Carrick to Calgary

P here again! Things are moving on apace - slowly, but surely, we're making progress towards making this empty shell of a house into our Canadian home from home. As I've said before, this shopping business is a little mundane, and half of me feels like we should be making a bigger effort to see as much of Alberta as we can before the ice and snow come back. However, exploring the countryside needs to take a bit of a back seat until we get the house into a homely shape.

We spent most of the weekend building the furniture flat packs that we had delivered from Ikea on Saturday. While the bookshelves, chests of drawers, bedside cabinets and chairs look great now, it wasn't a bundle of fun getting them built! We had the packages delivered at about 11am on Saturday, and by 8pm we had constructed everything except the two armchairs. The shelves were okay, the desk was a little more difficult, and I would certainly baulk at having to construct the 6 drawer unit again.

This is the first item of furniture that we constructed (complete with new amplifier and speakers to play the iPod)



And here are a few of the pictures of the other bits of furniture in their before and after states! (we decided not to show you most of the nasty in between phases!!)

Desk - before





The final desk (+ new computer)




As I said, the drawer unit was a bit of a nightmare - see below:










I also meant to put up a picture of the gorgeous flowers that we had delivered from my mum. dad, Denise and Roy, so now that I've learnt to post pictures, here they are:





Today's major activity was going out to buy a car. The neighbourhood that we live in seems to be populated by many four wheel drive vehicles and pick-up trucks. However, driving around the roads in Calgary has led us to believe that a big truck will not be necessary to get from Tuscany to the Foothills Hospital to Crowchild shopping centre and back, so we finally bit the bullet today and bought what the Canadians call a sub-compact car. After reading a few reviews on the net, we decided to go for a Japanese import - specifically a Honda Civic. We have a Honda dealership just down the road (Village Honda, Crowfoot Shopping Centre, Crowchild Trail), so we thought we'd have a look there. We wandered on to the lot, and within 2 minutes of arriving, our salesman (Gary Rhodes - no, not the chef) had us out in a maroon Honda Civic for a test drive.It was grand; at 2 years old, it had only 36,000 kilometres on the clock, and was being sold for CAD$16,995.. I thought it was fine, but Mr White felt that it was a little basic. Actually, he had his eye on a black 'Sport' version of the same car, which although it had about 70,000 km on the clock, had anti lock breaks, a full electrics package, air conditioning, an automatic gear box, a CD player, heated mirrors etc for the same price (CAD$16,995). So... guess which one we went for??! After a little bit of negotiation, we ended up paying CAD$16,995 for a fully 'loaded' automatic black Honda Civic, with mats and four new ice tyres thrown in to the price.

So, once we get a bank draft sorted out to pay for it, insurance to enable us to drive it, and get new plates, it looks like we'll be the proud owners of a black Honda Civic (complete with a rather restrained rear spoiler)!


We then took a little bit of a drive out in to the coutryside. One great thing about where we live in Calgary is that it takes only 5-10 minutes drive to get out of the city. This evening we headed north towards Airdrie and the roads were something else. Mostly, we were on tarmack...





but there were also a few stretches of gravel road... I can see why you might need a four wheel drive vehicle if you were travelling on gravel for any length of time. We're still driving the Chevrolet Impala that we have hired from Avis, and while its a great car for tarmac, its a nightmare on gravel roads... It has such a huge bonnet and boot and it just seems to fishtail on anything other than tarmac. However, I suppose that won't be much of a problem, given that Gary Rhodes is very keen for us to take the black Civic of his forecourt by Wednesday. I think that he needs to get his sales figures looking good by the end of the month! So, we've checked with Avis, and even though we said that we wanted to hire their Impala until 11th July, they're willing to take it back early. This is great because it saves us a substantial amount of money on the hire costs.

So - that's about it for now. Tomorrow we visit insurance agents, go to our bank for a draft to pay for the car, and then hopefully do something nice in the afternoon.

By the way - I just remembered that I promised a picture of the button up blind (how exciting!!!)




More later..... (and more exciting pics)....