The story begins a few months before PickYourPlayground (initially called Adventure Escapades but we learned over time that people couldn’t spell Escapades!) was formed.
It was the last week of the year 2004 and we had gone on a family holiday to Tarkastad in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
The holiday was full of memorable moments [accompanying Xhosa boys on a hunt during their Ulwaluko (initiation into manhood); hearing the delayed news of the Boxing Day Tsunami because we were out of cell range for a full week; and surprising a family of 4×4 enthusiasts as we passed them on an off-road track in our family VW Jetta].
My parents often joke about how we (their children) did not pick them very well (our family runs under the assumption that it is possible for children to have such options of picking their parents before birth)! They joke that we should have picked taller parents, or more athletic parents, or wealthier parents, and whilst we often ride on that wave (such as blaming them when we need to ask for help reaching for items from the top shelf in the kitchen) my sister and I have come to learn that despite the ‘down sides’, we did make a pretty good choice.
My parents were hard workers and smart spenders. They valued experiences over ‘stuff’ and we were raised the same. My parents loved to travel and shared this passion with us from a young age. With them being from different countries, we were raised with a constant reminder that there was a lot of the world to see, and a lot of family spread around the world to visit!
My parents also understood that there is a global pandemic of financial illiteracy and that the ‘Rat Race’ was not the way to achieve financial security. With this in mind, they read widely about the topic. This brings us back to that family holiday late in 2004.
We sat at the table in this little BnB (2 years before anyone thought to put ‘air’ in front of the word) and our parents spoke about a project that they wanted to start, the project was simple enough, ‘How to make a million bucks’, but there was a catch, it had to be done with no capital.
The theory was easy to grasp even for us as young children, to get from 1 to one million, you only needed to double the number 19 times. So we started a race, Mom and Son vs Dad and Daughter. Team names and plans were drawn and the first task was to get the first 1 without touching our wallets, so we headed off to the local little dorp (town) and we spent a good few hours looking for coins that had been dropped in the street. Cents coins that were not worth bending over to collect, but to us, in that moment, it was like we had found gold!
I can’t remember all the ways we went on to double our money, a few buy and sell options and a few weekends outside a lecture hall in our hometown selling homemade muffins and cooldrinks.
After dinner one evening, my parents called a family meeting, and we sat down to discuss our next step. My mom had had an idea to create this activities website and needed some capital to help get it off the ground. She wanted to discuss the options and see if we would all be happy with putting in the money we had built up thus far into her new business idea with the understanding that this would be our way to the next double. We all agreed and so… Adventure Escapades (AE) was born!
From here it became a passion project for my mom who continued to work her fulltime job, and I remember working a few holidays in her office helping to find potential activities and clients for her. She went on to change to the name to what it is today (PickYourPlayground) and went through several unsuccessful attempts to get a team with the technical web and app development skills to actuate her vision for what PickYourPlayground could be.
I went on to finish high school and on to university to study Geo-environmental Science and English and to complete my post graduate teaching degree. From there I moved to Dubai to pursue my love for teaching in a way that would help me continue to follow my passion for travel instilled in me by my parents in the school breaks.
This was a passion I desperately tried to pass on to my students over the 5 years of me teaching geography. My goal was to visit 30 countries before I hit 30 and, as often happens when one writes down ones goals I’m now on country 39 and while 30 is fast approaching, I’m not yet there.
As it became time for me to leave my teaching job, my mom and I had a discussion and decided that the UAE and the GCC region in general, was a perfect location for PickYourPlayground expansion. So, I saved up money to help last me while development was finished and left my teaching to help set up PickYourPlayground in the UAE.
Over the past 6 years, I am amazed that even in a relatively small city, I am still finding new things to do with my friends and visitors to the country. We are building something that we, as people who love to travel and host, would want to be able to share with friends and family, or to use ourselves when we go somewhere new. We hope you love this just as much as we do and we would love to hear feedback about how we can improve to make our app and website, as user friendly as possible!
We hope you find new adventures to share with amazing people and we look forward to seeing you make new friends and memories using our platform!
Please tag and mention us in stories and posts, we would love to see and share your stories with others!
See you in the next one.
– JP