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.