Exploring Home

We all have that one touristy place in our area that we recommend as a place to visit to everyone who comes in to town but have never visited ourselves. It’s just somewhere that we always think would be interesting to go to, but we never make the time to go there ourselves. For L and I that place was the Royal Canadian Mint.

I’ve now lived in the area for 6 years and I’ve never gone to the Mint, considered by many to be an essential visit when you’re in town. L has lived here all her life and has never visited either (apparently she was sick on field trip day). With these facts in mind we decided that it was time to check this landmark off our list.

We went on a guided tour, something I would recommend because there’s not much you can see if you’re not on one of these tours. If you’re by yourself you can visit the first floor of the building, which contains the gift shop and a few feature windows showing the end of the minting process. Your experience would be lackluster if this was all you were able to see. By taking the tour you are able to see the process in its entirety and have it all explained by the guide, allowing you to properly understand the process. We called ahead to book our tour (just in case) but you can also book them from the front desk when you arrive. Overall it’s an interesting place to visit and one I would recommend checking out if you’ve never been.

And now on to the real sentiment behind this article, encouraging you all to go visit these places in your area.

As I have said, we all have places in our area that we recommend to others but have never visited ourselves. So what’s holding us back? If we are telling others to visit these places then why aren’t we going there ourselves? Many times these places are quintessential destinations, the kinds of things you see on the brochures advertising your town. They are the landmarks that define our homes, the pictures that are undeniably of your city and yet we don’t go to them. For some of us it’s because we don’t make the time, for others it almost becomes a point of pride (“I must be the only person in New York who’s never been to Central Park”).  Whatever the reason, it’s time to go out and visit these places. These locations define our homes and it’s time to see them.

One thing that travel teaches you is to appreciate your home and in order to appreciate it we have to explore it. So go out and find that location that you’ve never been to. Spend a day exploring your home and enjoy the appreciation you gain for it as you learn more about it. These places are our homes and the best way to make them feel as such is to explore them.

So get out and explore,

 

JP

A New Year (and a new writer)

Hello friends,

 

We were looking at the blog this week and we realized that it has been a year since we posted anything. So, for those dedicated few of you that have stuck around this long, we thought you deserved a new post. And with this new post you get a new writer! Yay!

Alright, alright, quit your whining. LP will still be writing here too, I’ll just be chiming in every now and then with my own thoughts and ideas.

Hi, I’m JP, the other half of the Paetkau Life and since it was because of the events of this last year that I am now living a more media focused life, we figured it was only fitting that I was the one to update you on those events.

This past year we have done a lot of travelling, though not as much as either of us would like (we’ve both caught a little travel fever). Since our last post we’ve travelled across 13 different time zones on three different adventures and we have plans for more travel upcoming. But for now, let me update you on the places we have been.

Right after L’s last post we took off to Hawaii with my family. This is a trip that my parents had been wanting to take with us kids after they went a few years ago and fell in love with the Islands. So when they gave us the offer of “get yourselves to the Islands and we will take care of the rest,” we jumped at the chance. That’s just too good to pass up, so we all travelled from different points in Canada and met up in Maui. There we enjoyed the sun, learned to surf, and swam with turtles. We also discovered that shave ice is amazing when you get it from the right place. We were sad to leave this great family time and go back to the real world.

In the fall we had the chance to make up for a lost opportunity and go to Kenya. As some of our readers will know we were originally supposed to be living in Kenya for 4 months a few years ago but unfortunately our plans fell through. Sometime later we were approached by the World Missions leader of our church with an opportunity to help build a relationship with a community in Kenya through an organization called 410 Bridge. For the past year we have been helping the church to plan and organize a series of trips and we were lucky enough to get to join one ourselves. On our trip we travelled to a series of communities to learn what they were doing in their partnership with 410 and how they wanted to proceed with their plans in the future. Eventually we and the rest of our team sat down and picked one of the communities for our church to partner with directly. This trip was so different from others that we have been on because even though we did do some touristy things (safari!) they were only a small portion of our time on the trip. Kenya was an intensely rewarding experience and we are so glad that we can help others go on similar trips through 410 Bridge.

Our final adventure of this last year wasn’t as grand an adventure as the others but it was just as important. In February we took a few days off to visit my parents in Southern Alberta. It was nice to be able to relax and recharge, especially since we were not able to visit during the Christmas season like we usually do. We spent time with family and friends and L got to visit her favorite place in the world, Banff. This was a great way to get away for a bit and break out of that post-Christmas funk.

So now you know our year. We spent a lot of time travelling and even more time doing all the other things one needs to do in between (but nobody wants to hear about that). I hope you enjoyed reading about our travels and if people enjoy them enough maybe I’ll go more in-depth about each trip some other time.

Thanks for reading,

JP