Buy the Extension Cord Now
The first thing nobody tells you about is the cord. It hangs from the grille of half the trucks in town like a tail. By the second week of real cold you will understand it completely and stop finding it funny. Buy a long extension cord before you need one. Then buy a better one.
New arrivals to Grande Prairie usually come with their warnings preloaded. The winters. The distance. The boom-and-bust mood of a city that has always taken its cues from the oilpatch, the bush and the canola fields. All of it is true, and none of it is the whole story. The people who stay longest tend to be the ones who stopped treating the place as a posting and started treating it as a town.
Start with Muskoseepi Park. Bear Creek runs through the middle of the city, and the park follows it as a long green seam of trail that carries you across a good chunk of Grande Prairie without a single stoplight. Walk it in every season. In July it belongs to strollers and cyclists. In January it belongs to you and the chickadees, and that is the better month.
Then there are the swans. Grande Prairie calls itself the Swan City and puts a trumpeter on nearly everything it owns, which sounds like a branding exercise until spring. That's when the real birds come back to the water around town, Saskatoon Island Provincial Park in particular, and you find yourself pulling over to look at them like everyone else. You will not be cool about the swans. Nobody is.
Learn the light, because it will run your life. In June you can read on the deck close to midnight, and the sky never fully commits to dark. In December the sun leaves before most people do. Neither one is a problem, exactly. But they are facts, and the newcomers who plan for them do better than the ones who take them personally.
Don't judge the city by its big-box strips. Every city has those, and they tell you nothing. Go downtown instead. The Montrose Cultural Centre holds the library and the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie under one roof, and it is one of the few places in town where an hour disappears without your noticing.
The drives are the real reward, and the Peace Country is generous with them. Head east to Kleskun Hill, a small, strange pocket of badlands rising out of farmland, where the prairie crocuses come up early. Go west past Wembley to the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum. The Pipestone Creek bonebed nearby is the reason it exists, and the reason children in this region can name more ceratopsians than their parents. Go south to Nitehawk on the Wapiti when there is snow. Go north to Dunvegan, where the bridge crosses the Peace and the valley opens up beneath you. It is worth going any time, but it is at its best in September, when the aspens turn and the whole slope goes gold.
Edmonton is the better part of a day away, there and back. You will make that drive less often than you expect, and complain about it more.
One last thing. Much of this city came from somewhere else: other provinces, other countries, other plans. That is why it is easy to get invited to things. Say yes to the first few. Somebody will show you which ditch the swans like, and somebody else will show you how to set the timer on your block heater. That second person is your friend for life.