Shopping + Car Repairs

Day 25 -- Kingston, ON


The traveling part of our trip is now over but I think I will keep updating this until we are at least settled in (or run out of internet service) to update our families back home. Our "trip" technically doesn't end until we move into our apartment on August 1 though!

Today, our goals were to find out what was wrong with the car, to get a rental car, and to at least place an order on a bed.

We found out news about the car around noon. Unfortunately, it's a pretty major problem. In short, the air compressor (for our air conditioning) seized up. It is part of the system that recharges the car battery though, so when it stopped working, our battery stopped charging. We need to basically replace our air conditioning system and the parts need to be shipped from Toronto. Since the long weekend is coming up, repairs won't start until middle of next week at the earliest! It is also a big repair bill but we decided that it's still worth it to keep our car. My parents will help us out with the bill -- thanks Mom and Dad!

Having these problems just before a long weekend makes things a bit worse. We had originally planned to use our car to drive around to price out mattresses and buy other essentials. We tried to get a rental car this morning but without a reservation and being a long weekend, everyone was out of cars! So we are still currently on a wait list for a car rental this weekend.

We survived today without a car though with some good old fashioned manual labour. Luckily the dealer where our car is being repaired is only about a kilometre or two from our hotel so we moved a couple of boxes from our car to the hotel manually. We also took the bus to several furniture/mattress stores that were close together and walked to other places. We can probably survive tomorrow without a vehicle either but it would be nice to have one for the move-in on Sunday. If we are lucky enough to get one tomorrow, we can use it to move in on Sunday. Otherwise we may have to use a taxi. We might try to rent one middle of next week to go to IKEA too.

After looking at several places, we narrowed it down to Sears and Mattress Mart. After considering deliveries fees, metal frame, etc. the Sears one was slightly lower in price than Mattress Mart. However, Mattress Mart was able to deliver on Sunday afternoon, right after we move in. The guy at Mattress Mart agreed to not charge us for the frame and to include a set of sheets, 2 pillowcases and 2 pillows so we sealed the deal! We also found a nice sofa at United Furniture Warehouse but we have not committed on anything yet.

We also had a shopping list of cleaning supplies that we would need for move-in day. Our hotel is near a shopping centre which includes Canadian Tire, and they had a sale on so we got almost everything on our list. We left some items to get at the dollar store that we will be going to tomorrow. Laura managed to somehow arrange everything in a cloth shopping bag and a bucket we had bought and we carried it back to our hotel.

At the end of the day, we were pretty tired from all the walking around in the hot weather and lifting. Laura got a bit red from the sun because she didn't use sunscreen, despite my warnings! We thought we deserved a break so we ordered pizza for dinner and saved the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.