Stealing Ideas

We are avid magpies – stealing ideas from other adventurers and making them our own. All of us seek inspiration and we have many inspiring adventurers that we turn to for ideas, e.g. Alistair Humphreys, Dave Cornthwaite, Sean Conway and Anna McNuff to name but a few. The problem is that these hard-core impressive human beings are often doing exciting things that are beyond the realms of the every day family.

So with that in mind, we decided to steal the essence of adventures and make them our own. We’ve nicknamed this approach as DIY adventures – Do It Your way. See our latest adventure ideas here: www.dotrythisathome.com

Science-y bit

Whilst running workshops at the recent Basecamp festival we attempted to impress our participants with a bit of science – graphs! This particular graph attempts to illustrate (very simplistically) the way to approach adventuring with kids.

The y axis shows the length of time an activity or adventure can take, increasing as it moves up the page, while the x axis shows the difficulty, increasing as it moves right. These scales are not in anyway accurate and are relative to whatever content is put on the graph, but do give a rough impression of two areas of consideration when planning adventures.

Examples of more gnarly adventures would obviously appear in the top right corner of the graph – they take time and are at the difficult end of the spectrum; these are the adventures that would be difficult or impossible to do with younger children, e.g. Alistair Humphreys’ cycle around the world in four years. The idea is to find suitable alternatives that fit in the bottom left corner of the graph initially when planning adventures with kids. The time taken and difficulty will vary depending on the age and ability of everyone in the family and this will and does change as we get all get older (see next blog post – part 3). Who knows, one day, you might end up doing an adventure in the top right corner!