neill

Brown lawns are underrated. Brown lawn = No mowing.

Steve_

And everyone always say this - for a fact it happened, there was no gravel they hadn't put any down yet, it was in October, I think 2009. The windshield is laminated so it got very cold very quickly and it cracked on the outside. I dare say the odd divot in the windshield might have made it more likely to happen but the guy at Speedy Glass said he'd heard of it happening before.

In any event, you're far more likely to get your car damaged generally speaking here from gravel for example. Or one time I was behind a semi and a huge chunk of ice came off the top of the trailer and hit the hood of my car, denting it.

Don't ask me the psychics of the windshield, it happened, I was there, I suspect there's a difference between driving into it at 100 km/h and pulling out of your garage. I've been in a car that was struck by lightning as well when I lived in Florida. Raining outside, got in the car shut the door, really loud BOOM and I was blinded for several seconds. To begin with I thought it had struck a nearby lamp post. Car wouldn't start to begin with, eventually got it going. A few days later when it stopped raining I noticed a brown burn mark on the roof.

And another thing that happened to me in Calgary is when I got indirectly struck by lightning. Sitting here using my computer, lightning struck outside, close enough I could feel the heat of it through the window and ZAP it came up through my computer into my arm and the shock of it made me fall over sideways. I later discovered that it had come up the network cable and fried my cable modem and the NIC. Amazingly the computer still worked.

My imagination is not good enough to make up these stories.

Aviator

Even a minor chip can cause a windshield to crack with extreme changes of temperature. Our had a minor pitting on a new windshield. Sun came out, temp in car went up and a crack full width of the windshield on my OH new car. It would happen when I was using it though!

Steve_

This is another psychological coping mechanism though. "When I retire I'm going to move to Kelowna!" Where it's overcast all the time (and the winters are still quite bad), or the Fraser Valley where it rains all the time.

The only place in Canada where the weather genuinely isn't appalling during the winter is the southern tip of Vancouver Island - but then you're stuck on an island. How many times can you go to Nanaimo and Tofino?

I agree with Cheeky though the weather is sort of better here in that it's sunny, so you can sort of convince yourself that it's a nice day when it's -20+ outside, provided you don't actually go outside and you have a bath. But you can't do that everyday.

The thing about Victoria though is that it might be okay, but it seems a bit odd for British people to move all the way to a town that is quite similar to Plymouth.

Steve_

Ah you clearly live in Alberta, you never say "it's too hot", you say, "I'm going to the basement for a spell" or "I'm going for a walk around Canadian Tire."

I find the lack of AC can be compensated for with clever location of fans to create a draft. Last summer though it got so unpleasant I had to put reflectix in the bedroom window which acted like a magnifying glass and melted bits of the window frame. Oops. Did drop the temperature significantly though.

Stinkypup

As always Steve you are spot on with the facts....it is complete shite here. Sun..nope can't remember what it looks like..It always puzzles me why so many of your Albertan buddies choose to have second homes here and then subsequently retire here. I reckon it is the recurrent freeze/ thaw cycle that they get over there with you in Calgary, Edmonton, Grand Prairie which does something bad in their brain, Coz they clearly can't choose to do that.....can they?. I mean, why would they?????

Almost Canadian

I've had something similar happen to chips in my windscreen, not as a result in a change of temperature, but simply as a result of the car flexing as it went over a bump in a road.

But...


There are heated underground car parks all over Calgary and one would imagine that, if Steve' issue was a regular phenomenon, this would not be the first time I had heard about it. We used to stay regularly at the Delta Lodge at Nakiska (the venue of the alpine events at the 1988 Olympics) and many at time I have driven from there (temp around 18 degrees or so) to the outside with temperatures as low as -30, with no damage being caused to windscreens with chips in them.

While I appreciate that chinook winds can cause large variations in temperatures, I don't believe that the change is so sudden that it would be like hitting a wall but I completely accept that I am not an expert on such issues.

Almost Canadian

We had AC installed a few years ago and, in reality, it wasn't that expensive. Now we have it, I wouldn't be without it again. It isn't needed that often where we live but during that hot spell we had last year, it gave welcome relief.

Shard

That is such a good point!

Steve_

Well neither am I, I'm sure there were a few pockmarks in the screen, I was going by the comments from the guy at Speedy Glass. Let's put it like this, I've never had it happen anywhere else I've lived.

Steve_

Look everywhere has less sunshine than Calgary does in Canada, by definition. Yes I am exaggerating on that point but my general point is that I often hear Kelowna put forward as some sort of Nirvana by the people you are referring to and it definitely isn't. The record low in Calgary is -44 and the record low in Kelowna is -36.

Absolutely the weather is a little bit warmer and the winters are a bit shorter (partly because of the increased cloud cover), but Kelowna is also a pretty isolated city and so is Calgary, but at least Calgary is four times the size and you don't have to drive through mountains for hours to get anywhere.

If hacking it through harsh winters is what bothers you, the reality is that the southern tip of Vancouver Island is the only place in Canada that doesn't have harsh winters and that's obvious from things like this.

I've bumped into many of these Albertans you're referring to in California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida, so...

"Oh you've got BC plates/sound Canadian."

"Yes we're from Kelowna/Cranbrook/Kamloops."

"I'm from Calgary."

"Oh we used to live there but we retired to Kelowna/Cranbrook/Kamloops."

"What are you doing here?"

"We're here for the winter."

You should not feel guilty moving from Canada to somewhere else because you never tried living in BC, is the point I'm making. It's not some amazingly superior place to the rest of Canada. And why in God's name anyone wants to sit in a traffic jam in Vancouver (in pouring rain) to try and prove the point is utterly beyond me. It might be slightly better in certain ways but it always seems exaggerated to me. We have lakes in Alberta too and you don't always have to drive over a sodding mountain to get to them.

Stinkypup

Keep digging Steve, you will be popping your little head out in the Southern hemisphere very soon



Oh and by the way- Albertans don't get BC plates even if they move here, why should they?-rules are there to be broken.

Steve_

I'm not digging at all, Kelowna is overrated. You haven't even argued any of my points other than the cloud cover. I point this out every time the subject comes up, but I could move to BC next week if I wanted to. Maybe one of the days I will if I come up with a reason to but I've been all over BC and I don't feel particularly left out. In fact, when I first moved here, I basically couldn't move to BC for a number of reasons so I didn't have a look at it because everyone was telling me how great it was and I thought it would piss me off. Then I started looking around BC a couple of years later and I was like, "what the hell is all the fuss about?" That's when I came to the conclusion it's a psychological coping mechanism, one among many that people seem to have here.

At a basic level, people wouldn't just retire to Kamloops/Kelowna/Cranbrook if they were so great, they would live there all their lives. But the common situation seems to be to move there when you retire and then spend the winter down south somewhere.