Category: Our Stories

In Honour of the Mitsubishi

The somewhat unnamed guest (or host, rather) on all of our Portugal adventures was the purple and silver Mitsubishi, the pick-up truck of Kevin’s late grandfather, Avô Eugenio.

This mammoth of a truck represents countless memories for Kevin and his brother, who spent their summers in the Algarve with their grandparents.

Until recently, Avo Maria kept the Mitsubishi in her garage, where it took up approximately 95% of available space. I’ve never seen a truck-to-garage ratio like it, and I was impressed both times I watched Kevin park it back in there.

During our time in Portugal, we also made our fair share of memories in this truck. A thoroughly Algarvieu vehicle, we’re not sure it had even seen rain until we road-tripped north of Lisbon with my brother, Tyler.

It was the driver of many interesting off road adventures, allowing us to explore and appreciate the Algarve in all of its glory. It took us across the Algarve, and north into Lisbon several times. Its rear gearing wasn’t exactly highway tolerable, so we always took the slower country roads all through the Alentejo. Thanks to the truck, we know an outrageous amount of back roads and countryside routes.

Through most of our time in Portugal, Kevin drove me everywhere in the Mitsubishi – roadtrips, dinners, beach days, and more. When Kevin’s best friend Mark came to visit, I actually learned to drive a manual transmission so that I could chauffeur the two of them to and from the Algarve night life.

My adventures with Kevin and Mark popularized the phrase “give it the beans” in my life, and also resulted in one of the funniest events I ever witnessed in the Algarve: Kevin and Mark soaking wet eating and drinking out of the back of the Mitsubishi as Albufeira morning traffic began. After a night at a Kiss Night Club foam party, we couldn’t go home without snacks. So I parked the Mitsubishi (a foot away from the curb) and they turned the back of the truck into a dining room. I’ve never seen two people laugh so hard in my life.

This amazingly pristine vehicle, a 1999 Mitsubishi pick-up truck, was recently sold to a British expat. And so ends our adventures with the wonderful purple and silver Mitsubishi. Pretty sad, actually, but we’re both carrying a ton of memories forward.

Photos below of our adventures in the truck:

hey buddy!

look at them, just chilling out!

we saw some goats running across the road!

Then we drove there, and Kevin sniped this wicked parking spot directly in front of the entrance

chilling beside the truck… let’s gooooooo

siblings at a non-existent archeological monument

Kevin’s truck enjoying the ride (I’m inside the truck at this point)

August 23, 2017
We Moved! And Decorated!

This post is primarily for my mom’s friends, who haven’t seen our new place yet.

Kevin and I moved back to Toronto at the beginning of July, and have spent the past few months focused on setting up our new home together.

We also got back into fostering with the Annex Cat Rescue, which you can read more about over here.

In my experience, moving is one of those situations where you realize just how wonderful and helpful family support can be. I’ve never moved without my brother, Tyler, travelling some far-ish distance to help me move (read: move most of my stuff for me). And having now moved out of my parents’ house 3 times, it’s clear that I never leave without taking (re-purposing!) a bunch of their stuff.

Like a fool, I was planning to paint our entire place by myself. Kevin’s mom insisted that we let their family help us, and thank goodness for that. In my allotted paint-the-whole-condo time, I managed only to paint our closet and bedroom. The Saturday after we moved in, Kevin’s mom, Aunt, and Uncle came over to help us paint. 12 hours later, our place looked amazing!

So, we made a big move. And our place looks great (in my opinion), but it wouldn’t look nearly this great without the love and care of our families.

Anyways, here are some photos to show you how it all looks. Be forewarned, Kevin is in the photos which means I took the photos, so they’re a tad blurry.

The only remaining decoration project is the closet, which will be resolved soon. In case you’re wondering where some of our furniture came from, the yellow chair, wine rack, bed, and kitchen table, and patio set were all “re-purposed” from our families. The couch, chairs, bookcases, and desk came from Ikea. The dressers and bar table were picked up at vintage/antique stores on Queen St W. The light in our bedroom comes from Morba on Queen St W. The rug and pillows came from wayfair.ca. Our glass coffee table and side table came from Home Sense (but versions of this are being sold everywhere right now). The pink stools came from Design Republic, also on Queen St W.

October 25, 2016
Back in Grimsby :: Thoughts on accepting unexpected changes in 2015

I’ve been working on this post for sometime, building it in my head, finally writing it out, and coming back to it with edits on edits. It seems fitting to publish this on New Year’s Eve, after a rather surprising and challenging year.

When I started writing this blog, Kevin and I were living in Cambodia. We’d quit our jobs, sold or given away most of our clothing, furniture, technology, etc, and moved across the globe on a new adventure.

Going into this, our expectation was that we’d live abroad and travel Southeast Asia & surrounding areas for 3 to 5 years, and then see where life/work led us from there.

What we weren’t expecting was my homesickness to result in a mandatory trip home at Christmas.

Still, we worked in some extra benefits to that trip. After going home for Christmas, we’d planned to travel through Spain to France, and then fly from Paris back to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

What we weren’t expecting was for Kevin to get hit in the mouth with a hockey stick while playing “pick up” hockey in Grimsby. When that happened, we got some quick dental work done, then headed to Portugal to finish the rest.

What we also weren’t expecting was to learn that recovering from a traumatic dental injury takes several months, not several weeks. Fast forward to December 31st, and we’re still 1.5 months away from a full resolution.

Back in February, when we were coming to terms with the recovery outlook, we realized pretty quickly that our goal of living 2-5 years in Asia was going to be postponed, and possibly replaced with a new plan that worked for our current circumstances.

Coming back to Canada in July, and having to re-explain that to everyone who thought we were still living in Asia, was harder than I’d expected. In a sense, I felt like we’d failed on this big journey that we’d planned and talked about for so long. For the sake of moving away, we’d given up both things and opportunities, and coming back so soon had me wondering if all that was in vain. It also feels weird to have only travelled for such a short period of time, when our “move” had been aimed that avoiding a type of rushed,”see it once, then head home”, type of travelling. And yet, the things we saw and accomplished during our travels were incredible. And as I’ve written before, there’s nothing quite like travelling to cure oneself of the notion that it’s even possible to ‘see it all’, so should I really be disappointed that I didn’t?

I’m still kind of grappling with these thoughts, but also trying to full embrace our current circumstances.

So… yes, we’re back in Canada. Yes, we live in Grimsby. Yes, our untethered lifestyle is indefinitely on ‘pause’. But I’m actually okay with that. And after a year of health/dental related drama and stress, I am more than okay with saying goodbye to 2015, and looking forward to whatever 2016 holds. If these past couple of months are any indication, there are many good times ahead for our life in Canada.

December 31, 2015
Back in Grimsby :: An update on what’s happening with this here blog
If you’re reading closely, 2 things are clear:
1. Kevin and I are back in Canada
2. Most of the posts about our travels are describing things have taken place a few months ago
At the end of July, Kevin and I booked one-way tickets back to Canada. We’d been in Portugal since early 2015, and had been travelling/living in Southeast Asia before that.

We didn’t anticipate coming back to Canada nearly this soon, but here we are. So, what happens to a travel blog when you’re no longer “travelling”?

The immediate plan is to continue writing. There are still tons of photos and stories to share from our adventures in the first half of 2015. I’ll be posting those as a “Throwback Thursday” entry, once a week.

Alongside the Thursday posts, I’ll be writing about what we’re doing and exploring in Canada, along documenting with any other shorter trips that we get to.

When we left Toronto and set out on our ‘big international adventure’, we chose to plan a long period of travel because we like to take our time. In Portugal, we *really* took our time, exploring many nooks and crannies of the Algarve, often seeing the same place or thing many times, and yet appreciating it all the same.

One thing that we learned very quickly is that it’s next to impossible to see all the incredible and beautiful and interesting things/places out there, because the opportunities to do so are limitless. If the opportunities to explore beautiful experiences abroad are so numerous, it stands to reason that the same thing applies wherever life finds us. Right now, we’re living in Grimsby, the quickly growing small-ish town where I grew up. Much to my surprise, there are plenty of things to see and explore here, as long as you look for such opportunities.

As someone who has started and abandoned many projects, I’m still a bit shocked that I’ve maintained this blog for so long. Though I’m geographically back where I started, I’ll keep documenting Kevin’s photos and our stories. (Beside, this blog was started to share our adventures with friends and family. With most of our friends in Toronto, being in Grimsby can feel so far away that we might as well still be in a foreign country 😉 )

I’m not at all looking forward to winter, but Kevin and I will be doing our best to get into some winter sports and activities, making sure we get the most out of the unique experience of a Canadian winter.
December 9, 2015
I blog for work too!

Just a quick little post today for anyone following along here.

Though I’ve mentioned that I work remotely for a tech startup called RecruitLoop, aside from this post, I don’t talk about it in too much detail on here. Despite appearances, it’s a job that keeps me quite busy doing a pretty wide variety of things. And since I’m so well-practiced, blogging has been added to that list!

Yesterday my very first post was published on the RecruitLoop blog. It’s about innovative strategies for sourcing candidates when hiring. You can check it out right here!

Enjoy!

PS: If you’re interested in learning more about cool hiring strategies, we’re running a couple of webinars (aka online seminars or classes) in the next few weeks, covering hiring for remote teams, and becoming a talent magnet.

September 17, 2015
Did you know that Tyler came to visit?

While Kevin and I were in Cambodia, my brothers trekked halfway around the globe to visit us for a 10 day extravaganza.

We managed to convince Tyler to come on a similar adventure, this time in Portugal. Kevin put weeks of planning into a road trip that took us all around Portugal, where we saw some incredible sites, ate some incredible food, and laughed incredibly hard.

He came to visit us for 10 days in the middle of April. We started with nights out in Lisbon, followed by a 3 day roadtrip that was cut short by illness. We then spent the rest of the trip in the Algarve, where we showed him this sites, relaxed among the orange trees, and convinced him to eat all kinds of amazing seafood.

Inspired by our former roommate, Dragan, the motto of the entire trip was “turn down for what” (really, inspired by this most amazing music video), and Tyler did his very best to turn up all the time.

We did it up pretty big, which is to say that we spared no expense and never said ‘no’ to anything.

As a result, there are lots of photos and videos and stories to share. I expect they’ll take up the next 2 weeks worth of posts (including a couple written by Tyler himself!), so be sure to check the blog often!

Below are a few photos of what’s to come – enjoy!

siblings at a non-existent archeological monument

approaching piodao from the cloudy mountains

cows on the roadside, just normal stuff

meta photos on an aqueduct in Tomar

siblings in Lisbon

siblings in Belem (part of Lisbon, really)

slow down – goats on the road!

June 29, 2015
We converted, and now we’re obsessed.

Back when e-readers came out, I worked at Chapters. I thought the Kobo was a cool concept but, like many people, I love buying, holding, having books. It had been suggested that I buy an e-reader, but I’d always declined. In my mind, nothing can beat a real book, in my hand, and then on my bookshelf to be perused and re-read in the future.

When we moved to Phnom Penh, this became something of a problem. I couldn’t take books with me to Phnom Penh, but I felt silly buying books there because I couldn’t take them with me when I left either. I had lots of time to relax, so I did buy a handful of books, but the selection was terribly limited. In one case, I actually bought a book that I knew was sitting unread in my parents’ garage.

And that’s when I realized: e-readers are perfect for travelling or living abroad.

When I came home at Christmas, I went out an splurged on a Kobo. I loaded it up with books, and was reading non-stop once I got to Portugal.

After a couple of weeks, Kevin picked it up, then asked to borrow it. Within a couple of hours he was hooked.

I hopped online and looked up e-readers in Portugal. The best option was to buy a Kindle from Amazon.com, and that’s just what I did, saying to Kevin “I’m ordering you a Kindle, but I’m keeping it for myself if it’s better than the Kobo”.

It is, and I did.

So now we have a set of e-readers and we rarely leave the house without them.

I’ve read 34 books so far this year. That’s probably more books that I’ve read in the past 3 years combined.

Kevin concurs, having read 30 so far.

We’ve always been big readers. As kids we were total library nerds, and we consume a hefty amount of internet reading, and readings for school. But actual books, fiction in particular? We haven’t read this many in years.

We never thought we’d say this, but we would never part with our e-readers.

reading!

reading by the fire, keeping warm in January.

June 20, 2015
Life with a garden in Alte

The garden at Avo Olimpia’s house in Alte is not just for lemon trees and orange trees. It’s also a place for herbs and flowers.

Many, many flowers. In particular, roses.

When I was growing up, my grandparents had a truly incredible rose garden. I frequently remember walking through the garden with my grandparents, examining the roses, learning their names, and choosing favourites. I’d never expected to experience rose-induced nostalgia, but as winter ended and the roses began blooming in Alte, it hit me. And it kind of freaked me out, too. Kevin and I would walk through the garden, he’d pose question about a flower, and I’d know the answer. For a small amount of time, I felt the like the Jason Bourne of gardening. Totally weird, but also nice to be reminded that there is lasting evidence from that time in my life, beyond simple memories.

Beyond roses, the gardens in Alte are filled with the types of flowers you typically only see in bouquets in Canada. The weather here is far more forgiving, which means that plants which die during the winter at home actually survive here. Not only do I get to see unique flowers, I also get to see flowers that are larger than I’ve ever seen before.

Take a look below to see some shots Kevin has captured in the garden over the past couple of months. Beautiful colours, beautiful flowers, beautiful memories.

All the fixings for homemade hot sauce.

Kevin’s attempt at homemade hot sauce.

me with a Pomegranate tree at Kevin’s Avo Maria’s house

June 2, 2015
Wait, where exactly do I work?

“Work” is kind of a funny concept. I do a lot of work on different fronts, but I’m currently only monetarily compensated for one of them. Things like blogging, writing TripAdvisor reviews, helping friends write CVs, exploring ideas for future projects, don’t have immediate financial dividends.

However, I do have a paid job, working remotely for a tech startup based in San Francisco. Often when I talk about work, I’m talking about that job as well.

The name of the company is RecruitLoop. Here’s our story:

I met RecruitLoop when I worked at a different tech startup, Influitive, in Toronto. Influitive makes an advocate marketing software, which aims to help b2b companies create online communities of their best users/advocates. RecruitLoop was a customer, and I knew them quite well because I worked in frontline customer support.

When they found out that I was quitting my job at Influitive to go abroad and spend some time living in southeast Asia, they offered me a job. Part of that job involves operating the community platform that Influitive created, since RecruitLoop is a customer.

RecruitLoop began in Australia, and then opened a US office around 2 years ago.

We’re a marketplace company, aimed at connecting independent, billable-by-the-hour recruiters with companies looking to hire. RecruitLoop finds the recruiters and the clients, bringing them both together, and makes a software that is used to manage the hiring engagement between the two parties (it’s kind of like Air BnB for recruiters that bill by the hour). You can see our list of recruiters here: recruitloop.com/recruiters

They hired me to work with/manage our Australian client base, which is quite large since the company has been operating there since 2011.

There was a big internal shift at the company recently, which has led to a much bigger focus on growing our number of recruiters, so my job has changed quite a bit (typical in a startup, particularly one as small as RecruitLoop – we’re just 9 people in total!).

My job title is Customer Success Manager, but the focus of my job changes constantly. At any given time I can be selling RecruitLoop to clients, helping recruiters manage their client relationships, designing email marketing campaigns, managing our community of advocates, creating educational content for recruiters, troubleshooting technical issues, chasing invoice and revenue and beyond. It’s less a question “what do I do?” and more a question of “what needs to be done?”.

With so much to do, you’d think it would be hard to work remotely, but fortunately it’s par for the course at RecruitLoop. We have people working in San Francisco, Berkley, Sydney, the Philippines, and wherever I am. I have Skype calls with various team members almost everyday, and I actually love working for a tech startup from outside of ‘the valley’. I think my remote location helps me keep a fresh perspective on my job and on the tech startup industry itself.

As for my location, I’m very lucky – as long as I’m online for Australian hours, then I can be anywhere. This was obviously very easy in Asia. It was a bit challenging in Canada, and it’s quite awkward in Portugal – I typically work from 8pm to 4am GMT so I can be online for most the day in Australia.

Working while travelling has been really great, though sometimes I wonder if I miss out, since I end up spending so much time indoors, working. Still, it means I can travel this way for longer, which I love.

Here are some photos of the various places I worked over the past year:

In the living room, my everyday workspace – with a good luck fish!

view from our favourite cafe!

Our unpacking space, and my workspace

The view from the window beside my desk while working in our hotel in the UAE

Sometimes in Cambodia I also worked from our balcony

In the alley near our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

while working in Canterbury at night, I could see this beautiful church from my window!

May 27, 2015
Welcome to Portugal, where you can’t do things quickly, even if you try.

At the beginning of 2015, I had 2 goals for this blog:

1. Continue to write regularly

2. Write more about my feelings and experiences, as opposed to a steady stream of I-went-here stories (though I do plan to continue those as well!)

June is around the corner and I’ve published so few posts that I have an actual backlog list of 20 blog posts waiting to be written. They’re coming, I promise!

Today I bring you a brief post about my personal state of mind and a rather funny realization that Kevin and I had today.

You may have heard people joke about the slow pace of Europe, particularly southern Europe. Let me be the first to tell you, that shit is no joke.

When you wake up to sunshine and birds singing and fresh orange juice from the backyard, work just doesn’t seem all that important. While I was in Cambodia, I worked non-stop. Don’t get me wrong, I took plenty of time for fun, but I didn’t have social ties or distractions, and so it was easy for me to throw myself head first into nonstop work. Without that, this blog probably wouldn’t even exist.

In Portugal, there are many distractions. Both literal and mental. With a car and with Kevin’s familiarity with the Algarve, it’s all too easy to find things to do. And it’s hard to explain, but this place just feels relaxed. Life in the Algarve is just so damn pleasant, you never feel guilty for not “getting shit done”.

On top of that, with Kevin’s dental disaster continuing on an open-ended schedule, we quickly learned to stop asking questions or talking about “what’s next”. It’s hard to plan the next adventure when you don’t even know when it can begin.

This week has marked the first time since January that we’ve felt comfortable discussing that elusive “next”, possibly even laying down a timeline. We’re still in southern Europe, but these thoughts and possibilities kickstarted something in both of us.

We’ve both spent the past 2 days working feverishly. It feels natural to fall back into a work-hard groove, getting lots of things done, and quickly.

Which brings us to today. We had big plans: get up early-ish (11am, since we stay up till 4am while I work – more on that later!), go to the grocery store at the Algarve Shopping mall, come home, then head back to the mall to see a mid-afternoon screening of Mad Max. After all, it’s Tuesday. Indulging in Tuesday movie deals was a well-followed tradition for us in Toronto.

So that was our plan. A bit more rushed than our typical schedule, but that’s no problem, right?

Ha!

Instead of a quick trip to the grocery store with Kevin’s grandmother, the three of us ended up checking out several shops throughout the mall, then having lunch, and then realizing,”shit, it’s 3pm, we’ll have to rush, but we can definitely make that film at 4:30 if we hustle”.

Ha!

We did the fastest grocery shopping we’ve ever done in Portugal. We thought that by rushing our shopping, we’d get in and out quickly, and home in time to go to the movies. Of course, we couldn’t have planned for this:

– the grocery store was under construction and every single section had been moved somewhere new

– at this grocery store, you have to weigh your produce at a special station before the checkout. Not only did we forget to weigh our watermelon, so did the two families in line ahead of us. And obviously it took them twice as long as us to resolve that issue.

– for almost 10 minutes on our drive home, we were stuck behind a rather slow-moving tractor

Ha!

On the drive home, the realization hit me: we’re back in North American mode, but we’re still in Southern Europe.

Even if we’re in the mood to really ‘get shit done’, we’ll drive ourselves mad if we don’t keep in mind that the Algarve is too relaxed to be compatible with our North American, do-things-fast mentality.

Fingers crossed that this new surge of energy for working will keep me posting more regularly!

And just for all that reading, here’s a series of photos us relaxing around Alte and of me making orange juice in true, laid-back, Algarvian fashion:

oranges from one grandmother, grapefruits from another

making orange juice in my PJs!

the lemon tree before its trim

orange trees in the backyard.

picking oranges from the tree

collecting oranges for juice!

the formerly crazy lemon tree in the back yard

oranges!

view from our favourite cafe!

snack time!

reading by the fire, keeping warm in January.

reading!

pick-em-up-truck spotted in Alte!

our juicer!

May 27, 2015