Three Years, Part Two

Almost to the border ...

Three years ago today, we crossed the border into Canada. There is quite a story to go with that, but I’m saving it for another anniversary, so I’ll just say this: kids, don’t cross the border into Canada with the declared intention of moving up here on the eve of a major American holiday. Just take my word on this -- it’s a bad idea. Particularly if you don’t have all your ducks in a row, paperwork-wise.

That said, we somehow did manage -- with the help of some very-friendly Canadian authorities and some more-grumpy-but-very-kind American authorities to achieve our goal only a few hours behind schedule.

This is Huntingdon, near Abbotsford, where we crossed.

One memory that really comes to mind is that once we made it over the border (not a big deal if you’re visiting, but if you declare your intention to move here permanently as you are legally required to do, it’s a much bigger deal!) was seeing a sign that said Vancouver was further away than we thought it would be, meaning we’d be even later arriving than we already were -- only to realise a few moments later that oh yeah, we’re (back) on the metric system now -- so Vancouver wasn’t 30-something miles away, it was 30-something times 0.6 -- the conversion to kilometres. Suddenly the “time” we thought it would take us to get there was cut in “half!”

Of course, the next thing we did was adjust the settings on our very-cool van to metric settings. That was a good feeling. Things had changed.