Canadian Adventure Practicalities & Plans part 1

July 2004.....OK… enough of this rose tinted guff! (but I’ll get back to that shortly as its just so awesome here!)

After the initial couple of days spent wandering around the farm aimlessly with sporadic exclamations of Wowwwww, we had to knuckle down to practicalities and the next week or so was taken up with lots of travelling and again even more paperwork. We tackled these necessities in this order (I may go into rather un-interesting details here but this could possibly be of some use to anyone thinking of moving to Canada)

Collect Pooh from Airport… ermmmmm…and before you say anything I don’t mean faeces for some bizarre recipe but rather our middle aged, bad breathed poodle.

Pooh arrived at Halifax airport 2 days after we landed in Canada.  http://www.airpets.co.uk  organised the flights for us as it was impossible for her to travel with us on our budget airline as they did not have the facilities so we arranged a short stay at the airport kennels before she flew to Nova Scotia with Air Canada a couple of days later. It was an expensive process costing about £800 in total and had we done it ourselves we could have saved 50% but we didn’t feel too bad about doing it this way as our air-flights through  http://www.canadian-affair.com  had saved us over £1000 in comparison to booking with Air Canada.

Anyway…..what we thought would be a quick trip to and from the airport to collect said pooch, took considerably longer than anticipated as ‘Airpets’ had given us the wrong landing time of the Air Canada flight so when we arrived at the cargo bay to claim her we were advised by the clerk to kill a few hours at ‘Tim Hortons’ (everyone loves Tim Hortons coffee in Canada and it is rumoured to have addictive qualities) until her flight came in.

We did just that and several coffees, iced cappuccinos and boxes of ‘Tim Bits’ later we bimbled back over to the cargo bay to wait for the airport vet to give ‘Pooh’ the all clear before signing her off. Once this was done we then had to take signed paperwork over to customs in the main airport terminal to get the final stamp of approval and were then able to finally take her home to the farm at long last!

Read more on my web site http://www.acountrylife.com

Podcast and interview with someone moving to Nova Scotia  http://www.acountrylife.com/aclrr/ACLRuralRadio4.mp3