Looking for microadventure ideas to try around your home? You don’t need to be traveling to enjoy the wonders of the world. Instead, you can make short adventures just by exploring your surroundings.
The place where you live probably offers plenty of opportunities for exploring. Still, most people end up visiting the same places over and over again. Why does this happen?
I guess we fall into routines so quickly because they are so easy. When we always do the same things, we can move on autopilot, saving a lot of mental energy as we don’t need to make new decisions and plans.
Of course, this doesn’t need to be a case. If you’d like to shake your routines and make your daily life more exciting, you can use microadventures to spice up your life.
Instead of a normal list of microadventure ideas, this blog post goes a little a bit deeper. Instead, I’m suggesting more profound changes in your daily routines that will help you get more out of your surroundings.
The tower of Vesilinna in Jyväskylä, Finland.
1. Reserve time for adventures
Besides microadventure ideas, you need time. You can’t change your lifestyle unless you don’t have the time to do it. Reconsider the routines of your day-by-day living and see if there’s something you could skip. Make enough room for adventures and don’t fill those empty hours you get in your calendar with other tasks.
If you just try to add more activities to your life without taking anything out, it’s very likely that you’ll quickly give up on the project, wondering why you couldn’t upkeep the change. In fact, this same principle applies to all revamps of your lifestyle: whether it’s about weight loss or piano lessons, the attempt may be doomed to fail if you just try add new responsibilities when your schedule is already cramped in the first place.
Forests offer a perfect place for microadventures.
2. Change your routes and make detours
Adventures don’t need to be larger than life. Even the tiniest of ventures can be exciting and memorable. The main thing that makes your adventures feel special is the uniqueness of them: instead of doing the same things over and over again, you experience something completely new.
Do you always take the same route home from your workplace? How much of your workplace/neighbourhood/school have you actually explored? The next time you go somewhere familiar, choose a new and previously unknown route. And if you have few extra moments to spare in your school, workplace or wherever you spend your days, take a few minutes to go behind corners that you haven’t checked before.
Try something you haven’t done before!
3. Act like a tourist
“Well”, you might wonder, “I’ve been living in this town for seven years but I don’t know if there’s anything to see here”. To get some microadventure ideas , try to get into the mindset of a visitor. Check tourist guides about your hometown or go to museums and other tourist sights. Search online to see what cultural activities your town has to offer. You can even visit a local tourist information center to ask for microadventure ideas!
If you want, you can take a camera with you and spend a whole day as a tourist. This is exactly what I did a few days before my departure from Finland, a day I documented in an early blog post called “Hometown Tourist in Jyväskylä”.
Hitchhiking in Northern Finland with my friend Pyry in 2013.
4. Get company
If you want, you can go on adventures on your own, but sharing the experience with a friend can make it twice as fun. If you have a friend visit you from another town, you can act as a guide to him. As you try to explain your surroundings to another person, you often realize how little you know about the places.
But of course, you don’t need to have guests or any “rational” reasons to go on an adventure with other people. Just take a local friend with you, start exploring and see what happens!
I often look for green spots on maps and visit them. I found this park in Warsaw that way.
6. Embrace randomness
Some of the greatest travel memories are born when things are out of you control and you don’t know what will happen.
Now, read the same sentence again without the word “travel”. What applies on the road is just as true when you’re staying at home. You can’t know the results in advance, but even taking a public transport to an unknown suburb can turn into a memorable experience. Unexpected events may create fond memories that last for years.
So, just go to new places and see what happens. Wander randomly or check interesting places on the map. And if you see an interesting hill or landmark at the distance, who says you can’t take a closer look?
Fun fact: there’s even a geocache at the top of this bridge in Jyväskylä, Finland.
7. Start geocaching
Geocaching is like a modern version of treasure hunting that has been around for over fifteen years. All around the world, geocachers have hidden caches of different sizes in their surroundings. To find the caches, you usually need to locate their GPS position and then search for the hoard in the area. Geocaching has a huge international community behind it, so there are geocaches spread all over the world. If you haven’t done it already, give geocaching a try!
I haven’t been geocaching on my own, but some of my friends are avid geocachers and I sometimes joined them on their geocaching expeditions back in Finland. I especially like how geocachers put effort into their caches. This is why many of the caches are located in interesting places that you wouldn’t otherwise witness.
Do you have any microadventure ideas you’d like to share? You can share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!
