About Me

Welcome to Lauren’s Lighthouse!

It’s been many years in the making. What started out as a hobby has turned into something that I now gratefully pour my heart into…

How it started

In 2017, I had just started my big girl job out of university working as a mechanical designer engineer-in-training. I loved it. But… it was never going to be something I was passionate about. As someone who thrived in math, needed structure, external discipline and instructions, and enjoyed detail-oriented tasks, I always felt like my job in engineering was perfect for me. But then I found myself day dreaming about having a creative outlet in which I could share things that I was passionate about outside of my job.

Backing it up a bit to 2016, Jason (my now husband) and I picked up our first cameras and started playing around with photography and videography. We indulged in taking pictures of landscapes, learning the inner workings of our DSLR’s and later mirrorless cameras, and getting creative in Lightroom and Adobe Preview. We began capturing and creating photos and videos during our travels and it became a huge part of our itinerary wherever we went. Our passion for capturing our experiences also became a motivator for wanting to see and do more throughout each day of our trips.

Being a beginner in this new skill of photography, I started to apply it to things I was passionate about: natural skincare, healthy foods, yoga poses, baking, you name it. And in the fall of 2017, Lauren’s Lighthouse was born! It was sort of like a diary entry while featuring local products and brands I was head over heels for. It wasn’t long before I started partnering with some of these brands in a service-based exchange. And a lot of fun it was to promote small up-and-coming Calgarian and Canadian brands while sharing them in my writing and photography, on this blog and on my growing Instagram!

But the blog was still just a hobby with little direction. I was everywhere – talking about food, recipes, natural skincare, workout studios… And I was finding that these were all secondary passions or outright phases I was going through.

But what ALWAYS, always stood the test of time was my passion for travel.

How it transformed

Before I could even walk, my parents were taking me to Europe, the Caribbean, cross country and to Southeast Asia. I was extremely blessed in my upbringing, and my parents’ passion for wandering the globe passed onto me. Thanks to my parents for starting me off strong, so far I’ve made it to 40 countries on 4 continents, and it is only the beginning!

So, with an ever-growing desire to travel and make it part of our brand, in 2019, Jason and I decided to completely pivot our content goals: we dove straight into travel content only and kickstarted it with our month-long trip to China and Japan. But at the end of that trip, no matter how exhausted we were, we just wanted our travels to keep going! I knew I couldn’t do that with my job. Getting four weeks off was the max I could get – and even that is a blessing in Canada. So how else could I travel more than that in a year?

The next two years we worked hard to make things happen so we could pursue travel full-time. It was exciting and daunting altogether as we were overwhelmed with the possibilities. Lauren’s Lighthouse transitioned from being an ensemble of various diary entries to a place where other fellow travellers could find the information they needed when planning a trip. Early 2020, we made our first hotel pitch and the collaborations were a success! But then March 2020 came and we all know what happened then.

We restructured. We took the first opportunities that came to explore our very own backyard, the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Soon all the parks opened and we were out there practically every weekend we could. We discovered so much about Canada’s Pacific Northwest that we hadn’t before and were excited to see our platforms growing along with our content. Soon after, in 2021, we were starting to get noticed by tourism boards and marketing agencies who specialize in travel promotion. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel for me to leave my job!

So in September of 2021, when international borders were opening, I gave in my resignation, Jason and I packed our bags for our first of many long trips and we never looked back.

How it’s going now

Two years later and we’re still going strong! Between Lauren’s Lighthouse and Adventures of Lauren & Jason, we hope to help you navigate the world and make the most value possible out of any trip, big or small!

When we’re not living in our home base of Calgary, Alberta, we’re venturing to new lands and seas, one country at a time! We’re excited to be launching on our exciting trip to Central Europe in a week. And after two weeks of being back home, we’ll be jet-setting off again to South America for the very first time!

Since going full-time in 2021, we’ve:

and so much more!