You can take the girl away from Manitoba, but you can't take Manitoba away from the girl. Or at least when it comes to the weather.

Katie VanKoughnet is originally from Carman, moved to Winnipeg to complete a Bachelor's degree, but eventually settled in St. John's Newfoundland for her Master's and never left.

You might think that the weather out there would be quite different from the Prairies, but it seems no one can escape a little bit of Mani-snow-ba.

"They were calling for quite a bit of snow. I don't think anybody was really ready for the amount of snow that ended up coming," she says of the storm that hit the east coast in January.

"Over one day we got about 80 centimetres of snow which is just outrageous. Nobody really knew what to do with it. There had already been a pretty big snow storm about two weeks before where it hadn't been totally cleaned up from there, and then the snow just kept on coming."

VanKoughnet says the city called a state of emergency very early on which meant residents were not allowed to go to work or travel on the roads, and it lasted for about eight days.

The sounds of that may resound with people who witnessed the 2019 Thanksgiving snow storm, but she notes that the winters in Newfoundland are a different kind of harsh than in her home community.

"Way more snow even in a normal year, but the amount of snow that came within one day is truly mind-boggling. It doesn't get as cold, but way more precipitation. There's just no where to put it all."

Usually snow is not allowed to be dumped into the harbour but the sheer volume required specific permission to do just that.

During all of this, VanKoughnet was one of the many people stuck in their home until the roads were clear enough for travel so she and her roommate made videos to pass the time.

"We're both pretty musical and pretty silly . . . [We] started to get a little bit stir-crazy, get some cabin fever. While we were out shovelling we would sing little snippets of songs that had to do with what we were doing."

"Everybody who was stuck in their homes as well [were] just kind of twiddling their thumbs looking for something to do, so as soon as they see anything that's entertaining and something they can spend some time watching, they gravitated to that."

She says the videos were a "perfect storm" of people looking for something to keep themselves busy while stuck inside from the snow, and others hoping to get a look at what it was like out there.