Brian and I had a great Christmas vacation. We flew down to Edmonton and met Karlyn Bedwell, his best friend Ryan's 10 week-old daughter. She was adorable and survived me holding her a couple of times. Then we went on to Victoria. Our flights were great and mostly on time. We arrived in Victoria and Brian commented on the smooth flights - I commented that its not totally smooth until we get our bags. Needless to say, our bags arrived 7 hours later and we now have a credit with Westjet. We spent Christmas visiting Brian's uncle, aunt and grandfather and my grandparents, parents, sisters (and boyfriends), uncles, aunts and cousins.
On December 27th, we went and helped my grandparents and uncles clean up the lake property. We the huge wind storms in BC, thousands of branches had fallen off the trees and the ground was just laden with them.
I borrowed some clothes from grandma and we spent 6 hours picking up the branches and throwing them on the fire. We had 2 big 4 foot fires going for 6 hours.
Finally, we took the ferry to Vancouver and visited Brian's grandfather's old property on the Alouette River in Maple Ridge where he used to spend all his summers. We had dinner with Brian's aunts Kim and Kathi and Uncle Vern and cousins Aaron and Paul. Overall, it was a relaxing vacation and we were able to visit everyone we wanted to.
So, we said so long to our Dakota. It was sad but something we had to do. We'd decided that if we sold it we would look for a second hand truck that we could buy and own. Well, you should have seen us surfing the autotrader website. We were looking from Ontario to BC for a second hand Toyota truck. Brian had found one in Victoria and one in Winnipeg that he liked but we'd have to wait until the end of March to see them. So we kept looking. On Thursday, I was talking to a friend who owns a Toyota and another person overheard our conversation. She informed me that her husband was selling his Toyota truck and gave me his name and number. I passed it on to Brian during lunch but never heard if it was what we were looking for. When I got home from work, Brian commented that he liked the truck and it was in our price range. He failed to inform me that he'd already test driven it and taken pictures until later that night. We wanted to have it inspected by a mechanic so Brian called up the Toyota dealer in town and got an appointment for 1pm to have the truck checked out. By 5pm when he picked me up from work, he'd bought the truck and organized insurance on it and I'd only seen pictures of it!! I was totally okay with it because he liked it and the price was right. One friend was totally correct in saying that I liked it because I'm frugal!! Needless to say - here it is. It needs a few things fixed but is otherwise a great vehicle.
