After we opened the door from our Condo when we came back from our to short winter break in California we found a letter that the thermal unit (the whole door) would be replaced on that same day. After we watched up on some sleep the technicians came in the afternoon, within only minutes the whole unit was gone…outside it was about -14 degrees celsius and snowing and that made a 45 degree difference within 24 hours for us…

You can imagine we felt really cold while waiting for the technicians to be finished in about an hour. After the unit was placed back we turned up the heating and soon it the temperature was back to normal again.

On Thursday evening a colleague from Germany visited us, thanks for bringing the Whiskey! We decided early that day to go together to Jupiter Ascending, a movie, at the SilverCity across the street. The movie started but there was something wrong with the 3D image quality. After one of the other guests informed the staff is was resolved. The movie was good and when we left the theatre one of the employees handed out courtesy tickets for another movie because of the issue in the beginning. I love the service mentality here in Canada, you don’t even have to complain to get it…

And than it was time for a long weekend, we started early on Saturday with a visited to the Yorkdale Shopping centre. We went there to order a chair, we already looked at this chair for a long time but wanted to look for more options at other stores but nothing came close to this one…it’s in stock in the new jersey warehouse and we can pick it up in the local warehouse at the beginning of March and then our living room is finished!

Finished? Wasn’t there an Ottoman which still needed to be picked up? Yes there was and we did that today. The Ottoman is the perfect size, it’s much more convenient than the carton box we used the first months but…the it’s not the quality we would expect. One of the hinges is bend and the fabric is damaged. We send an e-mail with our remarks and within minutes after sending the mail we got a response back from John, our own furniture associate at the Crate & Barrel. A new one will be ordered for us to be built the same way and in the mean-time we can keep this one and use it as if it is ours. Again excellent service.

That evening Danielle baked her famous Chocolate Chip cookies to bring the day after on a real Canadian adventure. Yes, I wanted to do something only die-hard Canadians would do… I planned to search for a geocache on a small island on Buckhorn Lake about 1:45 hours driving from our place. What’s so Canadian about geocaching you might think, the temperature. On this particular day the highest temperature was expected to be -20 degrees celsius with a windchill temperature somewhere close to -40 degrees celsius. And to get to the cache I needed to walk over the frozen snow-covered Buckhorn lake. Lucky for me the Geocache was placed by GEOmamma the mother of one of my coworkers and we were invited to visit their beautiful (and warm) cottage.

The ride towards Ennismore was beautiful on its own and after a cup of tea and some cookies it was time to put on the snowshoes and walk over the lake. And I can tell you it was really cold, I never expected that you can actually feel the difference between -10, -20 or even -40 degrees but now I can tell you really cold starts at -30 or something. I felt things I’ve never felt before. After only minutes out there my face started to hurt, my coworkers laughed it away and told me to get used to it, it’s normal for real Canadians…oh boy I’ve got a long way to go before I can call myself a real Canadian I think…

After posing for pictures in the middle of the lake and snowshoeing to Ground Zero it took me longer as usual to find the cache! It was made to blend in and normally I like the more creative geocaches but today I didn’t my hands started to hurt since my gloves aren’t suitable for Canadian winter weather…but I found it and I got some letters in the log, the pen gave up after being a couple of seconds out of my pockets.

After warming up at a warm spot behind the island we started our walk back to the shore and the warm cottage. Although it was colder as I thought it was a really cool experience in every meaning of the word cool. I’m glad I did went out with this kind of weather to feel what a Canadian winter is about and in the end I was able to write my name down in the log of that geocache with difficulty level 4 and terrain level 5. After a warm lunch and a lot of small talk it was soon close to 4:pm and time to head home. Thanks for letting me experience this David and family!

The monday was part of the long weekend as it was Family day, a statutory holiday which exists in Ontario since 2007, first time it took place was in 2008. We took it easy since we’ve quite busy week ahead of us but we decided to go see American Sniper in the VIP Movie Theatre at the Shops in Don Mills. It’s a great movie and with those full recliner seats and service in the theatre it got even better.

This morning we stayed in bed a bit longer since Danielle was used to the 3 hours time difference and I didn’t woke up from a railway. We wanted to look at some places we went already in 2012 but this time with a different goal or at a different spot. First up was the Hollywood sign, last time we only saw it from a mall at Hollywood Boulevard, this time we wanted to go as close as possible.

On the way to the spot we had no traffic at all and so I decided to take an exit early to drive over Hollywood Boulevard. But then I saw an empty parking spot which was free until 11:00am, that would give us about 1,5 hours to look at the attractions only 3 blocks away…

After taking the usual pictures and grabbing a frappuccino (did I already wrote that it was about 25 degrees?) for the walk back to our car we continued our tour to 3000 Canyon Lake Drive. There was enough parking space and we got some nice touristy pictures.

After taking the pictures it was time for lunch which we had at the Farmers’ Market and combined it with shopping for running socks at the Nike Store, a new cover for Danielle her iPhone and a SD-Card to Lightning converter for my iPad at the Apple Store.

Within 2 hours we were done and left to the Beverly Center. This is the Beverly Hills fashion shopping mall but we weren’t there for shopping at the mall, we went towards a store 157 North Robertson Boulevard.

Yes, it was the first time we went shopping for Tommy Hilfiger clothing from the European collection this year. But the selection was limited, most of the store were speciality items from the runway collections and since we both don’t have runway sizes… But we still found some nice new items for spring.

After we were done with shopping we went down to the Santa Monica Pier from some more beach time and another sunset. It was much more difficult to make good pictures here since it was really crowded at the beach. But we got some and that with a free parking spot only minutes walking from the pier made it a successful night.

We went back to the hotel because on Monday we wanted to be at the Disneyland Park as early as possible since we had hopper tickets for both Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure. And we made it, we were among the first to enter the park and it wasn’t crowded at all. We start of with a Starbucks coffee in Mainstream after which we visited Star Tours, Buzz Lightyear, Jungle Cruise, Pirates, Haunted Mansion and made some pictures with characters before we headed to the other park.

In California’s Adventure we enjoyed the Aladdin Musical, the Genie in the show is awesome. Afterwards we visited some rides and took character pictures before we headed back to the Disneyland Park to see the Soundsational Parade.

The parade was fun to see, this is way better as the Christmas parade in Toronto and the weather is much better too.

While waiting for the parade I found out that Siemens had a joint-venture with the Avengers in the Innoventions building and off course we needed to meet some of my colleagues and take pictures with them.

Soon it was time to leave and after riding the Storybook Land Canal Boats and It’s a Small World (sponsored by Siemens) we had dinner at the Village Haus. And when we exited we both felt cold and a bit tired which made us decided to go back to the car and leave Disneyland behind.

The day after would be our last day in California. We had an overnight flight back to Toronto which made us decided to have a really lazy morning in the hotel. In the afternoon we went to Rodeo Drive and we drove through Beverly Hills to look at the huge houses.

Early in the evening we brought back our rental car. Since the rental facility is located of the airport in a hotel they advised us to come one hour early to make sure we make it to the airport on time. In the end that made us being back really early since we didn’t have traffic on the way to the airport, the shuttle arrived in 5 minutes, there was no waiting line in the terminal and our flight was almost an hour delayed…

Both really tired we arrived back in a snow-covered Toronto and at 6:4oam we were waiting at the baggage claim and only 40 minutes later we opened the door of our condo….