They say a change is as good as a holiday and boy-oh-boy are we about to put that to the test!

The cat is officially out of the bag if you’ve driven past our home this week…we have made a very hard decision to sell our beautiful home & garden to embark on the next adventure…

We’ve bought a van (an off-road adventure campervan).
To live in.
And travel the world in (starting with NZ).

Yep, we’re taking downsizing to a whole new level!

So while we are sad to be saying goodbye to what we thought would be our forever home (I’ve cried multiple times already!), we are excited with the prospective of soon calling the road our full time address.

We will both be working from the road part time, Matt will use his trade & various skills to do casual work and I hope to expand Heidi Horton Photography to a whole new level!

I’ll still be in Southland for seasonal portrait work, BUT I’ll also be able to offer photography all over the country as we travel!!! I’m so excited for all the new places I’ll be taking my camera and for the people I will meet along the way. I’m also excited for expanding into new genres in the creative field, but more on that soon.

So this is where this blog comes into play…

2025 is the year I am bringing back the Blog. Do you remember my OG Heidi Horton Photography blog?? I used to post blogs (three times a week 🤯) about things I was learning as a photographer & entrepreneur, tips & tricks, camera techniques, photos I took on holiday and probably the most popular; the behind the scenes blogs! I really miss that blog as a creative outlet and so this year with all the adventures ahead, I have decided to get back to my roots of blogging; in the form of the Adventure Log.

The Adventure Log will live on my website as a standalone blog where I’ll share snippets from life on the road, travel photos, pop-up photoshoots around the country and all things photography & adventure. We will also be creating video content on our Youtube channel Horton Adventures too!

I hope you’ll tune in as we embark on this next adventure of our lives and if you have somewhere you’d like to see Heidi Horton Photography offering shoots please let me know.

In the meantime if you'd like a little more context around this crazy decision of ours read this next blog entry here.

Here's an excerpt from my journal towards the end of 2024...
WE SEEM TO HAVE A KNACK FOR MAKING LIFE WILD...
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If you’d sat me down ten years ago to tell me that I would very soon be choosing to leave my career in accounting to go full time self-employed with my own photography business, that over the course of the next decade we would sell the new house we’d just built and downsize into a tiny home of just 65 square metres in order to simplify our lifestyle, that I’d become a self confessed ‘homesteader’ growing all our own vegetables & living off the land AND then on the cusp of a decade we’d decide to pivot once more, sell up again and look for even more freedom in our lifestyle by finding a way to travel full-time… well actually maybe I would have believed you but I could never have predicted this is where life would lead us!

Even ten years ago I had an inkling that I might not be cut out for a conventional life. We already knew by our mid twenties that children might not be on the cards for us and now in our mid thirties we’re contentedly childfree with a lifestyle that gives us unique opportunities. I grew up with parents who told me I could do anything I dreamed of and I happily follow my intuition over external voices so even though things like quitting a career to go self-employed, building tiny and dreaming of full time travel may be BIG life-changing decisions I’ve always jumped in with both feet IF it felt right for me.

Perhaps because I came from an ‘unconventional’ family I’m also not afraid to live outside the script of a 'normal' lifestyle. Growing up as an only child I had access to both my parents almost exclusively full time at home on our 2 acre block of rural land; my Dad was retired and Mum was a home maker. My childhood was filled with gardening, fishing, hunting, camping, crafting, cooking, making and exploring. It wasn’t until I was older at primary school that I realised other kids didn’t get to spend all day with their dads at home, tagging along with their hobbies and pursuits. It wasn’t until secondary school that I truly realised how little money our household (comfortably) lived on compared to others.

Time is a strange thing. It passes regardless. We never know how much we truly have of it. And yet I reckon us humans are very talented at wasting it. We use precious time up on worrying about what others think, on doing things that don’t bring us joy but are ‘expected’ of us, on working A LOT just to pay bills and have all the things this modern world tells us we should want. I guess it was my Dad who taught me that time is our truest currency and to make the most of our time on this earth. I don’t think he ever sat me down and told me this exactly but it was the way he lived his life and it has become one of my highest values in life; freedom of my time. When I became unhappy in my accounting job I quit rather than stuck it out because it was a promising career with a good income. When we realised our big new home had turned us into slaves working all hours to pay a huge mortgage, bills and of course upkeep the home - I proposed a change of lifestyle. And when Matt and I came back from every camping adventure and trip overseas wishing we could spend more of our time exploring this beautiful world the idea of a life on the road took root in our minds.

For two years we’ve chatted about hypothetcial ‘maybe one days’ of living overseas, taking off in Winter for months in another country, living and working on the road, our dream adventure vehicle, potential van layouts. Possibly the idea was first born during the Covid lockdown that we stumbled across YouTubers who were full time travellers as we sat at home dreaming of being able to travel again one day. And naturally ever since we’ve been influenced by #vanlife on social media.

The sticking point was always that we loved the lifestyle we’d created for ourselves with our tiny home and abundant backyard. Our simple lifestyle has afforded us so much; freedom from the shackles of a mortgage, healthier lifestyles, being able to grow so much of our food, less materialism and definitely more time for our hobbies. We discussed options of renting out our property or AirBnbing it while we travelled, even just locking it up for a few months each Winter and heading out on an adventure. Here we were in our mid thirties, childfree, with the freedom to choose a different way to spend the next chapter of our time on earth and the idea of traveling full time just wouldn’t leave us alone. But I loved my small home and my garden - surely I couldn’t possibly be considering giving it all up to shift into a van and be constantly on the move…

And yet I was.