Day 1 – Everything I own is in a 10′ uhaul

Edmonton to Regina

Date: Friday, July 24/09
Gas: $0.86/liter
Cost: $62 to fill
Destination: Edmonton, AB to Regina, SK
Distance to travel: 486.5 miles
Time to travel: 7 hrs 33 minutes
Departure time: 3:30 pm MST
Arrival time: 11:30 pm

What a hectic day! We had planned to leave by noon, but of course things never go as planned. There are always a few wrenches in the plans.

Police Security Check
We need a police security check to give the Belize immigration department when we apply for residency next year, so we thought it would be a good idea to get one before we left. We went in on July 2, and were told that it would be ready by the 22nd. Brad went in with his receipt and ID to pick them up, as we had requested, but they weren’t ready. He asked if they could be mailed instead. but they said there was no way to find it in the pile of thousands of other applications. Apparently, the police service does not use computers to do this task – they use a manual in/out box paper system (any computer programmers out there reading this blog?) Plus, even though I gave him a note with my driver’s license that he could pick mine up, we both had to go down in person with our receipts to even request that they be mailed instead of picked up!

So, on top of everything else we had to do to pack up and clean the house before the new owners came at 11:30, we had to get to the police station to ask to have them mailed. (We would have phoned, but have you ever tried to call the administrative line for the Police?)

Wrench 1 – both of us were without vehicles. Brad sold his corvette and truck earlier that week, and my car was at Dean’s so he could sell it, and I had cancelled the insurance as of midnight.

Wrench 2 – I had just given all my accounting records and RECEIPTS to Gail the night before, so I had to get them back from here in order to get the receipt to go to the police station. Gail graciously offered to take the bus over to my place to drop them off. This is after driving over to my place the day before to pick everything up. THANKS GAIL!!! By the way, Gail is a super bookkeeper, and I highly recommend her if you need help in this area. She also works at Black Cat Press, a company I use for a lot of my printing work, as some of my clients already know.

Wrench 3 – Our phone was shut off as of midnight of the 24th, so we could dial out but no one could dial in. Make sure you have a cell phone when you are moving and that important people (like your lawyer) know the number.

So Dean came at 9 in the morning to pick us up and give us a ride. (Did I mention that we were up til 3am packing and cleaning the night before?)

We went down to the station and got the same person Brad talked to yesterday, and again she said we couldn’t have them mailed, so I asked if we could fill in new forms and have those mailed, she said we’d have to pay the fee again. I said no, I’d like to speak to a supervisor. This was a very good thing. It turns out that she understood our situation and was able to let us fill in the forms again, for no additional charge. She had been to Belize before and recommended that we go diving in the blue hole.

Then we had a surprise, while we were driving home from the station, she called my cell (see wrench 3 above) to say that our forms were ready and would be waiting at the front counter! She had just solved some big problems for us, as we were still trying to figure out how we would get them in Belize, fedex or someone to bring them on a visit? THANK YOU HEATHER!

We got back to the house in time to meet Brad’s parent who came over to help us with our laundry, and loads to Value Village and the Eco-station, and to pack up the kitchen. I worked on my stuff from the office and Dean was on box-making and packing detail. I had to call the new owners and ask them to give us a few more hours before they came to get the keys. They were so nice, and didn’t come over til 1:30, which gave us enough time to get everything out of the house and into the garage so we could finish the shipping list and labelling all the boxes before loading them into the truck. After many tearful good-byes, we were off. Only 31/2 hours behind schedule. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I would’ve thought of taking some photos of us saying good-bye to everyone and leaving the house for the final time, or even some shots of the inside of the house to show how it looked before, during packing and after when it was empty. Oh well, this is when photoshop comes in handy.

The Roads
Everyone is always saying how awful the roads in Saskatchewan are, but we thought they were great. I guess they’ve been doing a lot of construction lately, because the roads had new blacktop and fresh paint. And as far as a boring straight drive, that was a lifesave! we were so exhausted from sleep deprivation and packing and cleaning, a straight easy 8 hour drive was most relaxing.

The UHaul
Brad was dreading driving the uhaul for 8-12 hours a day, especially with a sore back, but the uhaul was pretty nice. I guess 1-way rentals require new trucks so the one we had was a 2008 with only 40,000 miles on it. It was very clean inside with “leather” bucket seats, and air-conditioning. It got good gas mileage too. We could drive about 600 highway kms on 1 tank. We are driving about 75 mph – the speed limit in the US. Even in 1 lane construction zones the limit is 65 mph.

The Cat
We brought the kitty’s hard carrier, so she can stand up and turn around and sleep in it. I knew she was pretty good in her carrier in the car, but we’ve never been on a 8 hour trip. She was so quiet, that we decided to let her out for a stretch in Lloydminister. She just walked around a bit and then went under my seat and stayed there for a while, then came out and sat on Brad’s lap. Then she found the depression in the top of the dashboard and curled up in there to look out the window.

The Bugs
When we got the uhaul, the windows had not been cleaned and there were tons of bugs on it – which you can see in my photos. When we stopped to get gas, we gave the windshield a good washing. We had just cleaned the windshield and were remarking how few bugs there were in SASK and then it got dark. It was as if we were driving through a hailstorm, except that it was a clear sky. There were so many bugs hitting the windshield that in 5 minutes, we could barely see out of it. This went on for about an hour. It was as if everything changed after Saskatoon. Once we left Regina the bugs were not so bad, but we still needed to clean the windshield on a regular basis.

The Technology
I expect my iphone will be my main tool for the journey, I can use it for photos, GPS, internet, phone calls, and reading our travel documents. The only problem is that the battery doesn’t last very long, and it doesn’t come with a car charger. Thus I ran out of power before we reached our final destination and I couldn’t take pictures of everything. I’ll fix that for tomorrow.

Filling up outside Sherwood Park, AB