Unconventional Adventures

Look up Beau Miles on YouTube for more in this vein of unconventional adventures.

Personally, I am a fan of exploring local waterways in the smallest, simplest boat you can find. The smaller the boat, the bigger the adventure. I recently built a folding 6 foot sailboat that I can sail with my young kid to a “distant shore” and pack up and carry home via public transport or Uber when we get there. Learning to build a boat- and traveling all around to find the right wood and materials was itself a great adventure.

Ultimately, being the first to do something only matters for recognition, something people are too obsessed with nowadays. It is just as fun to do something you’ve never done before as something never at all done before- either way it’s new to you! Don’t tell anyone about it, don’t make it a social media spectacle, just do it for yourself.

I do a small version of this in my own town. We're surrounded by public land, and I find stuff in the lidar data that looks interesting. And then I head out cross country through the forest to try to figure out what it is. Stumble across all kinds of weird stuff along the way. I love it even though I think most people would find it boring.

This speaks to me!

In 2015, a friend and I resolved to ride our bicycles across Japan. I had felt the yearn to go on an adventure that engaged my whole body and encouraged exploration in an environment completely new to me. I deeply desired some version of crossing Middle Earth, and a bike ride with a start and end point but no plan in between felt like just the thing.

In April of 2016 we set off from Kagoshima, and a few weeks later we ended our trip in Osaka. We made it roughly a third as far as we had wanted, but it’s a trip we’ll never forget, and one that we desperately want to continue someday. It scratched an itch I didn’t know how else I could scratch.

I lived in Bangkok for two years. The most conventional things I did while there were Ayyuthaya (the buddha head in the roots of the bodhi tree), Hua Hin (beach town), Kanchanaburi (Bridge on the River Kwai), and Koh Samet (an island). That said:

I went to Ayyuthaya on the local train, which was more interesting than the destination. Same for Hua Hin, where I stayed in a little low-key hotel and I walked to and out on a nearly-abandoned pier. Same for Kanchanaburi where I got off a stop early and had to pay a local to drive me to the final stop, and I stayed in a low-key floating hotel in a fan room. I took a bus (and a boat) to Koh Samet and walked from one end of the island road to the other, and got to watch people playing Takraw at the police station.

Wandering is a great way to see a place.

Another trend that's on the rise is danger tourism. Visiting places with active travel advisories or seen as dangerous. E.g. going to Israel or eastern Ukraine right now. Trips to Somalia, Yemen, North Korea etc.

rather US-centric train of thought from the author, but I guess that’s to be expected when the website’s name is quarter mile