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The cats have spent the past hour begging for dinner, thus things must be back to normal.

So! We moved to Montréal! And it wasn't too bad!

Not to overstate the magnitude of difficulty involved in moving across the border, but organization made it much easier. Pete secured his work permit ahead of time (after having it sent back once because of a missing signature on one page of the paperwork, and after having it sent back a second time with a polite, hand-written note on lined Immigration stationary noting that his Postdoc probably begins in June 2008, not June 2009, and that's something he might want to get changed beforehand), while I did lots of research and made many lists of things to do. To jump to some of the most common questions:

a) No, bringing the cats was no problem. There's no quarantine required if you're bringing pets from the U.S., merely ample documentation of their rabies vaccinations.

b) We didn't try to import the car across the border, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is a major pain in the ass. "More difficult than buying our house," reported one source.

c) We prepared a detailed inventory of the contents of our moving truck per the requirements on Canada's website. They didn't ask for this or inspect the truck on the way across, however. "Oh, you're not actually moving to Canada," explained the nice lady at the border crossing, "because you'll be bringing all of your possessions back with you." Now, I am thinking of us as taking a very long, very overly-packed vacation.

I did a lot of research on the various methods of bringing us and our stuff across the border. We had a walk-through done by a highly-regarded professional moving company, which revealed that our two-bedroom Madison apartment actually held three-plus bedrooms' worth of stuff. (But quite elegantly, I must add.) Moreover, our new apartment -- located within a maze of narrow one-way streets in the center of the city -- would require the contents of the moving van to be unpacked from the semi outside of Montréal, then repackaged into a smaller moving van and taken to our new apartment. These revelations raised the quote that we were given from a sight-unseen $2800 for the move to over $8000. Lesson one: never accept a sight-unseen moving quote. Lesson two, as amply evidenced by Moving Scam and several other acquaintances: don't trust anybody who gives you a dramatically lower figure. (Plus, a lot of companies aren't customs bonded, which makes coordinating the border crossing trickier.) After a brief flirtation with ABF U-Pack (less practical for us, as we needed to somehow get our car back to my parents' house in Ohio, where it'll be living temporarily), we opted to drive everything ourselves. It was the cheapest option, and we at least had the reassurance that we, our cats, and our stuff would all be arriving at the same place at roughly the same time.

Jeez, this is getting long. To make a long story short, we immediately decided against U-Haul, and rented a 22-foot Penske. The aforementioned professional movers' walkthrough was helpful in deciding how large of a truck to get, and no matter what happens, you're driving an enormous truck; it's not like a sixteen-footer would drive like a sedan, you know? The truck rental plus gas cost about $2000 for a week, which wasn't bad, considering that diesel's at about $5 a gallon and a twenty-two footer doesn't get the best gas mileage. Because people tend to be even nicer and more helpful when you're about to move away indefinitely, we asked our friends to help us load the truck in Madison. Our Montréal apartment is a third-story walk-up, and we know very few people, so we went ahead and booked the most highly-recommended movers we could find to move our stuff from the truck to the new apartment. Then, because byzantine laws resist letting you rent a vehicle in one country and drop it off in another, we arranged to return said truck in Burlington, Vermont, and arranged the round-trip two-day rental of a small car at a nearby Montreal car-rental place. Pete spent time stressing on the phone that these vehicles would be crossing the border, and nobody could tell us whether anything more particular would be required to make everything kosher. "But," they'd say, "you'll probably be okay." We also had Pete's future boss pick up a bunch of moving placards to place on the curb outside our new apartment building to deter people from parking there. We also picked up about 1000 pounds of IKEA furniture to haul in boxes to our new place, since it's more expensive in Canada, although this was arguably not an integral part of the move.

To be continued...