What's in a name?

The question / prompt today over at Fitness Cheerleader's blogging challenge was the meaning behind your blog name.

So here goes...

Back in 2005 my husband and I took a mini retirement, and did what many North Americans dream of doing....bought a motor home and travelled the country. Originally it was planned to be a 1 year trip, at which point we'd go back home to England and resume normal life. But the year was never enough, and in time it became 4.5 years! Along the way I was encouraged to start my first blog recording our traveling adventures and photos. That blog was 'Helen & Chris Road Trip USA', which I started towards the end of our first year in 2005 (and yes, of course I wish I'd started right at the beginning in December 2004! - thankfully we both have journals and diaries for those missing months!)

During the course of our adventures we extended the trip into Canada and cruised into the delightful Okanagan Valley in Beautiful British Columbia. We fell in love with the place, and for the first time ideas of NOT going home started materializing. Fast forward 2 years and immigration papers were chugging through the system back in London, but we were done traveling. We didn't want to go home to England in fear of getting settled, so we hung out in Kelowna BC (still living in the RV) networked, and started looking for work to expedite the immigration process. At the time we were still on visitor visas and had to leave every 6 months. We spent a couple of winters back in the UK but in the summers we headed back to Kelowna, and during that second summer we found work and got those treasured work permits. Permanent residency came 10 months later. During that transition time when we'd stopped traveling but yet to build a 'permanent' new home I came to realise that the 'Road trip USA' blog title didn't seem all that appropriate any more!

(still love this closing entry on my Road Trip blog - kind of sums it all up, and brings tears to my eyes now when I think just how far we've come since I wrote it!)

What Happened next...was literally that. What happened after the Road Trip....Road tripping was done, and we were embarking on a whole new adventure of emigrating and building a life in a new country.

The name stuck!

Now it's just a home for my random life. There's my running, scrapbooking, art & decor projects, vacations, recipes, family & my little Vizsla Meli and special events or activities we do. It's just me - whatever floats my boat!