A Canadian Spanner in the Works

A bit of background to put this story into perspective -

My husband works for an Australian mining company here in Mexico. Actually, he doesn’t have a blog name. He needs a blog name. Let’s call him Rocky (get it? Mining? get it? sorry). So, it’s a 2 year contract and we’ve been here for 18 months. Lately we’ve been talking about whether we want to extend the contract. The plan was that after Mexico we’d go back to Perth, since we’ve been away from home for so long. We’ve got a house back there that we’ve never lived in, which is a real doer upper, so we’d go home and be with our family and get stuck into a major renovation and…probably stay put for a while.

We decided that maybe we’d be happy to extend for 6 months, but no more, because that way we’d be back in Perth in time for Guerita to start Year 1 in January 2009. So Rocky told that to the boss and they started to discuss a few variations to the contract (correcting that bl**dy USD exchange rate for a start).

Then yesterday, the boss rings up and says, “How would you feel about staying for longer, but doing the job based out of Vancouver?”!!! Now, we’ve moved around a lot and lived in some really interesting places, but the one place we have always said we would absolutely love to live is Vancouver. We’ve been there briefly a few times, on our way to Whistler and always dreamed about living in a city that has so much diversity, culture, great food, great festivals, is on the water and you can go skiing on weekends! Its a similar size to Perth, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it was about the city, but it had a similar vibe to Perth. It felt like a place we could live.

SO – now we have a dilemma. On the plus side, we would be living in a fantastic, vibrant, exciting city, and be able to ski all the time and see more of Canada and there’d be no worries about the quality of schools, hospitals, housing etc. On the down side, we’d probably have to commit for another 2 years, so we wouldn’t be going home as soon as we thought, and Rocky would probably have to travel more for work (he’d still be coming down to Mexico regularly to check on things).

So, in amongst all the frenzy of Christmas, I’ve been madly researching whatever I can online and we’ve been (metaphorically) writing our pros and cons list. The good thing is we’ve made this decision quite a few times in our married life – should Rocky take this job? Do we want to live in that city/country? – so we’ve got a good decision making rhythm these days. The one question we always come back to is “will we look back and regret not going?”. Some of the places we’ve lived in have been challenging, but I’ve never regretted the experience of living there. Maybe we haven’t quite got that wanderlust out of system just yet….