Leaving the Six for the Sticks

Have you ever dreamed of picking up your life, relocating for a period of time in search of more calm, fulfillment and fun? Would you allow yourself to dream about it for a few minutes, but then reality and limitations come crashing down making you feel like it’s impossible? Well, in December 2017, my family of five picked up from Toronto and settled into a small mountain town called Canmore in the beautiful Canadian Rockies of Alberta, Canada.

“How did this all come about?” is a question we have been asked so many times before departing and after arriving in Canmore. Ten months before our departure, Feb 2017, my family and I took our annual ski trip to Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont with our ski pals. This was our first year on the slopes where all three of our kids could ride the chairlift and ski/snowboard down the hill without assistance. It was super clear to us this year that all three of our kids had grown a love for the sport and as biased parents; we thought they were pretty talented little athletes! So one fateful chairlift ride up with my husband we talked about how we could let them foster these new skills of theirs. I said to my husband Jeremy “I can work from anywhere with my online business and life coaching, would you be able to work out of the Calgary office for the winter ski season?”. My husband calmly responded “I can’t see why not…..We could live in Canmore! It is so amazing there. I could commute into Calgary for work and the kids could ski in the mountains all winter long!”.

As per John O’Leary, author of On Fire, this moment on the chair lift was an inflection point for us. We both instantly knew this was what we wanted to do and that it was without a doubt going to be the best decision for all of us as a family. It was going to be a turning point in our lives. From that moment forward we started working towards the dream. Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, taught me years ago that we make decisions initially from the heart, but with time we get into our heads and most often talk ourselves out of them. Our negative self-talk creeps in, family and friends can make concerning comments making us doubt ourselves, so it is so critical to take action quickly before the fear sets in. We knew this plan to relocate to the mountains for the winter was what we wanted to do, even though we had many people questioning the viability of it all. We weren’t sure exactly how it was going to happen, but our hearts were pulling us in this direction. So as soon as my husband got approval from his job to work out of Calgary, we rented a place in Canmore and slowly started putting the pieces together.

Getting out to Canmore may have looked all dreamy from our highlight reel on social media, but there were definitely challenges along the way. Rent in Canmore turned out to be more than we could earn on our home in Toronto. Renting in Toronto, even in a prime neighbourhood along the subway line was difficult given our short departure. When we did get a renter, he wanted to be in seven weeks before our departure date, so off the five of us went to move in with Grandma and Jido (Arabic for Grandpa) who were undergoing a kitchen renovation and things were moving very slowly. We actually had no kitchen sink for the first 3 weeks. It was indoor camping at its best!

The week before we left for Canmore, there was a lot of excitement in the house, but behind the scenes I was, let’s say, freaking out about all the final logistics. How were we going to fit our final items into our tiny Jetta to travel across Canada? How were the kids going to adapt to a new school with new friends etc.? How were we going to all cope, driving 3,500 km with five of us in one small car for five days straight? Being totally honest here, this mama had to reach out to her doctor to get some help as sleep was not coming easy and some nights, not at all.

On our last day in Toronto, we picked the kids up from school, left my in-laws with two boxes of last minute items to ship as we could not squeeze them into our already loaded car and headed off into a crazy snow storm. First stop Windsor, ON then on to Chicago the next day….Stay tuned for part 2 to hear about our five day journey and what happened when we landed in the Canmore, AB, to start living the dream.