The male side of my family has always had a good dose of "wanderlust". My brother and his family settling in Australia and my father, after many years working in Canada, retiring to British Columbia. For many years I have spent wonderful and relaxing holidays visiting both of them.

After a holiday in 2005 visiting my father on Vancouver Island I started to look seriously at emigrating to Canada, and started researching what was involved in starting my life anew in another country.

Whilst driving home from work one day I noticed a banner on the road side advertising an immigration seminar to be held the following week and decided to "go for it" and attend.

That was March 2005, two and a half years later, £3,800.00 poorer and our skilled workers visas are in the short queue ready to be processed by the Canadian High Commission.

Once we had signed up with the consultants they sent us a very extensive list of documentation that may be required by the CHC. This included family history, educational qualifications, job references, the list goes on...

It took us about ten months of pushing H.R. departments of previous employers, contacting schools for the certificates that we never thought we would need again, spending days trying to contact "great aunt Gladys" to find her date of birth. But, finally, we got all of the information together and posted it to our consultants.

The consultant checked it all and then submitted it to the CHC who duly returned a file number and put our documents into the queue with thousands of other applications.

During the next couple of years we travelled to Canada on "fact finding" and "job interview" holidays and I made several contacts that would be willing to help me get a job when I got over there. We also started to catalogue our posessions, what we wanted to take with us, what we didn't need and thought we could sell through eBay and what we would have to give or throw away. We stopped buying electrical goods and tried to manage with the same car (no H.P. agreements), etc.

Then the "Credit Crunch of 2007 - 2008" started to bite so we put the house up for sale in the hope that we would not be put into negative equity and not have enough money to support us when we finally got to Canada.

After five months, two viewings and three price drops we got an offer on the house and that same day we had a letter from our consultants asking us to update our documentation as the CHC was ready to process our application. We agreed a "move" date and had three weeks to sell the house, liquidate all of the assets we were not taking to Canada and sort out all of the documentation, get the criminal record checks, up to date photographs, etc. It was tough be we managed it, just.

We are now six weeks into the wait while the Canadian High Commission actually process our application and this wait is the worst, we are all very stressed and cannot think of much else!

Although using an immigration consultancy is not for everyone, as they are expensive, I think that, for us, it was a good move. It helped us with all of the paperwork and allowed us to put a better case to the CHC than we would have done on our own. Immigration has a habit of taking over your life, especially if there is a long wait for the outcome, and to fail the processing stage of the immigration process because you have not got all of the information that they require would be heart breaking.

During my research I have compiled a useful web sites and am currently researching a checklist of things that may need to be addressed before we leave the UK and after we arrive in Canada.

If you have any web sites that may be of interest, any information that would help others or if you want to add your story to my web site then e-mail me at [steve@spstreet.net].