Our first trip to Canada
In April 2004 we made our first visit to Canada. We had two weeks there, the first week was a holiday, the second a fact finding mission.
We started off in Toronto and stayed there for four nights. We really loved Toronto. We have been to many other cities in both the UK and USA, but Toronto was by far the best. It was very friendly, everything you could want from a city was there, shopping – lots of it, attractions such as the CN Tower, lake views and even islands…what more could you want.
Whilst we were there it was pretty cold, but quite a lot of sun, so really nice. We stayed in a great hotel – Cambridge Suites which was within walking distance to pretty much everything, we didn’t use our vehicle the whole time we were there.
After Toronto we drove round to Niagara Falls, staying at the Embassy Suites Hotel. Wow, we had the most magnificent view of the falls from our room. Thankfully the hotel was right at the side of the Canadian falls and well out of the way of Clifton Hill which looked to us like a cheap and tacky version of Vegas. Shame to have this in such a naturally beautiful location. We spent two nights here and really loved it. It was very, very cold here – snow still on the ground, but it was beautiful.
After Niagara we then started our fact finding mission. We drove down to London Ontario and stayed at the Residence Inn in the city centre. We used this as our base to visit the surrounding area and towns. We had previously been in contact with a real estate agent who we met on our first day there. He had some properties to show us and agreed to pick us up from our hotel the following morning.
True to his word, he took us to about four properties which really gave us a good idea of the sort of properties that were available to us in our budget – a lot more than you can get for the same in the UK. Kevin, the realtor said he would pick us up the following morning to view some other properties. In total, he took us out for about five days house-hunting. We were not expecting this as he knew we could not buy at this time, but he went out of is way to help us and not only show us houses, the the area in general.
By the time we had to head home, we had been down to Post Stanley, up to Grand Bend and visited many towns in between and to the east & west. We decided that this was the area we wanted to settle in, although which area specifically remains to be seen.
Two weeks after we returned to the UK we received our Acknowledgment of Receipt (AOR) which is the first confirmation from Canadian immigration that they have received your application and that it at least contains the minimum required information. It stated that it could be at least 15 months before we heard from them again…..more waiting!
