Travel Delays
We figured the best deals at the grocery store were the sandwiches expiring that day. We ate lunch and dinner for under $15 total. We also had chicken, coleslaw, and potato salad one day, all at 50% off. We did this the last few days in Halifax to stretch our already stretched food budget.
I worked on an IKEA shopping list for my new home office. A nice distraction from the scene work and guest blog post I was struggling to complete in the hotel. We had two beds in our room. One was where we slept, and the other had become the office bed where I was doing my writing.
Jamie stitched together the vlogs he had recorded over the months we traveled in the United States. He sat at the little desk in the corner of the hotel room. The videos captured us talking about every place we thought we might move to. His mind was distracted, just as mine was. We had to be careful with what we said to each other. It was easy to say the wrong thing. We didn’t want to fight. We tried to stay focused on the home we were taking possession of in a month.
Calls had to be made to arrange for our things to be shipped east, we had to book more hotels, and we had to figure out a route to drive across the country. We planned to take care of these details when we got back, over the Easter long weekend.
I thought it would be a good idea to film each stop of our drive across Canada, leaving from Vancouver Island, from the storage unit in Sooke, to Pictou and our new home and where our new life would start. But that never happened. We didn’t take any pictures during this leg of our journey. I think the screenshot from my Fitbit app on April 17th sums up what this week was like for us after we flew back from Halifax.
The 17th was our travel day. My heart rate was elevated from stress, not activity. 18.5 hours in the fat burn zone!
We got up at 4 am to shower and take the rental car back before our flight. When we got to the airport to drop off the BMW, there was no one inside at the desk. Jamie couldn’t find a drop-off box for the key. We had a moment of panic, and then a nice woman who worked in the airport (she had a reflective vest on) pointed to the dropbox outside. From there, we went through a very busy security check and then sat in the gate to wait for our flight. There was an announcement that our plane was going to be delayed so passengers from Newfoundland could make our flight. They let us get on the plane, but we had to wait a long time for the 20 or so passengers to join us. There was a baby that cried the whole flight just across the aisle from us. Jamie and I had to sit in different rows. It was hot, and there was a smelly person beside me. We had to run to our gate in Edmonton when we landed. Everyone was loaded, but they held the plane for a few other passengers, including us, from the Halifax flight. At least on this plane it was cooler, but we had hoped to get some food and water and go to the bathroom before we got on the next flight.
We had one more flight before we got to the Island, and we had a few hours before the plane left Vancouver for Victoria. Jamie had an awful headache. I had a headache too, but I didn’t realize my elevated blood pressure was causing it.
The next morning Jamie dropped our truck off for service at 7:30 am. We sat in the Ford customer lounge until the truck was ready. By 10 am we were headed up island to Port Alberni to spend Easter with Jamie’s parents. While we were there, Jamie called Pedder Bay RV Resort and booked us in for Monday, April 22nd. We had the spot until May 1st when we planned to leave for Nova Scotia. We booked three U-Boxes for the 24th to be delivered to the U-Haul depot in Sooke.
We had to move our keepsakes (already packed) out of storage and into shipping containers. Sounds easy enough. It wasn’t.