Here are some things I’d like to share with you today:

• Excellent adventurous podcast series – “Epic stories of Nasa’s missions to the Moon. Season 1: the first Moon landing, Apollo 11. Season 2: the near disaster of Apollo 13.”
• Seven simple steps to a summer microadventure.
• I loved chatting to the ace Beau Miles about Adventures and Books.
• Digital mapping & apps for hiking: 7 of the best reviewed.
• Beautifully-filmed South Downs bikepacking trip (despite the trail-ripping skids).
• Words of Wisdom from Brendan Leonard, the Everyman of Ultrarunning,on the life-affirming joys of type-two fun.

Coffee, Fly-tipping, and Bluebells.

Let me know if you have a relevant project that my readers would appreciate.

Here’s what you guys have been up to recently:

• Everywhere there is a whiff of the wild: walking London’s Capital Ring.

• ‍️ “What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning?” A superb essay about ultra-running (and life).
• ‍️ 18 years ago a slight lapse in concentration crushed Pascale’s dreams of surfing. With the help of a family friend and a roll of duct tape; she can now call herself a surfer. A lovely short film.
•  After my last newsletter I received an email requesting that I share some inspiring ‘older’ adventurous souls. I asked Twitter for advice and received some fantastic suggestions.

Anyway, the busy-ness came from recording the audio version on My Midsummer Morning. Putting the final touches to a book is a weird feeling – okaying the cover, sorting the photos, final scan for typos. It’s a mixture of control freak panic, weary relief, melancholy, and a reckless feeling of I-don’t-care-any-more-Take-this-away-from-me! If you’re an audiobook fan you can pre-order My Midsummer Morning here. In other good book news, Great Adventurers has won the fab Standford’s Children’s Travel Book of the Year award. Alhamdulillah!

Let nobody tell you that any ‘adventure’ is harder than a week of commuter trains and limp sandwiches! I think I’ve earned a lie-down and a good movie binge:

• The pleasingly eccentric and humble Rickey Gates has run every street in San Francisco
• Kilian Jornet ran up Mount Everest. Literally ran up Mount Everest.
• Teenager Ed Pratt went round the world by unicycle. Daft. Well-filmed

• The planet is in crisis – from climate change to the pollution in our oceans and devastation of our forests. It’s up to all of us to fix it. How big is your environmental footprint?
• A podcast I am enjoying: An ongoing series of long-form conversations with pioneers of exploration and discovery. And me, answering questions on ‘why we need adventure’.
• Following the superb crowd-sourced success of my question about adventures for young people from difficult backgrounds, I decided to ask Twitter again. “Which websites / blogs / podcasts / magazines do you go to find out about brilliant journeys that people have taken?”
  Any other ideas I should crowd source answers to?
• 16 adventures to try before you are 16. How many have you done?How many will you tick off this year?
• Two very different articles that have got me thinking. A list of 25 Principles of Adult Behaviour, and Screw Finding Your Passion.

Finally, let me know where you’re reading this newsletter! Hello to Helen on her horse in Wales, Erik in the Egyptian desert and Chantae in Fiji! You lot don’t know what hard work is. Not like me. I went to an office last week. Yeah.