Do you know your home's walk score? This number weighed heavily in our search for a place to live. Plug in your address on the Walkscore website. The higher the score, the more walkable your neighbourhood. Our previous house had a score of 25 out of 100. This one is a 92, can't do much better than that, and the bonus is that our street is quite quiet for being located in town. Our vehicle's gas bills have been reduced by 75%, partly due to the walkability, the rest is because living on the border we can duck down to the US for more reasonable fuel prices.
Made our first trek to the library, not a trek at all as it's two blocks down our street. I always feel a move is official upon the granting of a new library card. We've spent lots of time there on the free wifi as we aren't hooking up to to cable until after our construction phase is complete. Bonus: there's even a weekly knitting group. Here's my project, the New Wave Throw, one I started maybe two years ago:
I haven't lived in a house with a full flight of stairs between the main living and bedroom level since my childhood. In our previous home you could go from the master bedroom to the kitchen, dining or living room in six to ten steps. In this house, which seems quite tunnular, my word for a ling, skinny house similar to a double shotgun house of the southern US, it's 6o steps from the kitchen to the bedroom, with a full flight of stairs in the middle. Maybe I should have walk scored the inside of the house. A gold plated problem for sure, I'm not complaining. We'll eventually have a second master bedroom on the ground floor in case we need it in the future. A former coworker of mine, also recently retired, has moved into a three story house, figuring she'll probably lose her memory before the ability to climb stairs.
An appointment downtown Vancouver was my first foray into the peninsula's public transit. You board a cushy coach, as opposed to a city bus, for the 4o minute ride to Vancouver's Canada Line, followed by a 20 minute train ride, which puts you within a block of Vancouver City Hall. In traffic it would have taken the same amount of time plus the pricey parking.
The only down side, in this year of La Nina, is that sunny "White Rock" seems to have as many rainy days as the rain forest we left. But, as a friend pointed out, it's raining harder in Vancouver. According to statistics we can expect to have at least 25 percent more sun than YVR. C is looking forward to heading south, though, to find some sun to fully recover from his bout with pneumonia.