Yesterday we decided to take a drive round whilst the weather was nice. We basically followed our noses and ended up in the Thousand Island area near Kingston.
We started out in the morning after a hearty breakfast at Denny’s, then just followed our noses. There are some simply beautiful lakes around this area and we kept stopping off to take a look and take the odd picture.
It is really nice just to take a drive as you often don’t venture too far from home and miss out on many things, which are really close by.
We did this the other week when we went down onto Prince Edward County and visited the Sandbanks area. This is a stunning bit of coastline and we are thrilled to have a great beach so close. It will be a nice place to take my aunt and uncle when they come over next year from Spain – not sure if we can compete with Spain though?
Anyone know of any other really nice locations in the area?
Yesterday we booked flights for hubby’s daughter and her friend to come over in December. They are coming over on the 4th and staying till the 19th. They want to visit Niagara Falls, Toronto, New England etc. We are happy to take them to these places depending on what the weather is like at this time. If there is six foot of snow, then maybe not!
I am sitting looking out of the window and we have a sudden influx of American Robins in the garden. We had thought that they had all left for the winter as we hadn’t seen any for a while, but there are about 20 in the garden at the moment. We have also seen loads of Dark Eyed Juncos which a lovely little birds.
It is pouring with rain today – again, so probably won’t be going too far today. Hubby also wants to get the drywall for the basement but needs to wait until the weather is better to avoid it becoming wetwall.
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!
