Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black. A lot of people think about what would

happen if they could hit a reset button on their lives, leave everything behind and start over

in a new environment.

Few of us actually make such a dramatic move like the one our guest, Laura Galloway did.

Laura made the extraordinary move from New York City to a remote reindeer herding village in

the Arctic tundra, one of the most unknowable cultures on earth. Her story is fascinating and

jaw-dropping at times, and she writes about it in the book, Dalvi, six years in the Arctic Tundra.

Laura, we thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Well, we're excited to talk with you. It is such a fascinating story.

And tell us what your life was like in New York City before you gave it all up to move to the Arctic tundra.

And why you did that?

Well, I had been living in New York as a media executive.

So I was handling basically doing media strategy and public relations in New York as a media executive. So I was handling basically doing media strategy and

public relations in New York and had a very successful career. I ended up losing a major

client that I'd had for years and years just because they grew very, very big. And around the same

time, I had taken a very early stage commercial DNA test,

which I won't name, but it suggested this is when they were in a very, very nascent state. And it

had suggested that I had some relation to the Sami people, which are the indigenous Arctic people of Scandinavia.

So that would be Arctic, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia.

So I found that really fascinating.

And I started taking vacations to that part of the world.

And I loved it because it was such a difference from the busy,

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