Growing up on the same street as the hospital I was born in made the world feel pretty small at times. My early “travel experiences” were limited to the two-hour drives north of my hometown, passing a handful of gas stations and endless farmers’ fields, to the secondhand trailer where my family spent our summers. It wasn’t anything spectacular; nor did it need to be. It held the promise of something new, and for me, that was enough. I certainly never could’ve anticipated that long-distance hiking would become such a significant — nearly exclusive — means of exploration for me down the line.

See, during my formative years, I can recall thumbing through texts about far-off and far-feeling places such as London and Gibraltar; perpetually daydreaming of seeing and experiencing more. And when an educational tour company partnered with our school during my senior year (offering a multi-week dream trip through Europe), I couldn’t believe my luck. Naturally, I got my first part-time job scooping ice cream at a local strip mall to help foot the bill and began counting down the days until take-off. But, as these things often go, the trip never came to be. The departure date came and went, and though I was bitterly disappointed, I vowed to myself: one day, I’d fulfill everything on that itinerary…and then some.

Fast forward a few years and I was living – outwardly – a perfectly manicured life.

I’d finished school, began working the corporate grind, was on the cusp of buying my first house and had forged a happy, healthy relationship with someone I’d thought I was in it for the long-haul with. And yet, in the back of my mind was always that promise I’d made to my younger self. Despite my best efforts to be satisfied with what I’d had, or rather, with exactly what I’d built and swore up-and-down I’d wanted, I still had this relentless passion for a world I hadn’t seen yet. In quieter moments, I would imagine what it would be like to “leave it all behind” – something that only seemed doable for trust fund babies or the remarkably self-assured (of which I was neither). Decidedly unable to muse over the “what-ifs” any longer, I booked a one-way ticket to the southernmost tip of Africa in a futile attempt to extinguish this travel bug once and for all.

It was there that I first truly fell in love with hiking. Sure, until that point it had been a passive hobby (an inevitability for someone who’d grown up with the Canadian Rockies in their backyard), but traversing the Drakensberg Mountain range was…transformative. With little more to my name than the pack on my back, I felt an unparalleled sense of belonging. Not necessarily to Africa, though it will always hold a piece of my heart — you never forget your first — but to the act of journeying through the wilderness itself. Disconnected from the digital world, yet profoundly connected to the earth beneath me; I discovered the essence of travel in its most immersive form: on foot.