I was about to say that I wasn’t sure why blogging has been so hard for me in the last year, but I do know why. It’s hard to believe it’s taken me a year to blog these very precious memories with my brother and sister. My siblings are like pieces of my heart that only came to form after they were born; two of my safest places, they carry the parts of me I often cannot. They know me inside-out and they love me anyway.

This time last year—a hike with my siblings and my friends Bek & Chloe, enjoying our usual dance with winter in Kananaskis Country.

We didn't know it at the time, but this would be our last weekend away together as a couple. In my 2017 year-in-review, I wrote briefly about how we struggled; how we worked hard to maintain our love and our friendship after months of bitterness that had been making its way into the smallest spaces of our relationship for what may have been the last 2-3 years.

When I sit down to write this post every December, it always takes me some time to collect myself and my memories of the year. When I write, I try to say what I mean, and mean what I say. Some things are often hard to put into words—and to write from a place of authenticity requires pause.

At the start of October, Martin's mother, uncle and brother visited us and the Rockies. Apart from showing them some of my favourite hikes around Banff & Canmore, we were lucky enough to join them up north in Jasper for a few days.

Photos from when my brother & sister visited me during my first year in Canada.

21 years ago I sat with my 3-year-old sister in the waiting room of a hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. I would be late going to school if this was going to take a long time, I thought. I fell asleep. Upon waking I panicked, first checking that my sister was still with me.

It's going to be hard for me to put into words the depth of my love for the mountains. The unexplained affinity I have for these tall piles of ancient rock and how it is that I'm drawn to them in the first place, as a woman born in an archipelago of 7,000 islands who spent her entire life in countries surrounded by the ocean (amongst zero mountains).

Every week in summer had me asking the same question: “which trail should I try this weekend?”. Cue messaging all my friends to see who was free to join, and behold, a plan would emerge. Tent Ridge in Kananaskis Country will forever remain one of the best hikes I've ever done.

Summer brought us a string of visitors from Australia; one of whom was my dear friend Annie. An incredibly talented photographer, I'd been quietly following Annie's work since she was 16, and even then she was blowing my mind.

There are some cities in the world I know I definitely want to see before I fall asleep forever, and Paris is one of those. Paris was one of the first cities I had been excited to go to when I was younger, and French is the language I was drawn to learn in high school (for reasons I couldn't and still cannot explain).

My final trip with LUX* Resorts was at LUX* Saint Gilles, Île-de-La-Reunion. It was the 3 days I spent on this little island where I was able to truly had to exercise what little French I knew/could remember from school.

After the Maldives, I travelled to Mauritius, running my workshops at Belle Mare & Le Morne. LUX Le Morne was the last of the two resorts I visited, and was a beautiful way to end my stay in the country. In the car from the island's north-east to south-west, I was captivated by the changing landscape as we drove closer and closer to the mountains.

Some images from the time I spent in The Maldives running my photography workshops at LUX* Resorts.

The week before I left for my trip to the Indian Ocean for LUX* Resorts (more on that soon) was an...interesting one. We moved from our house, our first home in Canmore where we made many a great friend, to a condo deeper into the forests and mountains, further from town, but closer to the wild and the wildlife.

I wasn't always an outdoorswoman. It honestly wasn't until I started yoga that my relationship to that which I used to avoid changed—rather than judging myself harshly for not being able to break a “bad” habit, I began to observe the discord at an arm's length, and approach it with a process of enquiry.