It’s easy, scrolling through social media or leafing through traditional media, to think that adventure always exists somewhere “out there:” surfing the Mentawais, bikepacking across South America, peak-bagging in the Dolomites. Those are all eminent pursuits, ones I would happily take on. But between the cost, the lack of white space in the calendar, and the random dice throws of the thing we call life, they are typically fleetingly rare events, more dreamed about than done.
But that is no reason to let the questing spirit atrophy. “Adventure doesn’t always have to be about climbing K2,” Alastair Humphreys writes, in his book Microadventures. “Just getting out there and doing something is good enough.”
Which is why, every few months, I like to designate an “Adventure Day,” a chance to do something that is not only an escape from my normal work routine, but my normal leisure routine. It might involve a bit of travel—never more than a full tank of gas—but it could also be as simple as attempting a very long walk in the woods from your front door (a bit tricky when you live in New Jersey, but the mapping itself will be an adventure).
An Adventure Day scrambles your brain and body in all kinds of good ways. Take, for example, a recent one-day hike in the Catskills with my brother-in-law, our first such outing. I set the alarm for 5 A.M. but woke at 4—the first sign things were out of joint. By the time dawn broke I was pulling into a McDonald’s in Saugerties, New York, for a bathroom break and coffee (on an Adventure Day, even usually banal activities make you feel curiously alive).
At the trailhead we read the warning signs and dutifully put our names in the register. We walked, we talked, me occasionally stopping to identify birds with my Merlin app, my brother-in-law doing the same with mushrooms and ShroomID. We got lost once or twice, we almost got hurt. We clambered up the rocky chutes of the notorious Devil’s Path and were rewarded with an expansive view of yet more peaks. We sensed a new tradition, to hike all the Catskills “3500s,” had been launched. I was back in my driveway by dinner time.
Could we have made it even more adventurous—could we have camped, summited more peaks, maybe foraged for food? Sure. But every uptick in complexity is another invitation for something not to happen; don’t let, as Voltaire once counseled, the perfect be the enemy of the good. The best adventure is the one you are on.
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