Last week I made a bit of announcement that I’ve been holding in for the last few months, that I’m packing up my bags and hopping the ocean to settle down for a bit in the United Kingdom!

Earlier this year I found myself in a new situation in life that I hadn’t had before. Freedom. It came with a price of course, my relationship ending and me saying goodbye to a chapter that I didn’t expect to end so suddenly. With that chapter in my life coming to a close I found myself faced with what the next one would look like. Where would I go? What would I do?

 

When I returned to work on the Trophy Tour shortly after we traveled through Europe and I was feeling very lost, very confused about everything. Every place we went to felt strange, not just because it was a new city or country to me, but because it didn’t have that “home feeling”. That changed when we landed in England.

 

 

As soon as I stepped off the plane I felt a new energy in my body. The people we met in those first few hours were so kind and welcoming and our entire stay in London left me filled with a new light inside that I was scared had gone out.I took a half day to explore a bit of the city, taking the tube to visit the Harry Potter platform at Kings Cross and then to see Buckingham Palace and a few other parts.

Seeing the city, alone and with this slowly growing light was refreshing. I wanted more of it and the next day I ventured back out and explored Big Ben, the London Eye and Trafalgar Square and sometime in that walk to the square I fell in love with the city. A sun beam of light pierced through a break in the buildings and shone directly onto a Canadian flag hanging outside the Canadian Embassy and it felt like a sign to me.

 

A few days later in Manchester, I was visiting with one of my favorite humans, Jen Brook and told her all that was going on. Not knowing where to live, what to do. The opportunities were out there but I didn’t know where to turn. Maybe as a joke she said “Why not move here?” and that’s all it took. That night I replayed those words in my head and the next day I looked up how to apply for a visa and within the next week I had already applied and had decided, I was moving to England.

I had no idea of anything. Of what I would do, where in the country I would live. If I could even afford it but I knew that if I wanted something big to change in my life, I had to be the captain of that change. It was terrifying to think about moving that far with no plan but in that fear came that idea that I could do anything, go anywhere.

Over the last few weeks everything fell into place. My visa arrived, I made plans to visit friends that live in London and most recently last week I found an amazing place to live just outside London. I’ll be moving, the end of September to Guildford, a beautiful town in the hills of England. In a perfect twist, I found out that Lewis Carrol lived and wrote parts of Alice In Wonderland there and that it’s a perfect place for a photographer.

I’m nervous still, but more excited than anything to wake up to the new air, new sights and new people of a new country. To start a new chapter in my life and fill with all the things that I want it to be filled with.