ADVENTURES OF THE CANADIAN FAMILY ROBINSON

We moved from our 2500 square foot home into our 220 square foot 5th wheel and we hit the road .  The weeks leading up to that we sold 90% of what we owned and packed the remaining 10% into storage at a friends or into the trailer It is hard to believe that it has been a year! But what an amazing year it has been. We have travelled over 50,000 km . Our children have seen and touched and learned so much and so have we. We have met some amazing friends, travelled to some beautiful places, meet more inspiring people, learned about sustainable living. We have grown way closer as a family. We have been lead back to where we came from. A piece of property has come available that is what we are looking for so today a year later to the DAY we are signing the papers to purchase 5 acres of farm land in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island. Amazing how things work out

SO we have had an very exciting and busy week since getting back to the island!  We camped the first night we got back at the farm we were on this spring which was great! Stormy was excited to meet some fellow farm border collies and we were so happy to be back there!

So the BIG NEWS  we LOVE the property that we have the offer on!! We  have been busy this week getting all our finances lined up and so far all is going smoothly! Looks like we will be bale to remove the subjects on Friday!! We will keep posting updates as they happen!

We have had an exciting week this week!

Just by chance I looked up the Cowichan Valley real estate listings, I was talking to a friend and explaining a neat property that we had seen there. As I was looking online for that I noticed a new listing. It had only been on the market for 3 days! It is 4.76 acres in a rural area called Westholme in the Cowichan Valley. It is about a 25 minute drive from where we lived before but still very close to other amenities, 5 minutes from the highway.. We decided to look into it a bit more and call our friend back home who is a real estate agent. She went to check it out for us and really liked it, so then Mom went and checked it out too. We made the choice that it was worth driving back to take a look to see if its the right thing for us. We are hoping to get close to 5 acres that are agriculturally zoned like this one. We thought it through and decided to put an offer in subject to us viewing it so it wouldn’t sell before we made it out there. The real estate market has picked up somewhat out on the island, some stuff still sits on the market for a long time, but if it is priced to sell like this one it will and quickly. About an hour after we wrote our offer we got a call that another offer was coming in from some other people. So we bumped our offer up to full price so we had a chance. They had until the next evening to let us know what was going on.. Well our offer was ACCEPTED! So we are enroute back to the island! Our offer is subject to us viewing and liking the property and also financing. We will keep you posted and let you know what happens!! Here are some pictures that my Dad went and took for us

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We had a few days of getting vehicle maintenance and repair done before heading out, we had a leak in our roof that had to be fixed, as well as some small stuff that was long overdue for us to fix! We had a wonderful farewell BBQ at Jason, Jody and Aden’s with them and Grammy and Papa. We made a cake to celebrate Curt’s birthday which is on the 25th!

We headed out Saturday after getting ready to go. We are bringing our Minivan back out with us since it has been just sitting out here, so we are traveling caravan style.. We loaded up some computer gear we had stored here as well as tools, so we have a fairly heavy load in our van! Its a change driving with just one kid (and the dog), Curtis has the other 4 in the truck with him. We headed west towards Rocky Mountain House, stopped there to fill up with fuel and grocery shop before heading out into the Rocky’s.. But we got a flat JUST as we pulled into the parking lot.. Bad news was the tire shops were all closed until Monday which was not good news for us since we are on a time schedule right now. Curtis was able to get ahold of an unmounted tire so we turned around and headed back to his brothers place to mount the tire. So we are back on the farm, got the tire fixed and are heading out today towards Jasper! We didn’t want to go through the mountains on our crappy spare tire and risk blowing another one in a scary location with 5 kids in the vehicle. Last time we went through Jasper we lost our brakes so we are a little paranoid of the mountain roads Curtis got a new camera for his business, a Panasonic GH1, amazing camera that shoots HD video as well as stills! Here are some pics from his first day playing around with it!

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