Manitoba Bound!

Our Uhaul ready to go!

It has been quite a crazy month and to be honest, writing on this blog has not been on the top of my priority list.

To catch you up to date, we left Grande Prairie on Monday July 21 for Bow Island.  Tuesday we packed up the Uhaul and Wednesday we left for Dauphin at 4:00 am and arrived in time for supper at 6:00 pm, losing and hour on the way.

A very busy few days, but it is also good to have a home our kids can call home for more than a month as since February we have lived (constituting at least 5 days) in Poland, Ukraine, back to Poland, Parksville BC, Grande Prairie, Vegreville, Dauphin (ok so this was only a 3 day trip), back to Vegreville, Bow Island, Grande Prairie again and finally back to Dauphin where we have been for 20 days and counting!

I am pretty sure our kids are setting themselves up to move again, however, they like their own beds and Ellianna has started calling our duplex our house.  It also helps that we have not gone more than a 10 minutes drive away from the city (8000 people in Dauphin, but a Walmart, McDonalds and Tims!).

I was reminded when I put the title "Manitoba Bound" of the song Alberta Bound by Paul Brandt.  (Just a little video that really has no point to this blog, but a little piece of "home" for us)




I had the privilege of marching with the Grande Prairie Marching Band as we celebrated Grande Prairie's 100 years, so history is a little on the brain.  As part of moving to Dauphin, I went to city hall to register for Manitoba health insurance.  And noticed Fort Dauphin has been around since 1741.  And at one point was one of the most western settlements of North America.  Fort Edmonton was only around since 1795 (thanks Wikipedia for all that information (because everything on the internet is true!))  So we are living in a ton of history.

Manitoba has been very Friendly as their licence plates state; however, having only ever paid GST tacking on another 8% PST totaling 13% has been quite "unfriendly"

But with the extra tax comes alot of free things like no Library fees.  I was watching a Bomber's game with some guys this past week (for some reason, they don't want to get together to watch Eskimo's games) and I was explaining the difficulty of transferring our licence and registration.

There is a reason you have 90 days to transfer your vehicle as it takes 90 days to fill out the paperwork and jump through the hoops to get it done.  One guy commented "Welcome to Friendly Manitoba.  Socialism, everything is free, but you have to do a lot of work to get it!"

I started work last week and am starting to make connections; I even got to go inline skating at the skatepark and boy was I bad.

A few highlights include Celebrating Ellianna's birthday and going to the street fair (which happened to be on the same day)

And Jolen riding a horse for the first time (the wrangler said he was the littlest kid she has ever had ride by themselves)

We are excited for what God has in store for us and the community and if you would like to connect sometime, don't hesitate to comment or send us an email.  We would love to hear from you!