On Saturday morning, Sean gave me a hand to do a few things that I needed to do in order to unplug my life here in Oakville. It was a bit sad for me really, as it really drove home the fact that my time here in Canada was coming to an end.

First job was to get rid of the car. Not long after we arrived in Canada we picked up a very nice 2003 Chev Venture minivan, and it was a fantastic little car. It gave us absolutely no trouble all year, was totally reliable and very nice to drive. Considering we planned to do so much driving this year we thought it was important to get a decent car, so we were prepared to pay for something reasonably good. We put 94,000km on the clock (it had about 60,000 when we got it) which was just under the lease limit of 96,000.

After looking at the options of buying as opposed to leasing, we decided to lease the car and I'm pleased we did it that way. We spent about as much on the lease as we would have lost in a buy/sell transaction, but the convenience factor when returning the car made it more than worthwhile. True enough, I drove the van back to Towne Chevrolet on Saturday morning, dropped off the key and signed the release papers. Easy as that.

After that Sean drove me around to the local MTO office to cancel the registration plate. That was painless and easy as well. While I was there, I decided to cancel my Ontario G1 license. If you've been a regular reader of this blog then you probably know the crap I've gone through with the whole licensing issue. I was holding out for the whole $85 refund on the license-that-never-should-have-been, but I figured I would just get my $60 refund and be done with it. The three phone calls I recorded with three different MTO staff members, all contradicting each other and sounding like complete dills, will be priceless enough when I edit it into a finished podcast that it will be well worth the $15.

I'd also cancelled the car insurance earlier in the week, and that was supposed to take effect as of Saturday afternoon.

Finally it was off to the bank to close our bank account. I thought TD Canada Trust were excellent to deal with and their customer service was great. I would have liked to have kept it open - after all, you never know when we'll be back - however, there was a small fee each month to keep the account open so it really didn't make sense to keep it.

So... no car, no rego, no license, no insurance, no bank account. Talk about pulling the plug on my life in Canada. It was starting to feel very real all of a sudden.