Street repaving versus the moving van
Generally our move to Ottawa went very well. While there are mounds of paperwork to go through and fill out, most phases of our move went very smoothly... until we tried to get our moving van unloaded.
Background: Our new neighbourhood has lots of new houses being built on the end of the street, which means lots of construction traffic: backhoes, dump trucks, concrete mixers, delivery trucks, etc.. The day before our moving van was to arrive, we watched a pool being hoisted over a house to be installed in the backyard. There were no parking signs posted up and down the street (I assumed because of all the construction) but local residents seemed to park out on the street none-the-less.
On moving day I had to meet the van driver down at the customs office in order to clear our stuff for delivery. Despite my driver being unimpressed with the slowness and surliness of our assigned Custom's Officer, I felt that the visit to customs went pretty well. We jumped back into our vehicles and it was off to the house to unload our furniture and effects.
With the rather large moving van following a few minutes behind us, we turned down our new street to find a construction crew busy repaving our road. Simply amazing. After some interesting conversations with our driver and the foreman, we realized that we had to wait until the afternoon to unload the truck as the asphalt work need to be applied and sufficiently cooled before driving such a heavy vehicle on top of it. Our driver and unloading crew camped out at a local coffee shop for a number of hours waiting for the repaving crew to finish their job.
Once the asphalt was cool-ish, we got back to work and the unloading guys did a great job getting our stuff into the house quickly yet without damage (apart from my poor tea pot).
