What’s this all about?

“Good morning!” he said at last. “We don’t want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water.”

Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

The plan is to do one new thing every week, for a whole year and blog about it. In terms of parameters, the only rule is that in order for something to be “new” I can’t have done it for at least 10 years. Some weeks will be scary; others a bit more pedestrian, but everything will be new.

The idea for this project materialized after my husband Emrys and I returned from our California coast road trip in July of 2013. While we were away on vacation everything was new, which was exhilarating. New towns, new restaurants, new views! It felt so amazing to take off down the highway with only a loose itinerary; we needed to get to Alamo, California for my family reunion in about a week but otherwise the world was wide open. Since I couldn’t contribute to the task of driving, it was decided that I would be responsible for researching each new town we ended up in. Every morning I’d get on the internet and sketch out a plan on the hotel note pad of where we should go for breakfast and what sites we’d explore that day. Sometimes we followed my plan, sometimes we ended up somewhere unplanned, but every day was a unique experience.

When we got home Emrys suggested it might be fun to continue this game of tourist in Vancouver. I found myself looking up places for us to check out and every time we went somewhere new I felt so expansive and alive, like we were still on vacation. The thrill of new things seeped into other areas of my life: a first bike ride over the Lions Gate Bridge here, a new recipe for dinner there. It wasn’t long before I realized it wasn’t just the big, adventurous stuff that felt invigorating but little things too.

Of course I soon slipped back into the familiar and the thrill of my adventures faded into the background. The fact of the matter is, I’m a creature of habit who rarely takes risks; but when I do, good God do I enjoy life! And this is why I’ll be doing something new every week this year. Some of it will be scary, some of it will be silly and some of it will be against my very nature but all of it will be for the first time.

So here we are at week one and this is my very first blog post. It wasn’t overly difficult to write but the idea of anyone actually reading it is distinctly terrifying.

See you next week…