We were up at five this morning and drove to the capital with Jaime, to pick up a group of 25 people. By the time we headed back toward Lake Atitlán, everyone was excited, joking around, getting to know each other, and talking about how amazing the month ahead would be. It was the start of a big adventure, and about twenty minutes from San Juan, as we descended the switchbacks of the mountains into the Lake Atitlán basin, my phone rang. It was Ceci. She was crying and apologi

(...But humour me by consuming THIS content) I have been thinking a lot about social media lately. Not in the usual “how do we grow our account?” kind of way. Quite the opposite. I have been wondering whether I still want to grow our account. The world doesn’t need more content. There is already an unbelievable amount of it. More videos, more opinions, more inspiration, more people telling us how to live, where to travel, what to buy, how to parent and how to become the best

I am often asked, “How have your kids adjusted?” Let's start with me Around 1994, my dad took a government job managing an arts facility in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), a remote Inuit community of roughly 2,000 people in the Canadian Arctic. The nearest neighbouring community was Rankin Inlet, an hour flight south along Hudson Bay. Inuktitut was spoken more often than English, and life was deeply rooted in culture and tradition. It was an incredible place to spend time while gro

There’s a cliché that’s been floating around forever about “finding yourself” when travelling. People travel for different reasons. Overworked parents with stressful jobs look for an all-inclusive holiday to relax by the pool. Youngsters hit the backpacking routes to see the world. Instagrammers search for more exotic content to stay relevant and exciting to their followers, scrolling and hungrily consuming it from the comfort of their beds. At their core, travellers all do w

“Time’s fun when you’re having flies,” said the Frog. In an unbelievable, mind-bending twist of events, our family just four years ago shifted direction and relocated to Guatemala. We needed it. Something big, over the top, had to occur to give ourselves the jolt we needed to shake off the ruts, bad habits and general discontent we felt in life. We needed extreme circumstances to shock us from the numbness we had become accustomed to. When we look back at pictures, we looked

We have been spreading our roots here. Seeds of friendship have fallen on fertile Guatemalan ground! The last few years have been a grand experiment of self-examination and questioning lifestyles in general, and we have much food for thought. Let me set the stage: A standard home in rural Guatemala consists of tin or stone walls, a wood-burning stove of some sort, a foam mattress or two on the ground, and a table, some pots. The floor is either bare concrete or plain dirt, an