Leaving Canada

After driving around 7,000 km across this vast country of ours, we are now setting off on the next leg of our journey to New Zealand and Australia. We have now been travelling for exactly 5 weeks and everything has gone extremely smoothly so far – everyone is healthy, we are still talking to each other, we have seen and experienced much of what Canada has to offer, visited friends and family, and seem to be relatively still on budget.

I have been tracking all our receipts in a spreadsheet in google drive which gives us a good idea of where we are spending our money by category (food, travel, accommodation, activity, and other). It is a bit tedious, but I think it will be worth it in the end and using Google Drive is very easy to do on mobile or on laptop.

We spent our last few days in Canada in Vancouver doing some sightseeing and trying to get organized

We hit the major tourist attractions - went for a bike along the sea wall in Stanley Park, toured Granville Island, and walked around Kitsilano beach.

I have to say that I have some mixed feelings about Vancouver. On the plus side, it has some really beautiful areas, has a good food scene, and seems to be a very livable city if you can handle the rain (we were again fortunate with absolutely incredible warm and sunny weather). However, one of the striking things about Vancouver is the level of homelessness. We drove down Hastings towards the downtown and passed right along the heart of “tent city”. I have seen this covered briefly on the news, but to see it in person is another thing. We drove for at least ten blocks of complete slums – streets lined with tents, garbage, mattresses, shopping carts, etc. People were walking around like zombies completely strung out on drugs. It was very hard to imagine that this is going on in a country like Canada. I don’t know what the solution is, but this is a very serious problem that needs to be dealt with. The whole thing is very disturbing. Anyways – don’t mean to be a Debbie downer.

Besides some sightseeing, our mission in Vancouver was to take care of some business. We needed to sell our car! I placed ads in Autotrader, Kijiji, and Craiglist. With the exception of a couple of lowballers and one scammer, there were no good leads. That left no option but to go to the dreaded dealer. After several appointments with dealers, everyone was coming in with offers well below market. With very little time remaining I said to Mel that we should just bite the bullet and take the best offer. We were on our way to drop the car off at the dealer with the best offer, and as we were driving I suggested that we try one more place. We walk in and the dealer says the same thing as all the others and comes in at the exact same price. Frustrated, I told him that the price was too low and that I would love to just keep the car. He then says, well, let me ship it for you. $1,500 + tax. Deal! We would have lost at least $5k to $6k by selling it and would have to buy another car on our return, so it was really a no brainer. Nice to have that all dealt with. The other bonus was that we could ditch some of our extra baggage and stow it in the car to be shipped back home. We now have 4 carry on bags, 3 knapsacks, and a travel guitar, so we do not have to check any items. It takes us a while to get through security, but I’d prefer that then having the airline lose one of our bags!

Next stop - Auckland!