Month: June 2016

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One Week Left Till I Leave Indefinitely

I can’t believe how quickly departure day is sneaking up on me!

Here’s an update on my giant to-do list:

Reducing Expenses Back Home While I’m Gone

I can cancel the registration on my truck and have very minimal insurance to cover me for liability. This new policy will be $50 for a year. Savings: $70 per month. I have to do this at the last minute, so it’ll happen on my last trip to town next Tuesday.

I can cancel my SaskTel service since my contract is up. When I come back, I can either get service again with them if I can do so without a contract or look at Bell Mobility. Savings: $80 per month, but I lose my phone number. I have to do this at the last minute, so it’ll happen once I clear security at the airport next Friday. By the way, SaskTel has no customer retention program.

SaskPower will let me disconnect my power for a $170 reconnection fee when I get home. I pay a $30.65 connection fee every month. So assuming I am gone 11 months, I would have paid them $337.15 in maintenance fees. Savings: $15 per month over 11 months. I will get a new account number. I have to make sure I reconnect before a year is up, otherwise my meter has to be recertified by an electrician, negating any savings. I was able to put in a work order for this for next Friday or the following Monday. I didn’t realise that a technician had to physically come here. I really like SaskPower, by the way. I never feel like I’m out in the middle of nowhere when I deal with them.

Finding Healthcare Coverage

I actually didn’t have to do much research on this because the options were so limited and others had done the homework before me. I bought a policy with World Nomads. For just over $400, I am insured up the wahzoo for six months. The caveat is that my SaskHealth coverage needs to be valid for my trip. I put in a notice of extended leave with SaskHealth and haven’t heard back yet, but I’m not concerned as they didn’t have an issue with my doing this for my first winter in Mexico. Ha! I got email confirmation seconds after I posted that my request was approved!

Ensuring That I Have Insurance Coverage for Home and My Personal Effects While Away

As it turned out, my home insurance covers me perfectly even with the addition of my outbuildings, the RV no longer moving, and my traveling for long periods of time. The only thing I changed was increasing the coverage on my buildings, which was an extra $0.50 per month. I cannot discuss my home insurance in any more detail.

I got a nasty surprise that my electronics are not covered by my home insurance while traveling because they are used for business. I have an broker working really hard to find me travel coverage. If he succeeds, the policy will be able what I am paying right now for SGI (truck insurance and registration).

Understanding the Schengen Area Rules

What this boils down to is I’m allowed up to 90 days in the Schengen Area in a 180-day period. The area comprises most of Western and Central Europe, as well as some Eastern European countries like Poland, but excludes the UK. Now that I know I’ll be in Bulgaria, which is not part of the Schengen Area, for my full allotment of 90 days there, I have a better handle on how I’ll handle the Schengen Area to make sure that I can be in Portugal and/or the south of Spain for the bulk of January, February, and March.

Option 1: I leave Bulgaria for a Schengen country for a quick holiday at the start of July to open up a 180-day period that would take me the start of January. This would give me the option of doing Schengen countries like Poland and Greece after Bulgaria. I don’t like this idea because I would have to reenter Bulgaria.

Option 2: I complete avoid the Schengen Area until January. After Bulgaria, I’ll likely go to Serbia and a couple of other countries in the Balkans that are not part of Schengen and then very carefully make my way to Turkey. And by very carefully, I mean that I’ll have to fly because I won’t have the land option of going through Bulgaria and I cannot fly through Athens. Or I may travel straight to Istanbul from Sofia and then fly from Istanbul to Belgrade.

Planning My Packing List and Doing a Lot of Online Shopping

That’s done. I am washing the last of the clothes that I am taking with me for sure and will start packing for real in the next couple of days as I make time to take some photos for my series of posts about my packing list. Now that I know I’ll be in the Bulgarian mountains for three months I’m not so much having to make any significant changes to my packing list as being more certain of what items I can add since I actually still have some room and weight allowance left.

Trying to Learn Even a Smidgen of Bulgarian and At Least Getting Used to the Sound of the Language

My internet is behaving better and I can listen to a few YouTube videos every night. I don’t feel I’m making any real progress, but at least it doesn’t sound like complete gibberish now and I’m starting to recognise some Cyrillic letters…

Making as Much Money Before I Go

Definitely happening. I picked up a new client last night that I am still reeling from shock at adding to my list. I’m not making super good money, but steady easy jobs are the next best thing. I’m not worried about work. My clients are very supportive about my Europe plans.

What I’m hoping for my three rentless months in Bulgaria is to have a comparable cost of living as I do in Mexico as that will enable me really replenish my savings. I expect that any savings I have on rent will be lost with weekend jaunts in the area, but I may be surprised. I do think that I’ll save money over being at Haven in that food will be much cheaper and I won’t have all those at home surprises in the budget that I’m sure other homeowners know about.

What I still need to do:

1. My 2015 taxes. I just can’t be bothered when I have so much work, so this will happen probably on Wednesday next week. Before anyone freaks out, I’m a sole proprietor, so I have till June 30th to file.

2. Make sure I’m satisfied the roof is leak free. I had a drip the other day after a bit storm, just a couple of drops, which was do disheartening when I’d gone through two solid days of rain with no leaks at all. I bought tarps that are just the width of Miranda and instead of strapping them down, they will be weighted down.

3. Close up Haven.

4. Advise the postmaster that I’m leaving again and that Caroline and Charles can handle my mail.

5. Make sure I have both physical and digital copies of all my important paperwork before stashing my printer (and a few other things) in C&C’s basement.

I believe that’s it, in addition to a few work and volunteer projects.

I’m ready to get out there, much as I’m enjoying being home. And I am incredibly grateful that I can do this now, three years ahead of when I planned to, and that the project doesn’t involve selling everything I own or putting things in storage.

All those tough early years of freelancing have paid off. I did have to make sacrifices, but I was right that it would be worth it if I just worked at it. I can’t wait to toast with a pint in London the fifth anniversary of the start of my transcription business!

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Well, That’s Bulgaria Sorted…

One thing that I have learned in life is that things fall into place in their own time. There’s no use fretting about anything and if something feels huge and complicated and overwhelming and full of obstacles, it’s probably not the right thing to be doing. And I’ve also learned that if something falls into your lap that fits perfectly, it’s not “too good to be true,” it’s just meant to be.

An example of this happening in my life was when I moved to a rental house in Gatineau from my house in the Gatineau Hills. The “house” was more of a shack, a decrepit mobile house that was falling apart around me. No matter how much money I poured into it, something else would go wrong with it. The loan on it was paid off, so after signing the lease on the rental house, I decided that I would just leave my house keys on the counter and let the owner of the mobile home park have the place for storage.But  I still put an ad on an online classified ads site offering the house for sale in the hope of getting something for it. I was brutally honest about the condition of the house and that the owner of the mobile home park was difficult.

Well, in the days leading up to my move, many, many months after I posted the ad, I got an email reply to the ad from someone saying they wanted my house, what they wanted to pay for it, they had cash ready, and they were sure that giving the landlord a couple of years’ rent on the lot up front would smooth their relations. The transaction went through. One of my friends said about the situation, “Anyone else on the planet, I would have called bullshit. But because it’s you, I know it’s true.”

So with that said…

Shortly after I bought my ticket to London on Monday and paid for accommodation through to the 29th, I got an email through a house sitting website asking if I would be available to house and dog sit from July 1st through as long as I possibly can (which is just shy of 90 days according to Bulgarian rules).

I got a bit more info and this is a go!

So from London, I am flying straight to Sofia, where my host will pick me up and drive me to a small village in the mountains. I will be living there rent free in exchange for watching the house, walking the dogs twice a day, feeding the dogs and the cat, and doing some chores. I will have good internet for work and I will have the odd weekend “off” (ie. not responsible for the pets) so I can go off exploring if I want. The house is located near a village with basic shops, walking distance (6KM) to a larger community, and backs up to many mountain trails that I look forward to exploring with the dogs.

Internet should be “adequate.” It’s “not fast,” but is reliable and works perfectly for Skype and Netflixing. Um, that sounds fast to me..

Just… wow. 🙂

Knowing that I will have so few expenses for the next three months will really make it easy for me to enjoy my time in London!

After Bulgaria, who knows. But I’m sure something will come up by then!

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Paving Day

For some reason, people like to complain about how bad the roads are in Saskatchewan. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I drove in Quebec for as many years as I did and know what truly bad roads are like. Sure, we get potholes in the spring, but they get filled very quickly. Pavement also gets patched and gravel roads are frequently graded. Considering the small population here and low taxes, I’d understand having crappy roads, but road maintenance appears to be a priority, another reason to love SK. I still haven’t figured out how Quebecers can pay such taxes and have such bad roads, but that’s another discussion.

The weekend around June 24th is always a huge one for my hamlet. Bikers from all over come to our little park for what’s called the Boogie to camp, listen to music, and talk bikes. For days before the event, motorcycles roar through the area en route to our sleepy, so unimportant, and forgettable hamlet. One of the hamlet access roads is paved and it is always in rough shape by this time of year. Once the freeze/thaw cycle is over, the potholes are marked with signs and fluorescent paint and we locals know where they are and can slalom around them. But a week before the Boogie, everything changes. Our gravel road to Willow Bunch gets an extra grading and the paving crews come out in force to repave our other access road.

And I just happened to decide to do a town run on Paving Day. It was slow trip to town, but I’m not complaining! All the potholes were filled with gravel and the crews were starting on the paving. Big shoutout to them for all their hard work!

My town run was prompted by the fact that I was completely out of food. I’m doing a good job of not stocking up on anything… Before going to the grocery store, I stopped in at SGI (our DMV) to find out if I can lower my monthly registration and insurance fee for the truck since it won’t be driven for about a year. Absolutely. The vehicle won’t be registered (street legal) and I will be covered for liability only in case someone  steals the truck, goes on a joy ride, and destroys property or, worse, injures or kills someone. The cost will be $50 for a year, saving me an $80 monthly payment! Wow!

Next stop was the art gallery to pick up a ticket for a Great Plains concert on Saturday night! Saskia and Darrel are friends of C&C and put on a great show. I’ve seen them play a few times and they never disappoint. I’ll be going in with C&C and we might do dinner first.

I then had lunch, did a couple more errands, and finally got my groceries. I don’t want to get into the price of crappy tomatoes, but boy is pork consistently a great deal!

My thieving neighbour was in the store and we did a great job of pretending we didn’t see each other…

I took a secondary grave road home to avoid the paving crews. Even a gravel road in SK is better than a paved road in most other parts of Canada, especially in a zippy little pickup truck!

Now, I’m going to finish my work today and then start experimenting with my packing. My last order of clothing arrived today, so I’m ready to see how much everything I want to bring weighs and then start subtracting pieces. I’m starting to regret deciding to go with a suitcase since it alone uses up a full quarter of my weight allowance. I suspect that I may do a frantic run to Montana next week to pick up a super lightweight backpack rush ordered from Amazon… But we’ll see what the scale says tonight! 🙂

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Off to London!

Well, Passport Canada came through… I was so happy to see the “you have something at the counter” notice this morning because I knew all the packages I’m still expecting aren’t due till the end of the week so it had to be my passport! I got in and promptly went to skyscanner.ca to book my flight. I’ve been checking prices daily and the fluctuation is incredible. I really thought I would leave mid-week as that’s when the best prices always show up. Indeed, I saw a $400 ticket leaving next Tuesday on a route I was happy with, but I was hyperventilating at the thought of leaving that quickly.

I did one final scan of the month and an unbelievable deal through Travelocity popped up for next Friday, the 24th. Not only was the price great, but the route was perfect. It left Regina at 12:30, about the earliest I’d want to fly out since I have a 2.5 hour drive to the airport and I have to be there three hours early. It did have two stops, but one of them would let me finally add Newfoundland to my visited provinces list ( 🙂 ) and it was by far the quickest trip I’d seen between Regina and London clocking in at just under 13 hours. It would also take me to Gatwick rather than Heathrow.

But there was just one ticket left at that price… I lost out on a couple of Travelocity deals to Mérida while I was thinking things over, so I didn’t hesitate to grab my credit card. And I got the seat! I’m not happy I’ll be flying all the way to London on WestJet (ie. in a sardine can), but for $333, I would have been nuts not to jump on this deal! $333 for Regina to London! I can’t even get to Montreal for that price!

The way the flight is broken up will be nice. I’m flying to Toronto first, a three-hour trip. I’ll then I have the bare minimum of time needed to make my connection to St. John’s, 40 minutes. That will also be a three-hour trip. I’ll have a 1.5 hour layover, which is the perfect layover length, and then it’ll just be five hours to London. No sitting in the same seat for eight plus hours. Of course, I don’t expect to get any sleep so it’ll be interesting to see how I am Saturday when I land in London. 🙂

When I went to Scotland in ’98, I had a similar itinerary and hadn’t slept in almost 30 hours by the time I got to Glasgow. I pushed through my day, went to bed around 7:00 PM and woke up pretty much on local time the next morning. I’m hoping the same thing will happen this year. Yes, I might be nearly 20 years older, but I’m also much healthier. So I’m optimistic I won’t be a zombie for my whole time in London. 🙂

I’ve secured a private room in a house through Airbnb for four nights (three full days not counting the Saturday). It should be convenient to everything I want to see, not too difficult to get to from Gatwick, and at $56 per night, it’s right in my budget. So with the flight to London and accommodation being so inexpensive, I should be able to handle the outrageous food prices.

Now, to figure out the Oyster card system…

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SaskTel Had a Province-Wide Internet Outage — And It Was a Good Thing!

Friday afternoon, Saskatchewan was cut off from the rest of the world when the internet, including mobile data, went dead across the province. Since they have the monopoly in this province, they own all the equipment. There were no obviously no redundancies on their grid so the only people who would have had internet service had to have been on Xplornet. This was SaskTel’s second province-wide outage in two months. Both were caused by faulty equipment.

I went through a serious telecom outage this when I was up in Yukon. There was just one cable bringing service into the territory and it got waterlogged from all the firefighting going on. All telecom went down. When an outage like that happens in a remote territory with a population of around 25,000, it’s just one of those things that happen when you live up north. But in a province of more than one million people? It’s embarrassing.

The part of the outage that proved to me that SaskTel is not up to the task of running a 21st century telecom grid is how long it took for their answering service to get a message up saying, “We’re aware there’s a problem. It’s province-wide. We’ll update again as soon as we know how long t his will take.” You know, what SaskPower does within minutes of the lights going out. Instead, SaskTel’s answering service got flooded and would just hang up on you.

What I found most interesting about the outage was that I could have predicted it if I had thought about it hard enough. My internet was actually fine after I got the new booster last year. I was getting a decent signal and no drops. I could live with it. But my connection has been a nightmare since I got back this spring and it hasn’t been any better in town. I couldn’t get anything worth mentioning done in Moose Jaw and I had a hard time getting my emails in Willow Bunch. Something was up with the network, but SaskTel brushed me off at every call, telling me the problem was my phone.

It’s now the second morning since the outage. I have had a strong, steady signal (comparable to what I get without the booster areas where I don’t need the booster) since the internet came back up Friday morning. Yesterday was a perfectly non-frustrating day when I had research to do and while Google is still very slow, my searches came up. I even had internet well past 8PM when I normally don’t have usable service in the evening. Everything’s been fine this morning.

At some point while I was away, SaskTel increased speeds at the tower I connect to. When I’m not throttled and my signal is strong (as it’s been since yesterday morning), I’m getting speeds that are 2.5 times faster than last year (2.5Mbps). Considering what I went through for internet service until I got the new booster, I could actually be satisfied with this service if I knew I could rely on having it every day. I’m not delusional. I know that adequate internet service will take ages to come out here and I would be happy with small steps like doubling our speeds every six to twelve months. It says a lot that I didn’t notice for almost a month that I was getting better speeds than last year!

What the outage made me realise is that Haven’s internet issue is a Saskatchewan-wide issue. They’re always going to have the infrastructure, but we need more ISPs competing for business on that infrastructure so that there is more accountability when that infrastructure fails. Bell and Rogers are not a true competitors. What we need are small locally-owned ISPs that understand the unique challenges of operating a telecom in Saskatchewan. There are a couple, but they operate out of Saskatoon and Regina. I’ve contacted them to show that there is a large untapped market between the TransCanada and the Montana border, including the communities of Assiniboia, Willow Bunch, Coronach, Rockglen, and Scout Lake, that has been neglected by SaskTel and needs more options. Once these smaller ISPs get a foothold down here, then we can start having the conversation about getting service to the Sylvan Valley.

I’ve been in contact with ISPs in other provinces that offer nearly Canada-wide service, but are not in Saskatchewan. They all cite the difficulty of doing business with SaskTel as the primary reason why they are not in the province yet. And they were all very interested to learn that there is such an untapped market desperate for them to hammer out some sort of agreement with SaskTel.

Stressful as the outage was, it ended up being a good thing as it fixed something majorly wrong with SaskTel’s service. I just hope that I continue to enjoy adequate service for my last couple of weeks here.