The Northern Wander Women

Welcome to our blog and our first post! Here's a little bit about us...

I’m Kyla! A 23 year old recent graduate of the University of Ottawa with an English degree, working for a national french youth non-profit where I focus on social innovation. I know, it doesn’t quite fit with what I studied but I love my job and the new experiences and perspectives I’m offered every single day. While I coordinate that as my day job, my dream job (and one of the main reasons I’m a co-author for this blog) is that I want to be a published author. I’m already an aspiring writer, dedicated reader and established blogger, but one day, I hope that my stories will be published and sold for the world to behold. I also enjoy traveling (OBVIOUSLY), puzzles, music, fuzzy animals, coffee, the colour green and men with ginger hair.

I’m Gen. I’m a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering with questionable ideas about adulthood and a very dry sense of humour. I’m very much career driven, but I’ve become increasingly motivated by the idea that life shouldn’t just be about paying bills. It should be lived, and enjoyed at that. I’m a lazy perfectionist, absentminded but organized, reserved but loud, world weary but wonder-eyed. I’m also an avid reader, a casual artist, and a music nut (yes I sing all the words at concerts, don’t judge). Oh yeah, and I’m just a bit obsessed with travel; I’m only here because my friends and family are tired of listening to me talk about travel.

We’ve known each other since we were kids growing up in Northern Ontario, and we want the keep the adventures coming for as long as we can. We are at our happiest either hanging out with friends, or exploring something new. We have similar interests and similar levels of ambition, and both believe that now is the best time to work on crossing items off that bucket list. On the other hand, we are quite different from one another, living paradoxes, yet we seem to complete the ideal travel duo. Kyla’s the dreamer, she makes travel full of wonder and has new ways to see things. She’s always finding new places to go or new things to do. Having Kyla around means unexpected detours and constant laughter. Gen deals with all the boring stuff: planning, budgeting, etc… Basically anything most people would find tedious, but that she finds an opportunity for improved organization and efficiency. Having Gen around makes things go, uh, relatively smoothly, while keeping us grounded. We’re an (im)perfect pair, a dynamic duo who want to venture out to where the wanderlust takes us. Our travel style is to plan (while also being spontaneous), to see as much as possible (while enjoying the moment), and to try new things (while sticking with our usual interests). In other words, we methodically plan our trips, but proceed to ignore or modify parts of it on the fly which leads to the most incredible places.

The objective of this blog is to promote travel, not tourism. Tourism lets you see the world through a bus window and the drone of well worn bits of information or the glossy pages of a magazine. Travel lets you immerse yourself in new environments and learn from experiences and culture. The goal is to get people out there and exploring, traveling, roaming so that we can become more open-minded, open-hearted and optimistic about all of the wonderful people and places that are out there. It’s refreshing to wander to wonder.

All of our travels and tips are centered around self-guided exploration of new places. We methodically plan our trips and adventures, and you will be able to find most of the information on the blog. We’ve got itineraries, budgets, maps, meal plans and SO MUCH MORE. Or if you want to suggest where our next trip should be, message us and let us know!

We hope that this blog will not only be a record of our adventures, but also be a useful platform for others to use when planning their own trips. So whether you follow us because you find us entertaining, or you stumbled onto this blog looking for tips and tricks from two beginner travel pros like us (yes that’s a working paradox), we’re happy to share what might encourage you to wander the world along with us.

So please join us, the Northern Wander Women, as we roam from home!

Kyla and Gen