Chilliwack BC, at The Cottonwood Meadows RV Park is now our home for a month. The RV park is just off Hwy 1 which provides good access to the city and family, Nik and Michael, living 15 minutes away. For the next 4 weeks we get all the necessary BC documents changed over and sorted out, and spend a week dog sitting.
The RV Park gave us a fairly large drive-thru site with full hook-ups (hydro is on a meter), with hedges on both sides for privacy. It is nicely set up, with good wifi, and a gate for security. We feel good leaving the trailer there for a week while we dog sit. The price is decent too compared with some others we had checked out online.
After a couple days, we head to Sardis where Nik and Michael have a terrace home (Treetop) high above Chilliwack with gorgeous views of the mountains, farmland well below, and glimpses of the fraser river. It is a newly built area, still being developed with amenities only a short drive away. We will spend a week looking after their home and 10 year old English Sheepdog Charlotte. It will be nice to have a bath, and a kitchen with lots of space for a week.
To get the lay of the land before they leave for the week, Nik takes us on a drive to get some groceries for a pre-Thanksgiving turkey dinner since he won’t be here for the big day, and duck breast from a local poultry farm he discovered. Sardis is surrounded by farmland, so there is no shortage of local produce. The poultry farm has great prices considering, and we also bought fresh eggs and perogies. Turkey dinner is delicious and provides lots of leftovers, including a lovely soup Nik makes the next day. YUM.
Changing our ID and plates turns out to be a bit of a chore here in BC. In Penticton at the Service Centre I was turned away because my passport unfortunately does not have my middle name on it and therefore does not match my Ontario drivers license. I was told I would have to provide my birth certificate along with my marriage certificate. These documents are in a box in our storage crate in Abbotsford … sigh…….. I had wanted to inspect the crate anyhow. Since we were driving Nik & Mike to the airport in Abbotsford, an hour away, we called Alert Storage and asked them to have our crate ready and arranged to drop off the canoe there for storage as well. The storage facility had our crate on the warehouse floor – a wooden pallet – and of course the box with my ID was at the back, but the employee helping us just shook it off and said he would put the puzzle of our boxes back on his own, and store our canoe in the rafters after drying out the UV cover and putting it back on. We were happily impressed with the facility and staff. But, $90 charge for accessing our crate.
At the Chilliwack service centre , changing my drivers license went smoothly, this time with the proper ID in hand. BC has a very different system than what we are used to in Ontario for vehicle licensing and ownership and it is NOT straight forward. BC service centres complete the drivers license changes and also start the process for provincial health care. Easy enough but you then have to do an online application for health coverage to complete the process. For the truck, we had to have it first inspected at a certified facility, with a cost of $180, in order for the plate to be changed as well as get an official letter from our current insurance company with our claims history. You could have a car new, just off the lot, you still have to pay. In BC, vehicle (and RV) insurance is charged both through ICBC (The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, ie. the government ) and supplemental private insurance, so after 3 hours at BCAA where we had to present ID, inspection papers, and where the truck VIN has to be physically verified by our broker, we finally had new BC plates at a cost almost triple to our previous rates in Ontario.
BC – Bring Cash! What a long day. We have to go back to change the plates for the trailer though, because they have to actually see the VIN themselves. Sigh again……..