We're always being told to make the most out our weekends away from the grinding and endless chattering of the keyboard at our office desk. Most of us, not surprisingly spend it cooped up indoors, riding the all too familiar wave of couch slumming, endless repeats of Friends and copious amounts of hop-based refreshments, wearing the hangover of your weekend rush under your shirt on Monday morning. Our weekends have become windbreakers to the working week and often victim to our lazy downtime.
To have an adventure, or to inject some more adventure into your life, you don’t have to take a month off work, fly halfway around the world and climb a mountain, it’s more of a mentality, an attitude that can be woven into your daily routine.
Me and three friends recently decided to shake up our weekend routine to ride the 180 miles stretch of Hadrian’s Wall, where England is at its narrowest and spent three magical days sleeping in fields, cooking, discovering learning, bonding and pushing our tired bodies across the undulated land from east coast to west coast. It wasn’t an epic tour, nor was it a huge feat of human endurance, but It felt like it had all the components of proper adventure: the highs and lows, the challenges, camping out in nature and feasting upon new experiences. On top of this was the rekindled sense of excitement that I had injected back into my weekends and into my life.
After the trip I remember taking my seat on the long train back to Newcastle, my bike strapped up and panniers full of damp clothes, torn grass, bugs and plenty of energy bar wrappers, my face still flecked with mud from the embankments of the Tyne and my shoes still damp from the morning dew. I returned to work the next day, slightly dishevelled and rough around the edges but with a natural glow, refreshed and energised knowing that, ‘yes, I've spent my weekend well!’.
Little adventures like this are great reminders not to live vicariously, but to be the curious instigator and live by your own terms in full appreciation and vitality of your own adventurous spirit. Whether big or small, an adventure can lead you to some incredible places, places that you would never of seen had you been locked in the house all week. Find yourself cooking delicious smelling noodles over a fire with friends and smiling as you look out, exhausted into the twilight of a balmy summer evening, the giant blades of a wind farm churning silently in the sun next to your tent.
So whether it’s driving somewhere new and sleeping on a hill, cycling and snoozing under the stars or spending a few days walking out in nature away from your phone and the incessant stream of social media, shake your weekend routine up and grasp the opportunity to get outdoors. Trade it all in for simplicity, perspective and impracticality and feel that satisfying squeeze of spontaneity that comes from toeing new tracks and fresh living.
Spending quality time with other like-minded people is also invaluable and something which is at the very core of Explorers Connect. Sharing experiences together with people who share the same thirst for adventure and outdoors as you has wonderful repercussions and it also enables you to help others by initiating them into your adventurous tribe.
Words by Jack Few