we bought a car, packed up our lives and moved to nelson

Marcus and I finally found our way to our new cabin on the shores of Kootenay Lake in Nelson, BC!

For the past few months we’ve had big plans to move to Nelson but it seemed that everyone else in the world was also trying to move here too! We struggled to find housing, but finally met a lovely couple who own a property with a few cabins and homes on Nelson’s North Shore. At the end of October we signed a lease with them and started to pack up our lives in Vancouver.

Before we could move we had to find a car. We hoped to get a Toyota Rav-4 or a Honda CR-V but could only find expensive and beaten up cars with lots of kilometers. After maybe six test drives of various cars, and 10 days from our moving date, we finally found one that checked all our boxes!

Meet Beni! She’s a 2005 Honda CR-V. She had 157,000 km (now more like 158k…) and a clean bill of health. She’s been well maintained for her 15 years and with records of every check-up and repair done over the past decade. We got her oil changed and started preparing for the big move.

I had lived in my Vancouver apartment for five years, and Marcus for two. We had a LOT of stuff. A very gracious friend from Nelson drove his truck to Vancouver for the weekend and helped us get our bikes, Marcus’s (new) motorcycle, and a few big boxes to our new home.

We crammed boxes, suitcases, furniture and more into Beni and when nothing else fit, we started stuffing socks, jackets, and underwear into all the nooks and crannies.

Marcus and I scrubbed up our Vancouver home clean, left the keys on the counter, and hit the Crows Nest Highway, bound for the small town nestled between the mountains.

On our way out of Vancouver we had a proper coastal send-off, with pouring rains, low visibility and our wipers on full-speed. The drive was otherwise easy and felt faster than ever, with only a 30-minute section of snow at Paulson Pass.

Now we are here, setting up our lives in a small cabin by the beach. This new home is bigger and cozier that the last, with sun streaming through our windows all day, the lake just a few steps away, and a gas fireplace to get us through the cold months ahead.

I’ll be sharing some more photos once we secure a few more crucial items (like a couch)! But for now I’ll leave this photo of the beach and of our cabin so you can picture where we’ll be spending so much of our time in the many months to come.

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