Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

in other words, save ur money and come on here and ask LOL

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

I came here without a visit with wife and two children (2 &6) 47 years ago. Out of the blue I had job offer in Jan 1963 and arrived here in Ottawa July 1963.

No time for visit and too expensive, but I did get some very good info. At that time you got $3 to the pound so the proceeds of the sale of our house in the UK bought us a much nicer place in Ottawa. I retired from the company that paid for our travel and huge amount of household goods by ship from Southampton (Cunard, Carmania).

Never regretted it and neither my wife or I had any real pull to return even for visits. I last returned in 1982 just before my mother died.

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

Hi just wondered what you thought of the expo you went to and did you find your jobs there or another way? Was it a useful experience for you?

My husband and I wish to move to Calgary. I am currently working in an office but my main job is in fact flight attendant i work on a part year permanent contract.

My husband is a qualified game keeper, FLT driver and is in the process of doing his 360 excavator licence.

we are looking on the job bank all the time and finding that most of the jobs require you to already have visa's or residency, we do not qualify for the skilled worker program so we were hoping to get the TWP and then apply for PR once we were there.

Thanks for your reply

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

I suppose we were lucky when it came to the recce. We were fortunate enough to take a 3+ month sabbatical, which we used to "live" as normally and routinely as we could in Canada. We rented an out of season holiday home on Vancouver Island at a MUCH reduced rate! We took the eldest out of school and she was home taught for a term (it really helped her as we could give her far more one on one time than she received in her primary school). She has swimming lessons, ice skating lessons; made friends with local kids through these activities. We made friends with some of the parents, and so on and so on.

I know we didn't have to get up to go to a crapy job every morning, but I think it gave us a sense of "living" in the environment. We joined the library, were recognised and chatted with people in the local stores etc. I think because what we were doing was considered unusual, I suppose we were noticed around the small town; even made friends with loads of locals from crab fishing off the dock.

It certainly helped us to confirm that we wanted to make the move permanently - which is, thankfully, what we have done.

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

What don't you like about Halifax? I have been looking into this area and thought it looked great but last night and tonight our local news has been in Halifax, NS to see how they coped with cutbacks in the 90's to compare it to Halifax, Yorkshire and I must say that I thought it looked pretty depressing and has totally put me off!!

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

I landed in Halifax in March 1969 with $183 and a suitcase not having a clue what the place was like or what I was getting into. I never looked back. I moved to Oakville, Ont. in November 71 and lived there until May'01 when I moved back to N.S. and built a new house.
I have never been homesick or missed much about the UK. I haven't been back since 04 and really don't have any desire to. What's left of my family is all in the UK and I speak to them regularly. I used to get asked if I would go back to the UK when I retired and I always said "not a chance".

If you care to see what Halifax looks like from the air take a look in my gallery, there a three pictures there.

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

Got a job downtown and the commute was horrific - a journey that should have taken 20 minutes was at least 1 hour in rush hour. There were no public transport options from where we lived and parking was very expensive.
We also found that we needed to go downtown for almost all activities - there was nothing happening locally, but this probably isn't the case in other areas. We should have realised about the activities as we looked at some houses where the reason people gave for moving was getting access to stuff for their kids!!

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

We came out in 2001 (wife and I and two 3.5yr olds) - had interview lined up.

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

I moved without having visited Canada. I had completely the wrong idea about the place and would have gone straight home had I had the airfare.

I can now see that Canada's alright if it's where a career move takes you but, unless you currently live outside the M25, I can't see actually choosing it.

Re: Anybody moved without doing a recce trip first?
 

We moved here without ever having set foot in Canada before. We did lots of research online to narrow it down to where we wanted to move to and have not been disappointed. We just figured that it couldn't possibly be any worse than the overcrowded country we left behind.
Would we do the same again? hell yeah! :D