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The Saunders' Story

So the question is how to emigrate without losing your mind? It's a tough one but if you have the determination you will get there. It all started for me, my husband Brad and our children, Oliver then 15, India then 7 and Jude then 3, at the start of 2006. After years of should we shouldn't we, when things in the UK just felt like they were going from bad to worse, we finally sat down and said, why not?

After ploughing through the masses and masses of information on the internet, and, admittedly initially fancying Australia like many others do, we hit on Nova Scotia. How come we didn't know more about this place before now? It looked beautiful with some of the most stunning scenery and views we had ever seen. We started to look into it further and that's when we discovered Mike and Orla at UK 2 Nova Scotia.

They were with us right at the start and helped us right through to the bitter end. Believe me there are so many hundreds of things you have to think about it's an absolute god send to have this sort of help and advice at your fingertips.

So the first step was to employ an immigration consultant to help with the, what can only be described as frighteningly long and painful application form. It would indeed have been extremely daunting to fill out on our own but with professional help we never had any trouble at all. We just provided all the documents and information as and when they were requested. Our initial assessment with them indicated that we had the points required so we signed on the dotted line and we were off and running. At this point we were looking at a four to five year wait which sounds horrendously long and would have been had we had to wait it out. We had heard however that by far the quickest way to get out here was to get a job. So with that, house hunting and exploration in mind we booked a one week trip in May 2007, minus the children, to come over and see it all for ourselves.

We managed to line up job interviews with Royal Bank of Canada through a friend who we both used to work with at Barclays Bank. We arranged to spend two full days with Rob Brown (rob.brown@ns.sympatico.ca) a UK2NS Realtor looking at houses that we had chosen from the www.mls.ca website and the rest of the time we planned to explore, research schools, the cost of living and generally find out as much about the place as we could.

It was an amazing week that couldn't have gone better. We loved the place immediately and knew instinctively that we could be happy here as a family. The job interviews went so well that within the month we had firm job offers through our door which meant that we could be fast tracked onto the Provincial Nominee Programme (PNP). This meant our application would effectively be taken from the bottom of the pile and put to the top. We were now looking at moving within the next four months, not 4 years as earlier thought.

The panic set in as you can imagine. An unbelievable amount of things to organise in such a short space of time, and on top of all that we had only just gone on the market so still had to sell and think about where we would live when we landed in Nova Scotia. To be honest you really do wonder how on earth you can possibly tie all the ends up to happen at the same time, but some how we made it work. I had lists coming out of my ears and every day I would think of dozens of other things I had previously forgotten. The top tips fact sheets Mike and Orla produce are really helpful and I found myself getting a lot of help from them.

We planned another four day trip at the end of September when we were determined to find a home so we didn't have to rent when we got here or store all our goods. We looked at about 16 houses with the same Realtor over two days which was mind numbing to say the least. At the end of it all though we found our dream home which we made an offer on and it was accepted, so thankfully we didn't have a wasted journey.

By this point, only our very best friends and close family knew of our intentions and it nearly killed me keeping it all a secret. We just wanted to tell the world but couldn't because of Brads job and we also still hadn't sold. We planned a big farewell party but had to have two sets of invites. The first ones just said that we were having a party so that people knew to keep the date free. The second ones which went out early October told the truth. I don't think we could have shocked people more if we tried. I had lived in Morecambe for 36 years and was one of the last people anyone would expect to emigrate. Overall the reaction was great, dozens of friends saying "good for you" and "I'm so jealous, I wish we could leave". Everyone was telling us how brave we were but I'm not sure we felt very brave at the time. Looking back it was an exceptionally brave move to make but it was also very hard and frightening too.

We had a holiday to Florida planned for November 2007 and decided there was no point returning from that only to fly across the Atlantic again days later. So we thought, why not coincide the two? We arranged for the packers to arrive while we were away which meant co-ordinating everything by email or phone while we were in Florida which was a nightmare.

So after one heck of a send off and a wonderful if very stressful holiday in Florida we finally landed on a very cold day in November. We closed on our house the day after that, our goods arrived six days later, as did our first set of visitors!

With the worst winter for fifteen years well and truly behind us and fourteen sets of visitors later we are now enjoying the beautiful summer weather. As I sit on my back deck writing this it's 4p.m and it's 32 degrees in the shade. The kids are in the pool having a ball. In a couple of weeks they'll be back at school and we'll be back in to our normal routine. I am planning ice skating lessons for India and Jude and Oliver is joining the school football team. We're hoping to hit the 2012 Olympics!

Brad is thoroughly enjoying the job having gotten used to the differences in the systems and the lingo. We find he has a much better work/life balance here which was seriously off balance in the UK. RBC is very family orientated as are most people here. The community spirit is amazing and we have made some wonderful friends who I know will be lifelong friends. Overall we live in a far more relaxed and happy world and the future for us seems so much brighter now.

It has been an extremely tense and stressful twelve months or so but I can honestly say...it was all worth it.

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