🏔️ Big Adventure Energy, Zero PTO Required
🎒 Sol Bites: Your Microadventure Starter Pack
🌲 Go Small to Go Often
🕊️ Words of Wisdom
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Big Adventure Energy, Zero PTO Required
How many times have you opened Instagram, watched someone kayak through Patagonia, or summit some impossibly beautiful mountain, and thought, Why isn’t my life like that?, before closing the app and returning to your day?
Good news: You don’t have to wait until you have a trust fund to start living adventurously. All you need to do is take a microadventure. It’s an idea that came from British adventurer Alastair Humphreys, and it’s a trip that is exactly what it sounds like: short, simple, local, and cheap, but still genuinely exciting, refreshing, and rewarding. Think less “quit your job and sail around the world” and more “finish work at 5 pm, sleep on a hill, show up to the office at 9 am with slightly damp socks and zero regrets.”
Humphreys himself spent four years cycling around the world before realizing that everything he loved about those epic trips (being in nature, going somewhere new, challenging himself) could be done literally outside his front door.
The way he saw it, microadventures don't replace the adventure of a lifetime. They offer a lifetime of living adventurously. Those are two genuinely different things, and the second one is available to you right now.
Sol Bites: Your Microadventure Starter Pack
Microadventures don’t require a gear list to buy or a training plan to follow. Here's how to get started:
1. Reframe What "Adventure" Means to You
Before you do anything else, ask yourself: What do you actually love about the idea of adventure? Is it being in nature? Going somewhere you've never been? The physical challenge? Disconnecting from distractions? Whatever it is, that thing is available to you anywhere. Humphreys figured out that all of those things are related to internal feelings. They're in your head, not in a specific zip code.
2. Start Smaller Than You Think You Should
Seriously. The whole point of the "micro" prefix is to make it undeniably doable. Don't plan a weeklong camping trip as your first go. Instead:
Pack a picnic dinner and hit a local trail after work
Drive to a lookout for sunset with a cold bottle of something fizzy
Sleep in your backyard under the stars
Go for a swim somewhere you've never been
Take a walk under a full moon or even at dawn (you'd be surprised how different the world feels at 5 am)
The bar is intentionally low. That's the whole point.
3. Use the 5-to-9 Window
This is Humphreys' signature move and it's genuinely brilliant: When your 9-to-5 workday finishes, your 5-to-9 microadventure begins. In summer especially, you've got hours of daylight and warmth after work.
Alternatively: Knock off a little early on a Friday, drive out to a campground, set up camp, and be back at work by Monday morning. Done. Adventure achieved.
4. Schedule It Like a Commitment
Here's where most people drop the ball. They love the idea of an adventure of any kind, but they never actually do anything. Humphreys' fix? Put it in the calendar. He literally put "go climb a tree" on the first Wednesday of every month and did it for three years. It sounds almost laughably simple, but that's exactly the point. Treat your microadventure like a meeting you can't cancel on yourself.
Some ideas to schedule in:
Monthly overnight sleepout somewhere local
One new trail per season
A sunset hike on every full moon
A wild swim once a month through summer
5. Don't Wait for Perfect Conditions
The biggest microadventure killer is the "I'll do it when . . ." mentality. You can camp in winter if you've got a decent sleeping bag and thermals. You can hike in the rain if you've got a jacket. You can have a sunset that isn’t picture perfect. The imperfect, slightly uncomfortable, genuinely unplanned version is usually the one that becomes a story.
Quick tip: Practice recovery as deliberately as you practice effort. Deep breathing, nature walks, yoga, and social connection all lower cortisol. In a Stanford University study, even a 50-minute walk in a park was shown to reduce stress-related brain activity.
Go Small to Go Often
The problem with loading your adventure ambitions with massive, ambitious plans is that they never ignite. They just sit there in the "someday" part of your brain, slowly suffocating under the weight of full-time work and an empty bank account.
Microadventures are like tinder—small, quick-burning fuel that keeps the fire going while you save up for the big stuff. At the same time, they can quietly and unexpectedly, turn out to be pretty great on their terms.
You don't need to quit your job, buy a van, or have a particularly photogenic life to be someone who lives adventurously. You just need to finish work, grab a backpack, and go somewhere local before 9am tomorrow.
The adventure of a lifetime is cool. But a lifetime of small adventures? That's something else entirely.
How to stop living for the aesthetic and prove that your memories > your camera roll.
Words of Wisdom
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
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