'm going to sleep now. I'll post the rest of the photos tomorrow