If you don’t know, now you know.
Sarah and I have a major event coming up in our lives—a trip to Tanzania! But this isn’t just any old vacation—no, over three weeks, we’ll:
- Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro;
- Go on safari in the Serengeti; and
- Spend some time on the beaches of Zanzibar
I claim no credit for organizing or dreaming of this trip—I’m a city boy through and through; mountain-climbing had never even registered as a possibility in my life—but with our good friends having taken 6 months off of work to explore the world, we figured that joining them for 3 weeks wouldn’t be too much of a problem.
But like I said—this isn’t any old vacation. You can’t just decide to climb a mountain one day and do it the next—the more you condition yourself before you try to do it, the more likely you’ll succeed at reaching the summit. So since we live at sea level and couldn’t prepare ourselves for the altitude, we decided to walk and build our endurance instead.
If I were to give what we’re doing a project name, it’d be Walk Your City—you get such a different perspective of where you live when you travel by foot—I know we wouldn’t have discovered most of the things that we have had we relied simply on driving or public transit! I’ll share some of our discoveries in upcoming posts 😊
When we first decided to walk, we were gung-ho about it:
- 1 hour of dodgeball on Mondays
- 2 hours of walking after work Tuesdays through Thursdays
- 4-6 hours of walking on Sundays after church
But while the intentions were genuine, we needed to remember that life wasn’t about to stand still while we tried to do this—we would actively need to make it our top priority if we planned to stick to it. And I know that I didn’t always put it at the top of my list, letting other things get in the way, like:
- volunteering as a photographer for Social Media Week Toronto
- signing up to jam in the 2012 Toronto Service Design Jam
- joining a friend’s Ultimate Frisbee team on Thursday nights
- keeping a challenging day job, filled with demands on time and energy
So now, it’s all about getting back on that horse and seeing this through—this isn’t the kind of opportunity that presents itself every day, and I know I’ll be kicking myself if we don’t succeed because we stopped trying!
Good thing that my calendar for the next month pretty clear!
Watch out, Toronto—my feet are ready to walk!!!
–case p.
