Buying a car

I had made arrangements with Steve Vincent, an Australian teacher who is returning to Australia soon to buy his car. He has been driving a Dodge Caravan and he also had some camping gear to sell. We decided to buy the lot.

Seeing as he was living in Enderby – about 5 hours drive inland, and he was coming down to visit friends in Abbotsford – I was to meet him there. I organized all the paperwork I needed and left it on the table ready for the next day.

On Wednesday, New Year’s Eve day, I walked down a couple of blocks to get the bus down to Lonsdale Quay. It snowed last night. There was about 2 cm of snow on the ground. It was actually very slippery trying to get up the driveway. $2.50 gets you 90 minutes on public transport in zone 1. That includes the Sea Bus and the Sky Train. I used both to get to the Greyhound bus terminal at Main Street Station. It cost $12.95 to go to Abbotsford, and I caught the 9.45am. We stopped at Coquitlam and Langley before arriving at about 11.30.

I got off and walked to Wal-Mart to have a look around. It wasn’t until I was leaving and thinking about making contact with Steve, or his friend in Abbotsford that I realized that I had left the contact numbers on a piece of paper next to the computer at home. I had grabbed the document wallet with all the other paperwork, but not the phone numbers.

One reason that we had made the arrangements for today was that we would be able to get the transfer and insurance paperwork done. Steve has to actually take the number plates off and hand them in, while I have to register the car in my name and pay the appropriate fees and I get a new set of number plates for the vehicle.

Anyway … “What to do???

I couldn’t remember the name of his friend in Abbotsford, so that was no use. I didn’t have his Enderby number and he wouldn’t be in the phone book there because he is on exchange here. I tried to find a place nearby that would have internet access. Luckily there was a coffee shop nearby that had a computer with internet access. They charged $1 for 20 minutes. I ordered a coffee as well and hoped that there would still be some emails from Steve on my Edumail account. I had been cleaning them out and transferring them to my computer, but I didn’t have that with me.

“Hooray!!” – there was one still there with his Enderby number. Now I had to find a public phone, work out how to use it, call Enderby and hope that there was someone to answer the phone at the other end. The phonecard I had bought in Vancouver couldn’t let me ring anywhere except from Vancouver, Toronto, or Victoria. I had to get the operator to help me connect and charged to credit card. “Thank goodness!”, his wife Bronte was home. I and gave me the numbers that I needed.
I tried Steve – no answer. I then called his friend John Davidson who came and picked me up. He is a retired policeman from the area. Originally Scottish, worked as a policeman in London for 5 years and then travelled the world. Met a Canadian while travelling and settled here. 25 years in the police force and now retired. We had a coffee and waited for Steve to arrive.

He arrived at about 2:30pm and we had a chat for a while until I suggested that some of the businesses might be closing early because of New Year’s Eve. So off we went to find an insurance broker. They do all the paperwork, and issue the plates. The first one we went to had already closed, so off we went to find another. The one we found was actually right next door to the coffee shop I had been at earlier. We started to organize the paperwork until the guy behind the counter said that he couldn’t go any further because the car was going to be registered in the Lower Mainland, and therefore needed to go through a CleanAir check. This meant another trip to the depot for testing the quality of the emissions from the car. At 4:00pm on New Year’s Eve there was no queue so we went straight in to the testing bay. $45 and 2 minutes later we were on our way back to the insurance broker, but at least the car has a clean bill of health, which is valid for 2 years.

Back at the insurance broker we were trading in one set of plates and forking out the registration and insurance for the new ones. This worked out to be $3027 for 12 months because the paperwork I had from the insurers was inadequate for the BC insurers, One other reason that the insurance is so high is that the area that we are living in, North Vancouver, has the highest accident rate, and consequently the highest premiums. After all this, I finally screwed the new plates on at about 4:30pm, which by the way meant that it was just on dark. I was a bit worried about driving on the opposite side to normal, but turned the key and off I went. I had a van full of 4 all weather tyres, currently winter tyres on the car, 4 sleeping bags, 4 Thermarests, a tent, and a cooking stove.

When I got home I was about to pull into the driveway when I saw that the tenant from downstairs, Nigel already had his car down near the garage. He looked like he was trying to dig it out. It had slid to the side of the driveway towards the house. I parked up on the road and came down to lend a hand. His car had locked up and slid down the driveway hitting the garage door and then sliding towards the house. He has damaged some of the panels of the door, but it can still be opened. We spent some time trying to dig out the snow. It was icy under foot. We had the neighbours come to help, but all to no avail. He was hoping to go out to a party, I went for a drive to get some driveway rock salt, but all the service stations and Wal-Mart had sold out. One of the neighbours lent him a bag and he put that down hoping to make the drive less slippery. Straight away you could hear the ice starting to crack, but there was not enough salt, and too much ice. He tried to get it moving several more times to no avail. I said that I would drive him to where he wanted to go, but he said that he needed his car out to get to work tomorrow, and as it was starting to snow lightly again, it was only likely to be worse tomorrow so he was going to try and get a tow truck to come and winch him up the drive. Seeing as he couldn’t get out to get drinks for the night we went down to Westview shops to the state alcohol distributor, but they were closed. In the end we came back home and he took some beers that I had.

A few hours later I was about to cook a pancake and he called from downstairs. The guy in the truck cancelled because it was snowing, so I told him to bring the beers upstairs and we got to know each other a bit better. It looks like I will be driving him to work on Mt Seymour early in the morning. This is a job that he has to help him get through his course and pay the rent on the space below. When going to bed at nearly 1:00am we must have had about 4 – 5 cm of snow.