Longtime Bowen Islander Mara Brenner – she came here in 1995 – is still an islander, it’s just that she is no longer a Bowen Islander. She and partner Stu Davidson and their two kids all had friends and years of history here and did not want to move.

But one year ago almost to the day they headed off to a new life on Gabriola Island.

“We really loved Bowen a lot,” Brenner said in an interview this week. “We left because we had to.”

She explains that they’d bought land on Bowen and wanted to build on it. But as building costs rose they couldn’t get ahead enough to do so. They were living on their land in a trailer with “an approved septic field and well” but a Bowen bylaw only allows you to live like that for one year and they passed that.

The neighbourly couple, who met on the Burrard St. Bridge in 1993 and were living together a month later, were popular and well-known here. Despite that however a neighbour complained about their living in the trailer and the next thing they knew “the bylaw officer was about to evict us from the land we bought.”

They would have rented a home here only we “couldn’t go back to renting because rentals for a family home were over $2,000 a month and of course we still had a mortgage.”

So Mara, 37, Stu, 44, Jasmine, 10 and Aden, 8, left and in the process Bowen lost a great ballet teacher/theatre producer, an installer and repairer of glass and mirrors whose work shows his integrity (Stu was also a top player in the local fastpitch league) and two wonderfully amusing and friendly children.

Brenner, from Montreal and who originally came west for theatre school, says it is a different world on Gabriola, population 4,000, as far as housing goes and that the word affordable is very much part of the housing lexicon there.

They began there by renting, Mara says, a two bedroom home that had a hot tub on an acre of land for $800 a month. Then, after selling their land here last March, in the summer they bought there and what bought them a quarter acre of shale and bedrock cliff out Millers landing way on this island bought them a “spectacular” three bedroom home on five acres of usable “beautiful” land on that Island.

Not to mention a dance studio and glass shop on property.

There are other differences. For example, there are daily free hot lunches at the school and all the meat and produce is Gabriola grown. They have a large garden and an orchard and bought a cow and butchered it and it’s in the freezer.

“I have not been to the supermarket in so long,” Brenner enthused. “It’s Bowfeast every night here.”

They had done their research – “we just looked for an island with no glass man and no dance school” – and the result is that Brenner now conducts a whopping 17 ballet and pilates classes weekly, many in a studio on their property and others for the Gabriola Rec. Society, while Stu is learning the island quickly as he darts about installing glass.

So finally then does Brenner and her family miss Bowen?

Starting with the kids, mom says Jas takes trumpet and drama and Adin plays the drums and soccer. They dance, and love it; “Jas dances in any performances that I let her sneak into.” They go to gym in Nanaimo, something mom says they are good at thanks to starting on Bowen in Lisa Brougham’s program (“the strong skills they learned [on Bowen] have made all the difference”).

So they’re too busy to miss Bowen and Mara says she and Stu are in the same boat.

“We miss some people and gymnastics and Bowen baseball big time, but it’s kind of a no-brainer that the move was great for us. People aren’t so stressed here, it’s so mellow. It’s part of the affordability because people don’t feel so rushed and that trickles down into their life and how they live it.

“If I won the lottery I would visit Bowen a lot but it’s better here than I could have imagined.”