Tuesday, February 12, 2008

I heard you were leaving.......

Why are you moving?

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard that question lately. While I do not find this particularly surprising, what does make me smile is the number of people who are absolutely floored when they hear where we are moving. So, in keeping with the current trend let's start with why.

The main reason is really fairly straightforward (despite what some may think), it is the weather. You see, Nancy rides and trains horses, and with very few expectations, this is an outdoor activity. Nancy has been having problems with the heat for some time, but over the last two summers it has made doing her work pretty much impossible. What sealed the deal was this summer she really could not do anything. The summer itself was very forgiving by Texas standards, but none the less she had a great deal of trouble from the end of July through October. We were talking about it this year and we both reached the conclusion that this cannot continue and so we need to start looking around for other options for a place to live.
Well, that brings us to question two.......


Why Canada?

Again the answer is really straightforward. As it happened, we were sitting in the kitchen getting dinner ready and we were talking about whether or not we should start looking for a new place to move to that would be a more forgiving climate for us. I started looking through the
Journal of Family Medicine and ran across an ad for Prince Edward Island. The thought of living on an island sounded cool, and it certainly fit the meteorological requirements for Nancy so we did what anyone else would do, we googled the island.

Over dinner we came to find out that it is the smallest province in Canada, and is located at approximately the same latitude as London. We also found out that it is not crowded and has a farming and fishing economy as a way of life. It also serves as the setting in which the character ‘
Ann of Green Gables’ was invented by the author Lucy Maud Montgomery . With this knowledge we fired off an e-mail to the recruiter and a few short days later we had scheduled a site visit to see the island.

We loved out visit to the island, the people were friendly and the pace of life was a lot slower, and in some ways reminded me of the pace of life when I have visited Ghana in the past. More than anything specific, we felt at home when we visited as if it was a place we had been looking for and that we had finally found.

We have decided to live in the west side of the island in
O’Leary, mainly because it seemed to feel much more like the life for which we have searched. The community is agricultural and very small. The clinic staff and physicians seem to get along very well and it seems that the pace of life will be a lot more bucolic.

So once we found out that it was a place we could live, the next step became the arrangements to immigrate. More on that in the next few days. Until then if you would like to see
photos and a glimspe of the weather that awaits look no further.