Living a Kiwi Life is now Stoked for Saturday!

One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned since moving to New Zealand and ‘Living a Kiwi Life’ is to appreciate our free time and take advantage of the opportunity to get out and explore. Before leaving Canada we were working full time and taking our MBA part time, and we slipped into a perception that there just wasn’t enough time to do all the fun things we wanted to do. When we moved to New Zealand we had no obligations, no excuses to hang on to and we were exposed to one of the most beautiful (and adventurous) countries in the world!

Summiting Mt Taranaki on a weekend getaway

When we first started this blog, it was initially just a fun way for us to share our adventures ‘Living a Kiwi Life’ with family and friends back home. We didn’t anticipate how much we would enjoy sharing our stories and were amazed when people all over the world started finding our site. We received emails and messages from people who took inspiration from our stories to pursue something they’ve always wanted to do and even got notes from Kiwis who were motivated to explore more of their own backyard. Although we love our name ‘Living a Kiwi Life’, it was when we began planning some holidays (Tonga, Canada and Tasmania) that we started feeling like the name ‘Living a Kiwi Life’ just didn’t seem as relevant for the exploring we were planning to do outside New Zealand.

Although we still plan to share our ‘Living a Kiwi Life’ stories and publish videos with that name, we felt it was best to change our name to something that represented us as a whole – as opposed to what we were doing in the moment. So we started on the path of searching for the right name that would represent who we are and leave all doors open for possibilities in the future. Little did we know, the path to re-branding ourselves would be a lot harder than we expected. It took many late night brainstorming sessions and pestering our friends and family for feedback every time we came up with a new potential name. This was quite the challenge as every time we thought of something great, we would find the URL was already taken, or someone had the twitter and instagram handle already (despite not using their account for years…).

We went through countless cycles of finding a potential name and…loving it…hating it…and eventually trashing the idea as it just didn’t feel ‘right’ in the end. We went from ‘Trekking through Life’, to ‘Wild Odyssey’ and ‘Odysseekers’ – just to name a few – before finally landing on ‘Stoked for Saturday’ after the idea came to Jordan during a long bus ride home one night. Right away we knew this was ‘the one’.

We have always been energetic people who love exploring the outdoors and being active. However, we are also very driven in the pursuit of our careers. While the typical 9am-5pm time slot is devoted to our jobs, our evenings, weekends and holidays are spent on anything we want. With our new found appreciation for taking advantage of every spare moment, we realized every week we were ‘Stoked for Saturday’ because it meant we were able to get out and explore more of our beautiful backyard!

Although ‘Saturday’ isn’t meant to be literal – it represents a day of the week most people can relate to as ‘their day’ to do what they love outside of work. Whether it’s your evenings, weekends or holidays, we want to inspire people to use those ~130 days a year to get out and explore their backyard and the world. It doesn’t have to be something epic – it could be going for a walk to a beautiful look-out, a run along the beach, or hitting your favorite climbing gym. Whatever makes you happy and gets you excited to explore and be active – we want to inspire people to believe it is possible to pursue your career and live a life of adventure!

Our first ‘Stoked for Saturday’ moment after choosing our new name

We hope you all enjoy our new site and would love to hear….Why are you Stoked for Saturday?