When Sarah arrived in Thunder Bay for her residency training program after medical school, she had no ties to the city whatsoever.
“You don’t necessarily have any guarantee as to where you’re going to end up,” explains Sarah of the matching process that happens when it comes to medical residencies. “Everybody checks their results on the same day, and you find out where you’re going to be spending the next 2-5 years.”
She moved here from Saskatchewan, where both she and her partner Chris are from. She met Chris on a visit home during the summer. They met on Tinder, and Sarah was open with him about her having to return to Thunder Bay for the duration of her training.
Chris asked Sarah out on a date before she had to head back to Thunder Bay.
“We dated long-distance for a year and a half until he made the leap to join me here,” says Sarah.
They had been dating for about six months before the pandemic hit.
“He drove the 16 hours here from Saskatoon here multiple times because getting on planes was difficult with all the restrictions.”
“In both his words and mine, he kind of just kept showing up,” says Sarah.
Chris now owns a local Powersports store and his background is varied; he grew up on a cattle farm, he majored in agriculture, and he spent several years as a software salesperson.
“He knew he wanted to own a business, and then when this opportunity came up, it was a mixture of the right people, right situation, right time,” says Sarah.
Sarah finished her residency four years ago and she is now working as a doctor of internal medicine. She works at a community clinic in Thunder Bay as well as at the TBRHSC and is a locum doctor in Parry Sound and Yellowknife.
“I initially thought when I moved out here that I would move somewhere else after my residency program as I had no ties here,” explains Sarah, “but I fell victim to the classic experience of Thunder Bay growing on you like moss.”
When the time came that she could leave, Sarah says she felt comfortable and happy here and found that she did not want to move away. Chris, being an adventurous and outdoorsy person, found that he felt the same way.
“The first time Chris visited it was March of 2020, so everything was locked down, we couldn’t go out and do anything. It was in-between winter and spring, and we just kind of did what we could with it. We walked to Hillcrest Park, we went for a run, and we sledged through the snow at Mount McKay to get to the lookout.”
“I remember feeling terrible, thinking this wasn’t the best season to show off Thunder Bay, but at the end of the visit, he told me he really liked Thunder Bay.”
Sarah was confident after that that if he still liked the city in March, during a pandemic, with nothing to do, he would be okay here.
“In Saskatchewan, you can access the same things you can access here in terms of hiking, skiing, camping, boating, and lakes, but you have to be willing to drive for two to three hours to get to them,” Sarah tells me.
“Being able to drive fifteen minutes and access most of these things here in Thunder Bay, I think both of us were like, ‘wait, are we in heaven?’”
“In my early to mid-twenties I thought living in a glass box in Toronto was the ultimate dream, but I was doing a rotation in Huntsville and driving in gridlock traffic full of cars heading out to the country and I thought to myself, we just have access to that all the time.”
Chris and Sarah were married two and a half years ago back in Saskatoon so their family could attend easily.
“We gave mini bottles of Heartbeat Hot Sauce as our wedding favours,” she says, happy to add a little piece of Thunder Bay to their celebration. The couple has really taken to sailing as a pastime in the last several years. It was something they were both interested in trying when they got settled in the city.
“Being pretty land-locked in Saskatchewan, sailing is something that always seemed pretty exotic and other-worldly.”
They started by going down to the docks and Chris decided he was just going to start talking to people. They made a friend and started sailing with him. Within a year, they had their own 33-foot sailboat parked at the marina.
Ultimately, it ended up working out really well that Sarah was placed in Thunder Bay for her training by chance. Both her and Chris have truly embraced all that the city has to offer and can’t imagine living elsewhere now.
