About a minute after we finally decided to go to Fernie, with the whole family, the thought of travelling with two kids under 4 started to dawn on us. For those of you who don’t know, Fernie is just about on the other side of the world. Have a look at this map:
Not only are we going to the other side of the world, the cheapest flight we could get was through Frankfurt in Germany. If all goes well we will land in Calgary (YYC) after 26 hours of travelling, which would still leave us with a 2.5 hour drive to get to Fernie. To make things more interesting, Fernie does not have a public transport system.
So we had to decide whether to hire a car for the five months or buy one. It turned out that it will be about half the price to buy a car, insure it and then sell it again before we leave. So we decided to buy what they call a truck, something like this:
I have always wanted a big Truck! ;)
It sounded like you need this sort of car to survive in the snowy mountain side.
Another challenge we had was deciding what we would do with the kids while we are on the Ski instructor’s course. There are some great kinder garden options in Fernie, but they are very expensive by South African standards. There is a great FREE early learning programme, but the kids must be accompanied by an adult.
It didn’t take us long to decide to take a nanny along to make the whole trip a little easier.So Eunice Vermaak gets a chance to go see Canada first-hand, and we get some help with the kids. Hopefully this will at least give one of us time to take a break here or there on the 25+ hours of travel.