Wow, I had certainly not intended on taking such a long break from blogging! Somehow over 12 months has gone past in the absolute blink of an eye… There has generally been pretty good reasons for my absence though, all of which I will cover in this “hello again” post! I even started this in January, and then somehow it’s April and nearly Easter…
2022 was a crazy year, where I started a new (awesome) job in a totally new industry for me, and have absolutely found myself again. There will be much more on this to come 🙂 Aside from professionally getting my mojo back, I very much resumed my usual lifestyle of fitting in as many gigs and adventures as possible… Oh, and I got married!
I’ll start on that topic, mainly because it explains the biggest reason for my absence. We decided to have a planned elopement to Banff, Canada after we fell in love with the place on our road trip in 2018. We are fortunate enough to have the most supportive family and friends around us, who all understood our reasons for getting married on our own. We flew out to Calgary, and spent an amazing 10 days driving an awesome Dodge Ram pick-up, camping in the National Parks and hiking our way around Canmore and Banff. I will share more about that trip, as I’m planning on doing a post on Banff after we’ve spent some great time there over the last few years.
Whilst we were in Canada, we got married on the shoreline of Two Jack Lake which is the lake of our favourite ever campsite (so far at least!). We used an elopement company called Elope in Banff (https://www.elopeinbanff.ca/), who were absolutely awesome with us. As we were doing everything ourselves we wanted to just be able to turn up in Canada and not have to worry about anything, and it was definitely worth the money! Their communication prior to us arriving in Canada was great, we knew exactly what to expect and at no point did we worry that no-one was going to turn up when we arrived in Banff.
We had the most chilled wedding day, starting with prosecco sent up to our room by the lovely hotel staff, before Sharon and Malcolm arrived with our freshly steamed outfits (they had been in bags/boxes camping with us for a week at this point!). After plenty of photos and a proper outfit “reveal” for Jack, they drove us over to a beautiful little beach on the shoreline of the lake where we had a simple ceremony with a local commissioner. We had lots of photos taken at a few different spots making the most of the beautiful Rocky Mountain scenery, and then they dropped us back into town where we headed straight for our favourite brewery! We had a couple of beers whilst video-calling family to let them know how we had got on, before eating our wedding meal at a beautiful Canadian Steak & Seafood restaurant (The Maple Leaf, Banff). It was so relaxing and all about us, and then we resumed our camping and hiking trip after a couple of surreal days of luxury!
We had a big Rockabilly Festival Wedding to celebrate with our family and friends once we were back from Canada, and we managed to keep our outfits a surprise until people saw us on the day! This has been one of the main reasons for my radio silence last year, as we did our wedding completely DIY. We hired a beautiful venue in the countryside near Welshpool (Quaint Country Weddings http://quaintcountryweddings.co.uk/) which was a blank slate so we could make our day exactly how we imagined it! This was what we wanted, but potentially hadn’t realised how much work it was going to entail! We made all of our decorations, co-ordinated all of the vendors and somehow it all came together without any (major) cock ups!
It was amazing seeing such a huge amount of our family and friends in one place, although people who’ve got married aren’t wrong in saying it goes SO fast! It felt like we had to rush around to try and speak to everyone, but I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. We are very grateful to have such awesome people in our lives, all of whom made such an effort to celebrate our special day with us 🙂 It was so special having our friends involved in our day, from photography to doing our ceremony, and arriving in the perfect 1960s Pontiac Catalina!
Last year I also got back into some of my speaking events, which reminded me how much I enjoyed that kind of thing before I lost all of my confidence and mojo at Ruroc. Firstly, I was asked to be a panel speaker for an International Women’s Day event at Mazars in Birmingham. This was a wonderful event talking about the ways we can tackle gender disparity in manufacturing, and I had the pleasure of being on a panel of some truly inspiring women and brilliant male allies. This was a great networking event too, with some really positive feedback from members of the audience after the event.
Following my feature in the IMechE magazine last year, I was approached by a member of the Triumph Motorcycles team who had read the article. They asked me if I would be the Key Note Speaker at their annual Triumph Design Awards, which is the culmination of their design competition for GCSE and A Levels students. This was such an honour to be asked, and so far beyond anything I had done before speaking wise. I had to stand up and deliver a Key Note Speech for 15 minutes to around 80 people, with Jack and my Mum able to be in the audience too. I then presented the awards to all of the winners, which was such an inspiring event to be a part of. I was so worried about doing this, but I am so pleased I was brave and went for it as it pushed me so far out of my comfort zone. I hope to be able to support some similar events in the future now I have proven to myself that I can do it!
2022 was the year that so many of the gigs we’d had booked and rescheduled countless times actually happened! It was truly a wonderful summer getting to see massive stadium shows by Rammstein, Green Day and Guns n Roses (the night before the Triumph Design Awards!!). It felt like the year was 2020, 2021 and 2022 all rolled into one, which meant it was manic but so so good to be back doing the stuff we love again 🙂
I also managed to adventure to some new places, and re-adventure to some places I hadn’t been to for a long time. I went to Copenhagen for the first time with my bestie, and absolutely fell in love with the place! Sweden has already won me over, and Denmark definitely added to the huge Scandinavian appreciate I have now! The people are great, so full of life and just good people, the beer is great (Mikkeller I’m looking at you) and the city is absolutely stunning. Who doesn’t want to start each day out with a coffee and a Cinnamon Roll anyway!!
Aside from the Canadian trip, Jack and I got out to Paris in December on a quick city break. I hadn’t been as an adult, and enjoyed exploring the historic sites and getting some great French practice in! I was pleased to have quite a few comments on it, with someone even asking if I had lived in France because of the standard of my language. As someone who really tries to maintain it, but by no means practice as much as I would like to, I was happy with myself 🙂
2022 wasn’t all positive though, with a real bump back to Earth as soon as we got home from Paris. Our old family dog Suki had spent a wonderful 8 years with us, and at the grand old age (for a lurcher at least) of 16 had come to walk her last steps. Losing a dog is one of the worst things you can go through, and she was such a gentle soul who touched the lives of so many people, even if she did enjoy barking at other dogs a bit too much in her later years! We lost her just before Christmas, which meant that none of us particularly felt like celebrating as it was all still very raw.
So far, 2023 has been pretty epic with a trip to Chicago to watch the Super Bowl in a Sports Bar and introduce Jack to the awesome US of A. We have been doing a lot of hiking, tried out CrossFit and have managed to navigate through the dark winter days. I am continuing to love my (not so new) job, and was recently asked by the Managing Director to represent the company at a Young Leaders European Conference in Berlin this summer. I looked into this opportunity (which sounded amazing), but despite feeling a bit of pressure because I was personally asked to do this, I ultimately turned it down because it didn’t align with my skills/interests. I was proud of myself saying no to something that a couple of years ago I would have felt like I had to do, just because I had been put forward for it.
The next couple of months we have lots of fun plans, including visiting our friends in rural Sweden over Easter, and trips away with my besties to Athens and our old favourite holiday destination in Abersoch. We are also doing the full 5 nights camping at Download Festival this year, which is the first time I’ve camped there since my very first Download in 2015. It’s going to be great fun, so I hope to keep sharing some tips and advice from our adventures, and share some of the careers content I have been working on in the background.
I would love to know what kind of content from me you would like to read? Are you more interested in general life stuff, travel, engineering / careers? Please feel free to reach out and let me know, I am hoping to be a lot more active on my blog again this year as I have really missed writing.
Emilie
The Female Engineer
