Great news: our household belongings have arrived!
If we had been more organized, we would have started this blog before moving up North, and then there probably would have been dozens of posts on our packing and relocation process. But instead, you get the short version:
As you probably already know, Tulita is a small, remote, isolated hamlet in the middle of the Northwest Territories. The ways that things can be transported here include the ice roads in the winter (from ~Jan-Mar), on one of the few barges that come up the Mackenzie River in the summer, or via a very expensive flight. As you might imagine, this means that moving personal belongings up here is an expensive and logistically difficult exercise. My job offered a relocation package, including movers coming to pack up all of our stuff and bringing it up to Tulita. This was great and made it possible to move up here for a prolonged period of time, but brought up an interesting conundrum: we now had one shot to bring everything we thought we might need for the next several years to a location that we had never even set foot in before.
What will the local store sell? What new hobbies will we take up? What city luxuries can we not go without? How much warm clothing is enough? These are the questions we’ve been puzzling over for the past few months. Clearly now was the logical time to drop some money, but we also didn’t want to end up with a bunch of stuff we were never going to use. Some tough choices were made. We’ve only been here two weeks now, so it remains to be seen what turns out to be our good and bad purchasing decisions.
Here are some of the things we bought…
Transportation
Excitingly, we bought a snowmobile! This was by far our largest purchase. We bought it from Ryan, who is leaving my position at Parks. Neither Maciek nor I have ever ridden a snowmobile before, so this is very exciting. Ryan showed us how it works, but we’re still going to put major effort into maintaining it, repairing it and not crashing it.
We already owned bicycles and shipped those up. I brought my snowshoes and AT skis, and Maciek bought snowshoes. We both plan to buy cross-country skis, but everywhere was out of stock when we were looking, so we’ll have to buy them online and have them sent in. We looked into canoes and kayaks, but they are expensive and we were unsure of how much we’d use them, so we decided to put that purchase off until a later date. The ice roads are only open for a small portion of the year, so we quickly opted away from the idea of buying a truck.
Weather-Appropriate Clothing
I was feeling pretty satisfied with my existing clothing selection, but Maciek was coping with his fear of the cold with impulse shopping. Several wool base layers, wool socks, wool scarves, wool mid-layers, down mid-layers, synthetic mid-layers, rain pants, hut booties, a giant down parka, and the warmest mitts he could find later and he’s feeling a bit more confident. I got a fairly serious down layer and some heavy-duty gloves, but I also get a lot of my clothing provided by work since Parks staff wear uniforms. We also got some bug jackets, and we still need to get some more serious winter boots, because they don’t really sell those in Vancouver.
Housewares & Kitchenwares
Our house in Tulita was furnished by Parks, and we already owned a bunch of this stuff (including a slow cooker, a juicer, and a dehydrator), so much of this category was already taken care of. We got a nice office chair for Maciek and other assorted things such as storage bins, a cooler, a blender, a coffee grinder, a kettle, hangers, canning jars, and a Joy of Cooking.
Food
In anticipation of the higher costs and reduced selection of foodstuffs in Tulita, we stocked up on non-perishable staples and spices and seasonings that we didn’t anticipate finding up North.
Outdoor Recreation
We heard that some of the main outdoor activities here are hunting and fishing. I have my firearms license already, and Maciek had completed the course, so we bought a .22 caliber rifle. This will be sufficient for target practice and small game, but nothing larger than that. You need to be a Northwest Territory resident for a year before you’re allowed to hunt big game anyways, so this should be good practice in the meantime. We still need to get fishing gear.
Although not exclusively in the outdoor recreation category, we got an entry-level DSLR camera (Nikon D3200) that we’re starting to play around with. Hopefully we’ll be able to get some good northern lights shots this winter.
Indoor Recreation
We bought a 50” TV. Also a Dance Dance Revolution mat – Maciek assures me that we don’t need a game console for this and that he can find a way to run it on Linux. We added to our board game collection a bit with the addition of Carcassonne, Arkham Horror, and Codenames. We got some basic at-home fitness equipment, including an inflatable ball, ab roller, gymnastics rings, gliding disks, and some light free weights. There’s a very nice fitness centre in town with all sorts of equipment.
Also, I got a fiddle. No, I do not currently know how to play the fiddle. That’s what YouTube and good household soundproofing is for.
Tools
Maciek decided that one of his northern hobbies is going to be carpentry, so he bought a whole bunch of woodworking tools. I was going to list them here, but he says that my list is incomplete and that he wants to write a whole separate blog post about his tools, so you’ll have to wait for that.
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All this planning and researching and shopping has kept us busy. Our last few weeks in Vancouver were spent shopping at Walmart, Costco, Famous Foods, Lee Valley Tools, Fitness Depot, Reliable Gun, MEC, REI, Arcteryx, 3 Vets, Deakin, Icebreaker, Steep & Cheap, Gourmet Warehouse, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Amazon, Craigslist, and assorted music stores, cheese stores, board game stores, etc.
Needless to say, we’re sick of shopping, and right now the idea of one small store with limited supply feels like a nice change.
The movers came and packed all of this up and took it away. That was three weeks ago. In the meantime, we’ve only had fairly limited personal possessions. The original estimate was that our stuff wasn’t supposed to arrive until August 26th, so we were pretty excited to get it a week early. Everything was packed in boxes and packing paper, so it was basically like Christmas morning, unwrapping all of our shiny new toys.