The Shepherds fancied a holiday.........

Its now time to introduce you all to our good friends Rob and Claire and their children Sophie and Ross who lived near us in Chesterfield.

We had known each other for a long time and had been on many holidays together, both before and after we had had children. We had had some great times on a Gulet in Turkey, various camp sites in France and Italy and a fantastic Christmas in Florida.

Having started to plan our recce trip to Nova Scotia it naturally followed that we would ask Rob and Claire if they wanted to join us for a holiday. We planned to book a week at a nice house by the sea and if possible do a little sailing. Who turns down the opportunity for a holiday !!!!

We had made some appointments with contacts we had made in advance with CORDA, Truro Elementary School, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canadian Red Cross and Bruce Berry a local real Estate Agent in Truro. Rob and Claire decided that they were going to do some exploring of Nova Scotia themselves and then meet up in Antigonish after a few days at the house we had rented.

We booked our flights on Air Canada from Heathrow to Halifax on 22nd May 2009 and Rob and Claire booked to fly out a few days later.

The Emigrate Show 2009.......

March 2009 arrived and we took some good advice and drove down to Sandown Racecourse to the Emigrate Show and ensured we made contact with Margot Begin-Gillis who was there representing Colchester Regional Development Agency, CORDA.

Whilst down the 'smoke' we also popped down to Pudding Lane in London because Gabi was doing a project at school all about the Great Fire of London. It was the girls first visit to London and we did the quickest whistle stop tour of central London you have ever seen !!

The girls also wanted to see Windsor Castle and so we had a pleasant drive through Windsor Great Park and had a nice lunch in Windsor.

Margot had indicated to us that our next step should be a visit to Nova Scotia to make some contacts and see what it was like for ourselves.

Despite having travelled around the world in the Royal Navy I had never been to Canada and the prospect of just visiting was exciting enough, never mind the prospect of living there !

A meeting in the New Forest..........

We started researching Canada and in particular Nova Scotia in September 2007 and quickly found the BritishExpats.com (BE to its friends) was a fantastic source of information. At this time Canada accepted Federal Skilled Worker Visa applications in hundreds of occupation categories including the police.

We calculated our points total and submitted our application to London for processing. Several months passed before our hopes were dashed by a change in the Canadian Immigration Act which drastically reduced the number of occupation categories and of course the police had been removed. Our application was sent back unprocessed together with our application fee. :-(

Whilst we had been waiting we went on a family camping trip to the New Forest. We stopped at the Forestry Commission campsite at Holmsley near Bransgore.

Totally by coincidence whilst chatting on BritiahExpats I had mentioned the fact that we were going camping in the New Forest and found that Nikkidreaming and Flogger (aka Nikki and Andy Lewis) lived in the village of Bransgore. We met at a local pub whilst we were there and chatted about Canada and their chosen route via the Nova Scotia Provincial Nominee Programme. This chat over a pint and a meal was to prove extremely useful later after we had received our bad news about our application being rejected.

The sadness was soon forgotten when we embarked on our new attempt to start a new life in Nova Scotia.

The Community Identified Stream aspect of the Nova Scotia Provincial Nominee Programme entails demonstrating that you have strong links to the local community in Nova Scotia and also that you can bring something to the local community and stand a good chance of settling there.

Nikki and Andy had mentioned that they had been on a research trip to Colchester County area and this was the area they were thinking of settling.

Our focus switched to this area and the town of Truro in particular.

Deciding on which road less travelled to take

Potential francophiles?

After spending a lot of my life travelling the 7 seas in the Royal Navy and more recently on family holidays around the world, I knew that I had an adventurous part of me that would need satisfying when I retired. Also being an Aquarian, my wife knew that my moon was apparantly crossing something or other in Mars and that meant probable trouble !!

Initially, after spending several holidays in France (mainly Brittany) we had settled on buying a property with some land there and then as a result of that decision spent night after night searching French property websites.

Change of heart

It is difficult to say exactly when we changed our mind but I think it changed when we saw some British expat children on television trying to settle in a French school.........it made us switch track and look for our adventure in another english speaking country.
Our options were narrowed by the fact that Australia and New Zealand only offered visas to those aged under 45 !!
At this point I dug out a book from the loft I had had since I was a boy called 'British Columbia'

Canada is a Big Country

Not sure why we looked at Nova Scotia but I was intrigued by a place across the Atlantic I knew very little about but had place names like Halifax, Chester, Liverpool, Windsor, Oxford and Truro.
My wife started to look at land and property prices (and studied the historical weather data like she was doing a Masters Degree)

The Robert Frost Influence

.............and so we decided to take this particular fork in the road.

My all time favourite poem (which I have above my desk at work) is by the American Poet, Robert Frost



TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;


Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,


And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Gentle Introduction........

Rachel, Gabi, Charlotte and Myself

Just thought it would be a good idea to start a blog about our immigration to Nova Scotia....mainly because there might come a time in the future when we forget why it was we actually decided to leave the UK !!



Our family is myself Dean, my wife Rachel, James, Alexander, Eleanor, Charlotte and Gabrielle (Gabi for short)






James, Alexander and Eleanor (in the second photo)
are my children from a previous marriage and are not moving to Canada with us but hopefully they will visit regularly and who knows might decide to move across in the future.


James and Alexander followed in my footsteps by joining the Royal Navy and are enjoying themselves travelling the world and Eleanor has just completed her GCSEs at Lady Manners School in Bakewell.

Charlotte is 10 years old and Gabi is 7.

We live in Chesterfield, Derbyshire and my wife and I both work for the Derbyshire Constabulary....I am a Detective Chief Inspector and my wife works in our Force Control Room as a Communications Officer (answering 999 calls and using the radio).

I can retire from the police in the summer of 2011 and that is the reason many years ago we discussed what we wanted to do and where we wanted to do it.