Moving to Kelowna: A dream come true

“I’M PINCHING MYSELF.”

KELOWNA – Hey Kelowna, next time you complain about traffic or weather or anything else, consider this: Moving to Kelowna is a dream for some people.

Just ask Anne-Sophie Dumetz of Ottawa who sat on sunny Knox Mountain and recorded her vow to make her dream of moving here a reality and released the video on Youtube.

Moving to Kelowna: Turning Someday into Today is a first person narration that should remind locals of how lucky we are to live in the Okanagan.

“Right now I’m overlooking the water, I can see the city (and) a bridge… and I’m pinching myself,” she says, bathed in the warmth of an Okanagan sunset. “It feels so surreal that I’m moving to this city that I’m just getting to know and has so many of the things that I’m looking for.”

Dumetz goes on to express her affection for Ottawa but says that she has wanted to move somewhere like Kelowna for a long time.

“My dream of living by water and living close to a beach and having some of the things that this region has here, was always firmly parked in the ‘somedays’,” she says. “And now, it’s this really strange place that I am in my life where I’ve taken that someday dream with my partner Brad and the kids and we’re making it real.”

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Three Kelowna locals however, don’t need to be reminded of how lucky they are.

Mark Jennings-Bates, Gio Lauretta and his wife Lucy Lauretta have produced a film, capitalizing on a trend that is drawing hundreds of thousands of Youtube views around the world.

Their film, Kelowna, Canada is Happy eh! Is Western Canada’s first contribution to the happy video phenomenon that has already seen similar videos from places like Tunis, Poland and France.

Kelowna’s happy video was produced over two weeks by Jennings-Bates and two owners of a local coffee shop, Gio Bean Espresso, as a way to share the happy side of the Okanagan with the world by capitalizing on a worldwide trend.

“It’s really just a way to thank the people of Kelowna for being happy and hopefully letting the rest of the world know that we’re pretty happy too out here,” he says.

The video was uploaded Feb. 3 and features dozens of Kelowna residents lip-syncing and dancing to Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy”. It currently has more than 1,500 views. 

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To contact the reporter for this story, email Adam Proskiw at aproskiw@infotelnews.ca, call (250) 718-0428 or tweet @AdamProskiw.