Scottish Family Adventure
Hello My wee family (me, wife, 5 month old daughter) are planning a 6 month Motor Home adventure starting in Vancouver and then heading down the West coast of the US, up through Texas, to Chicago, ...
Forum Discussion
Veebyes wrote:
Wow, you have really left it late. Have you done any research on what needs to be done as a foreigner buying a vehicle in Canada? There is the matter of an address to register it to. Insurance as a foreigner?
What to buy comes after all the ownership matters are taken care of. You are not going to arrive, scour the classifieds & drive off in a couple of days. Buying cheap means buying old or buying somebodys troubles. Either way expect plenty of ongoing maintenance costs as you go along. If you do not take care of problems as soon as they appear they will become big, very expensive, problems.
We do 15 to 20 thousand miles a year. Last spring we replaced & upgraded springs & shocks for the trailer plus the usual $3000 for general truck maintenance & minor repairs. Right now we are in the middle of annual truck preventative maintenance plus 6 tires. The trailer is getting $2000 worth of brakes & bearings after some 80,000 miles use. I have the tools & a place to do the labour myself.
Hate to burst a bubble but if you think that you will get on a plane this weekend & be on your way the following weekend, think again.
Yes I have done research, I've even been in touch with the overseeing registering and insuring bodies to make sure there would be no problems. It would seem that there aren't. I can buy and register a vehicle no problem - when you buy it you get insured as well so one can't really be done without the other.
I don't really think I've left it late? It would seem impractical to have put buying these things in motion before I'd even arrived in Canada?
I'm not entirely sure why you think it will be so impossible to arrive and go to a dealer/look at classifieds and buy a vehicle? We've given ourselves two weeks to accomplish that in the BC area.
I've just looked now at the dealer nearest where we are staying and see something like this 2nd hand 5th wheel and this 2nd hand truck if I had a mechanic check them out and they seemed sound what would be the problem? (I'm not suggesting this is what we would actually get just that there seem a number of options readily available)
Some maintenance is to be expected but it will be doing just this one trip and then being sold at the end.
