The unofficial start of summer — May long weekend — has officially come and gone, and I’m left feeling a mix of emotions.
Summer has always carried this magical feeling for me. It makes me think of childhood summer camps, road trips, lake days, campfires, and endless adventures.
Social media certainly doesn’t help either — every scroll seems to bring another beautifully curated camping trip, backcountry hike, lake day, or jet-setting vacation. As an adult, though, reality looks a little different.
Vacations cost money. Gas prices are up. Groceries cost a small fortune these days. Eating out? That’s if the budget is feeling particularly generous.
Even trying to casually “have a summer” can suddenly feel complicated. There are schedules to juggle, work responsibilities, bills to pay, and the strange pressure to somehow make every sunny day count before winter inevitably returns.
Living in a place like Golden almost amplifies that feeling. We’re surrounded by adventure. Hiking, camping, rivers, lakes, mountain biking, paddling — it’s all sitting right outside our doors. People travel across the world to experience the lifestyle we sometimes take for granted on an average Tuesday.
Meanwhile, sometimes all I realistically accomplish after work is making dinner and sitting in a lawn chair for twenty minutes before I need to get ready for bed.
But maybe that should still count.
The older I get, the more I realize that summer doesn’t have to look cinematic to be meaningful. It doesn’t need to involve expensive trips or perfectly planned adventures. Some of my favourite summer memories are actually the simple ones: spontaneous ice cream outings, sitting around a fire with friends, an evening drive down a dirt road, listening to music with the windows down, or spending time outside with no real agenda at all.
Maybe that’s the reality of adulthood — learning that joy often exists in smaller moments than we expected.
So yes, there’s a part of me that still envies the big adventures I see online. There’s also a part of me that wishes summer felt as carefree as it did when I was younger.
But there’s an even bigger part of me that feels incredibly grateful to call this place home.
Even on the busiest weeks, when schedules are packed, and budgets feel tight, I’m still grateful to live here — and grateful that this is the kind of “problem” I get to have.
