A New Year (and a new writer)

April 11, 2017 by jppaetkau 1 Comment

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