When we bought our new home at the end of 2013 we knew that there was a lot of work to be done on the place. Every room was in need of a huge dose of TLC!
Obviously there were jobs we couldn’t (or preferred not to) do ourselves, like the kitchen for example, but the vast majority of the work was done by us with a massive amount of help from mum and dad1.
This took up a huge amount of our “free” time, with the rest of our time dedicated to our four girls.
Our 9-to-5 grind was more like 7-to-9. The balance was all wrong and we were missing something, something important not just for us or our relationship, something important for our family as a whole…adventure!
Five to Nine? What The…?
In search of some inspiration on how to rectify this problem I read a lot about microadventures, a term coined by Alastair Humphreys2. As Alastair puts it:
“Adventure is a loose word that means different things to different people. It is a state of mind, a spirit of trying something new and leaving your comfort zone. Adventure is about enthusiasm, ambition, open-mindedness and curiosity. Most people enjoy adventure and would love to have more of it in their lives, but most people don’t have the time to cycle round the world. But adventure should not only be for ‘Adventurers’. So I realised that what I wanted to do was to break down the barriers to adventure. And thus the microadventure was born.
A microadventure has the spirit (and therefore the benefits) of a big adventure; it’s just all condensed into a weekend away, or even a midweek escape from the office. Even people living in big cities are not very far away from small pockets of wilderness. Adventure is all around us, at all times, even during hard financial times such as these; times when getting out into the wild is more invigorating and important than ever. If you are too busy, too stressed, too broke, too tired or too unfit for an adventure, then you definitely would benefit from a microadventure. Climb a hill, jump in a river, sleep under the stars. Try it. What’s the worst that could happen?”
And that’s where the idea of Five to Nine came from; that time outside of work we all miss too much of because we’re just too busy to get the work/life balance swinging in the right direction, and by that I mean the right direction for us and not work!
Not Another Website?!
Both Shelli and I have our personal websites, sites where we can write about our general musings or post our photos. These serve a purpose and will continue to do so no doubt.
What we haven’t had is a place for us, both of us, so having a new site where we can both write, post, and upload photos to made a lot of sense seeing as we’ve been together for quite some time now, so a new site was born.
And what better subject matter than our family adventures?
I hope this site keeps us inspired to get out more and to have fun. I hope it’ll also – maybe – inspire others to have more adventures, both large and small.
“Sometimes all you need is to climb a simple hill, to spend time staring at an empty horizon, to jump into a cold river or sleep under the stars, or perhaps share a whisky at a small country inn in order to remind yourself what matters most to you in life.”
― Alastair Humphreys
Footnotes