The appeal of microadventures is that they make adventure accessible to people who may have very little outdoor experience.

The day you finish writing your book is not the day your book is finished. Nor is it the day the book is published and you gaze with a mixture of relief, disbelief, pride and trepidation on the book in your hand. Your book! At last!

Tom and I paid homage to Millican Dalton by sleeping in the cave he used to live in, building a raft of our own and paddling it down the River Derwent.

When I’m in stuck in the city, chasing deadlines and dollars and other men’s dreams, I often wish I could escape to something different.

I wanted to explode some excuses with my year of microadventure. Here’s a few of them...

Get a bunch of kids.

Let them walk over a big hill, eat outside, run a bit wild, jump in a river, toast marshmallows and sleep under the stars in their clothes.

Here is what happens...

A Year of Microadventure 12 months. 12 overnight microadventures. 1 adventurous year.

The irony of reading the epic Odyssey on a microadventure was not lost on me. But if there is one thing I have learned during this Year of Microadventures it is this...

Look at the normal with fresh eyes. Seek the extra-ordinary in the ordinary. Step away from the pleasant, unsurprising riverside picnic. Step away and slide down into the water. See the world from a different perspective. Be surprised. Swim a river.

Once a season this year I am spending a night out in the same woods.

The best microadventures include all the ingredients of great epics (voyaging into the unknown, hardship and surprises).

This is the Fred Whitton Challenge. It’™s not on Twitter and it’™s not branded as, Xtreme, Tough, Epic, Ultimate or Awesome, though it probably is some of those things.