Yesterday was 'new car day'! Although our pick-up time wasn't scheduled until 4:30 pm, we skipped out of the office a bit early so that we could head to the bank to withdraw the funds to pay for the car and finalize our car insurance. It turns out that having that extra time was pretty important. An interesting thing about insurance in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is that you cannot insure a car without its rego (registration) number. The rego number is effectively your license plate number, which is tied to your mandatory third party liability insurance provided by the State. This was all a bit new to us, as we're used to simply requiring a VIN in order to insure a car.
So why are we mentioning all of this? Well..it turns out that it's very hard to get comprehensive insurance on a brand new car that is only being rego'd on the same day you pick it up. We had to wait until about 1 pm to get the rego number from the dealership before we could get our comprehensive insurance. And while - yes - we could have driven the car off the lot with liability insurance only, we were just not comfortable with that option. As luck would have it, however, we were able to get our rego number from the dealer two hours before we picked it up...which gave us two hours to get the comprehensive insurance set up. Talk about a time crunch!
Blair's never actually owned a brand new car before, so the process of picking a car up, signing all the paperwork, and having the salesman explain all the features of the car was a new experience for him!
Anyways...here 'she' is! Our brand new Mazda 3! :) (Name still TBD)
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Stacy had the honour of driving the car back to our apartment in the city. Along the way, we drove through an area of Canberra that has a large amount of bushland (along Belconnen Way). To our surprise, we saw a pretty significant and fast moving bush fire that was throwing off a heavy amount of smoke. Several emergency service vehicles were driving around trying to keep it under control. It was a pretty eye opening experience to turn your head to the left and see such a large fire blazing only 50 feet from your car. We seemed to be the only ones alarmed by this though...all the Aussies didn't even give it a second glance. We guess they're used to seeing fires of this size?!
In other news, we're still struggling to make a decision on where we're going to live in Canberra. The biggest problem is that the place we really want stay at has not yet approved our application (due to having cats)... and time is running out. Fortunately, we do have two other great places that we can fall back on (they've both already approved our applications). Both alternatives are equally nice in their own way. The first alternative is in a large swanky building (likely the most affluent building in Canberra)..but it does not have a pool and has a bit of road noise due to its central location. Choice number two is in a brand new building about a 5 minute drive to the city centre, in a quiet location with a pool, but the bedrooms are very small (by our standards). We believe that we will have to forget about our ideal place, and that we will end up at the first alternative which is in the city centre. This will be an interesting change for us - moving to a more urban location - as we've always lived in a quiet house in the suburbs. Only time will tell how well we adapt.
Have a good Easter weekend everyone!
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