Microadventure: discovering the world from 5-to-9
At LegendaryTrips, our quest is to find “freedom through inspiration”. We look at travel – big or small – as a way to break from incapacitating routine into the free world of imagination and creative play. The openness, challenge and curiosity we experience as we travel give us a sense of boundless possibilities to explore and become.
But as we live our busy lives of commitments and responsibilities, travel is not always easy and affordable. We love to hear stories of friends who saved up and dared to travel the world, discovering new perspectives that change their lives forever (shout out to Lolo and her Rum the World Tour!). But while everybody dreams of doing a world tour, not everyone can.
That’s why we were thrilled to discover Alastair Humphreys’ (National Georgraphic’s Adventurer of the Year) concept of microadventure – a brief adventure that is close to home, simple, cheap and easy to plan but bringing all the fun and excitement of a big travel experience. The rules are to do something that challenges you, like sleeping outside in a tent if you’ve never done it before, and ideally connects you with nature.
Humphreys’ microadventure centers around a simple question: “We are defined by our ‘9-to-5’, but what about 5-to-9?”. He suggests using our weekends and after-work hours for simple but highly exciting getaways that are close to home: a one-day bike ride to the countryside, wild swimming in a river, stargazing in a forest and cooking on camp fire on Saturday night, running in wind and rain, and even as simple as taking a bus to the end of the line…
On his website Alastair Humphreys has lots of exciting suggestions, also crowd-sourced from other microadventurers.
Our favorite is this summary infographic outlining 12 overnight microadventures for each month of the year and a list of other simple suggestions for weekly microadventures:
http://www.alastairhumphreys.com/microadventures-3/year-microadventure-2/
Let’s make our daily life an infinite source of inspiration!
Photo: Muckle Flugga, United Kingdom © Alastair Humphreys
