Happy Holidays and best wishes for 2013!

Marlies WobbenAbout LifeLeave a Comment

Another great year on the prairies! Of course with ups and downs.. in May we had to say goodbye to our good friend Rob, which was a tremendous blow, and just days later to Nico’s manager Joy. That was the craziest week ever and luckily we went on our British Columbia trip the next day! For vacation and orientation, as we still had the wish to move to the Okanagan. It was a wonderful trip (by car), but Nico hadn’t been able to set up a single job interview and the health region just pointed to the external job postings online. Jobs are posted on an internal list first, so you almost have to get in through a casual or otherwise hard to fill position. Nico was not going to give up his permanent full-time job here for anything less though.

After that trip we let it rest and went camping in our provincial parks almost every weekend – 45 nights in 4 months, yay! We often stayed closer to home, having friends join us and it made us re-appreciate our beautiful prairie valleys. But we ended the season with a bang at Cypress Hills where we camped after season between the majestic lodgepole pines and had moose, deer and coyotes walk over the campground!

Our furry kids are doing better than ever. Tess had bladder stones removed and the vet put her on diet food. Feeding her separately was stressful on her though, so we now feed this (both wet and dry) food to all six. We already thought we were giving them high quality food (only dry though), but their coats have become much softer and Tess is more playful then we have ever seen her! We’d like to find less expensive alternatives to what we now have to buy from the vet, but we also don’t want to reverse this big change!

Now it’s winter (this time with lots of snow again!) and looking back on that BC trip and a wonderful SK summer, we’ve come to realize that we have everything we could possibly want right here and we don’t want to uproot ourselves yet again, only for mountains and milder (but greyer) winters. We’ve built up so much in these (almost) 5 years, that we don’t want to leave the amazing friendships, a better economic/financial situation, a cute house, our jobs, the many sun hours and the friendly prairie people behind! Never say never, but it looks like we’re staying! 🙂

So we are looking forward to more SK camping next year and a trip to Europe again. Not so much Holland, for this trip we’ll be visiting friends in Germany and spending a week in vacation bungalows in Belgium with family!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas (or whatever other holiday you may be celebrating) and much happiness and health for the new year!!

Nico & Marlies
Tess, Gandalf, Rider, Smokey, Sheldon & Penny

Pictures on the card:
Main: home sweet home (a few days ago).
Inserts on the left: Buffalo Pound, Crooked Lake, northern lights, 2x Clear Lake (Manitoba), Tess.
Inserts on the right: Okanagan Lake, all 6 kitties, 4x Cypress Hills, sunrise at home.

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