Wednesday, August 1 – TT Birch Bay, Blaine WA

What, are those high clouds obscuring our sun?  Yup!  Never mind, we have lots of insidey stuff to do today.

The WIFI is pretty good in the motorhome early in the morning but intermittent during the day so after a late breakfast and a tidy up we go over to the Quiet Lodge to use their fast WIFI.  Much faster, I’m on a roll today!

Book a rental car for Thursday, tomorrow so we can do stuff.  Even though Enterprise in Surrey BC is closer they can’t cross the border so we have to get a car delivered from Bellingham, 26 minutes away.  We want to do some driving up in Canada for a week or so and catch up with some friends from nearly 40 years ago.  We will have the rental car until 15 August when we drop it back at Bellingham WA to catch a flight to Los Angeles for four nights, Kim can’t remember ever going to San Diego so we need to go back so he can recapture his lost memories!  Then we jump on a ship (Carnival again – we might get a gold sail and play card this time being such frequent cruisers) to the Mexican Riviera, just to fill in time you understand.  It’s almost cheaper to do that than pay for hotels and food!   Most of this is all booked on line today but there is still lots to plan.

From the cruise we plan to maybe fly to Oklahoma City and still do the big 30th Anniversary Safari Rally to catch up with friends but we will stay in a hotel and get a rental car.  That puts us in a good position to drive down through Texas back to Houston ready to fly home on 6 September.   I’ve received so many email confirmations from all the bookings I've made I just hope I have done them all right!!

We have done a dry run packing our bags tonight, trying to keep it down to two, hence the carton to send home.  I think we will manage it OK, we can reduce further as we get through Canada if necessary before we catch the first internal US flight where they are a bit touchy about quantity and weight of bags.

Poor Lea and Ralph have been jumping through hoops to get all the documents completed to transfer the LLC which owns the RV over from us to them.  Because they are Canadians they are taking over the LLC and they have to work almost as hard as we did when we bought it.  They need a Notary to sign the Power of Attorney and they couldn’t find one who would do it in Canada so they had to come over the border again today to get that signed.  Lea had a bank check for the deposit yesterday but we prefer to have the money direct credited as we can’t easily get to a bank to make a deposit in a large motorhome! So then she had to have all the SWIFT and Routing numbers etc. and pay another $35 fee for the wire transfers and that’s CND$ which is about the same as NZ$.  However the low exchange rate is working very well for us this time sending money back to NZ.  They also decided to use our insurance broker because they need to insure it in the US.  We must have at least 50 emails going backwards and forwards between us.  They want to transfer the rest of the money Friday morning and pick up the coach early afternoon to take it down to TT La Conner for the long weekend.  We will be ready - I think - by then!