August 2nd and 3rd

Ok, just a quick side note before I get writing - look closely at the cooler on the left and you'll notice a bunch of water in the back left hand corner. See it? It didn't rain last night - that is from the HUMIDITY! Have I mentioned how humid it is?! Anyways, it was weird getting up this morning and knowing that we would be arriving in Kingston within 2 hours! We decided it was a good idea to get there in the morning to find our bearings in the new place, unpack and start getting organized! So we loaded up the car for the last time and headed towards the border! The closer we got, the more anxiety I felt! All this time, it’s just felt like a vacation and now it’s starting to sink in that we aren’t going home! We pulled up to the border, no line-ups, just crossed

right over from New York into Ontario and about twenty minutes later we were in Kingston! It’s quite nice entering into Kingston the way we did, you are greeted by the mouth of the St. Lawrence and get a nice view of Lake Ontario. Tall brick buildings surround you, many of them old and full of character. We headed straight to the building on campus where we picked up the keys to our new (and temporary) home! The buildings on campus are pretty much all made of brick and are massive and old looking in a cool way! It looked pretty neat and is really close to Lake

Ontario. Our place which we were told was on campus but I guess is just “campus housing” is actually about a 7minute drive away – a little farther than we expected but still doable for Carl

to walk. We looked at our odometer and it read 999.8kms. We kept track of the kms for the trip but it resets every 1000kms making our total kms 5999.8! Crazy! And then it was time to

enter our place! We pulled up the building, and it looked just as we expected from seeing it on Google Maps. We entered the building, not to bad looking, a little dated and a little worn but expected. We found our unit, first floor, and then we opened the door…To the right, we have a little walk through

kitchen and our living room, to the left, a fair size storage room, then a closet, then the bathroom and straight ahead, our bedroom. The kitchen has more cupboard space than we expected and there is more storage than we expected but the bathroom doesn’t even have a counter! There is a bathtub, a stand-alone sink on rusted poles, a toilet and about enough room to turn around in! The walls are all the same color, a bland off white color that is peeling all over the place! The floor is a beach colored, old style hardwood. Our first thoughts were, “not bad, we can make it work”. It’s a little disappointing that all the paint is peeling and that the bathroom has nothing to be desired but it’s home for now! We have a big window in the living room and in the bedroom – our view is of the parking lot and the main entrance (everyone walks by our unit to enter the building). We unpacked our car and started out on our first mission, find a bed and get cleaning supplies! After shopping for several hours and bringing home a new bed set (Queen size box spring, mattress, bed frame and 2 free pillows for $370 – YES!), it was time to clean! We started at 7:30pm and gave up at 2:30am! It was dirtier than we thought – in fact, it was disgusting! After about 7 hours of cleaning, we had only tackled, the bedroom, the bathroom and part of the kitchen! Carl spent 2 hours just scrubbing the toilet! You can imagine how dirty it was – ugh! So, off to bed only to wake up at 7:30am the next morning and keep on cleaning! After about 12 hours of both of us scrubbing until our fingers hurt, was the place clean enough (and we are not THAT anal about cleanliness!). All this done, in

sweltering hot and humid weather with no fans! Apparently this is the second heat wave Kingston has had and the FIFTEEN stores (no joke, we counted!) we visited were ALL sold out of fans!!! Even the locals were

complaining about the heat and humidity and they probably had a fan at home! Anyways, our first few days have been hot, we have cleaned more than we hope to ever have to clean a house again, and we have ran around town a lot, visiting Wal Mart and various other stores about 3 times in 2 days! But we are finally at a point where we feel somewhat organized!