Cross Border Shopping trip

So I had the day off on Friday and we decided to take a day-trip to Seattle to do some cross border shopping. I'll be blunt: Despite the cost of renting a car, the consumed gas, the ENTIRE DAY spent running around, it is still worth it. Yes, we can save that much. Something is horribly wrong with the relationship between Canadian consumers and the local retailers.

Don't believe me? My first example is a little furniture store called IKEA. You may have heard of it. We use a fair amount of their stuff at home so on this trip we planned to get some doors for our book shelf as well as slip covers for our two love seat sofas. As luck would have it, the doors didn't work out (they didn't have the ones we were looking for) but we did get a pair of slip covers for our sofas. Price for the slip covers: $39.99 each - Price in Canada: $119.99 each. Those two items alone paid for the rental of the minivan and all the gas we consumed.

Then add on that all the items we were able to get that just aren't available in Canada, and the restaurants we tried, etc. Even when we don't get everything we planned, we still seem to come out ahead - way ahead.

Plus, it's just a day trip into another city, which is just nice to do once in a while. This last photo is of a fantastic mural inside a Chinese restaurant we had lunch at. Our lunch selections were nothing spectacular but the place definitely had the ambiance. Oh by the way, the minivan in the first photo is the one we rented, thinking we had extra long doors to bring back. Had we known they weren't going to work out we could have gotten away with renting a Smart Car. Thanks to Enterprise Car Rental though, for giving us a free upgrade and giving us consistently great service. There is a reason we go all the way to Richmond to rent our cars now. Kinda like our reason for going cross-border to do some shopping once in a while.