Life Update!

Good day everyone,

It’s been A MINUTE, and we’re sure many of you are wondering where we are and what we’re up to. In fact, we know some of you are wondering cause you’ve reached out to us personally, and we love you for that! If you are one of those people who connected with us recently, you got a reassuring answer that we’re alive and well. However, there were some cryptic details that we weren’t ready to discuss yet.

Although it’s been quiet from our end, there has been a lot going on.

Where do we begin?

Last year we decided we wanted a change - a change that would bring us closer to the things we value about life. A life that would pull us further away from the rat race of our modern society and  the boxes it tries squeezing us into, and towards an alternative lifestyle that values family, friendship, travel, and an appreciation for the symbiosis existing between us and the rest of our planet. So we let the plan materialize, and here we are in the thick of it…

To get the wheels in motion (no pun intended, you’ll realize what we mean as you continue reading), the first step was selling our house. The house we’ve lived in for the last 15 years, the house that has shared in, and provided us with, so many wonderful memories. The only home our sweet Licorice 🐈‍⬛  had ever known, Fox’s 🦊 first home, and the home upon which our beloved attic studio was built - where we recorded most of the music we have made & released. It was a very hard decision, but it was made with the heart, and a pull towards a life with less stress, more freedom, and more joy.

It took about nine months before we received an offer that felt right, at which point it was game on! Things were about to get exciting. We moved ourselves out of the city and into the country in Ontario, which will be our homebase for the next few months while we work on our project.

What is this project you may be wondering? Well, we are building a Skoolie! If you don’t know what that is, it’s a not so fancy term for taking a retired school bus and converting it into a mobile home. Which is exactly what we are doing. We want to travel more, live simply, make music, live our lives being more at one with nature, and raise our child in the same way. So, we are going to take some time to be nomads again, this time with Fox and Peppermint in tow. We’re excited about this new adventure, where it will lead us, and what we will find along the way.

We’ve already had a number of challenges and new things to learn such as how to import a commercial vehicle from the United States to Canada as an individual 🤦🏼. And learning to drive a school bus and acquiring the necessary documentation (Benjamin studied and worked part time as a school bus driver for three months in order to acquire the right skills and driver’s license).

At the time of writing (Late June), Benjamin was in Kelowna BC with the bus that had just been imported. It got a few repairs done before it went for it’s federal inspection which finalized the import. After that, the bus came to Ontario on a truck and Benjamin flew home. Benjamin was going to do the epic drive back to Ontario in the bus. However, we hit some red tape due to the vehicle being recently imported that prevented this from happening. The bus arrived to our build site on July 3rd, and since then it's been in demo mode. Today, we did our first actual "build day" and we could not be more excited with the progress. 

Anyway, this is the huge news we’ve been busting at the seams wanting to tell you, but also wanted to wait until the time felt right. We like to share our projects once their vision has been fully formed, and we have momentum on them. 

One unfortunate part of this trip is that while in Kelowna Benjamin injured his left thumb quite badly. It got jammed in a metal door! Good thing is, it’s not broken. However, it’s really sore and will require adequate healing time. So until then, any livestreams or performances will be postponed.

We took this unannounced break over the past few months because there was just way too much going on with our house sale and bus purchase/import that there wasn’t time for anything else. But once the bus is completed, (in few months) we can start planning some fun livestream evenings to share with you over drinks and music.

So with all that being said, would you like to join us on this journey? If so, we have a group chat on signal that we try to update weekly. If you'd like be a part of it, download SIGNAL and then click this LINK to join our group. Otherwise, we will try to send out a few more monthly updates until the bus is complete, and we are on the road (again!) 


If you have read this far, thank you for sticking with us. if you want some more, scroll down to see a small gallery of photos.

We love you all, 

Benjamin & Mia
Azalea

Click on each image for a full view.

Photo captions by number - top left to bottom right:

1-3 Our Bus!
4 Benjamin’s thumb
5 Scenery on a really nice walk in Kelowna
6 Saying goodbye to the attic studio
7 End of moving day saying goodbye to our first home. 
8 Peppermint was has always been  hard to trap. We couldn’t bear to rush him because we know he was also saying his goodbyes to the house and his brother Licorice, who had passed about 6 weeks before this photo was taken. 
9 First family photo in our new (temporary) countryside home. 
10 Last photo of Licorice & Peppermint together
11 Peppermint enjoying the deep windowsills in our new home