Big adventures are inspiring and they are great for impressing strangers in bars, but they happen quite rarely and the gap between them can make your life feel empty and uneventful. Plus, sometimes you just can’t take a day off from work even when you’re itching to get out and do something fun.

But all hope is not lost! There are several options that you’ve probably failed to notice in your despair.

After all, on a normal working day you’re free:

• in the morning;
• during your lunch break;
• after work (including the evening).

Here are 12 ideas for mini trips and adventures that you can squeeze into these breaks. They’re exciting, Instagram-worthy (because we all crave that killer shot that gets 100+ likes) and will help your free spirit survive until the weekend comes.

#1 Organize a sunrise picnic

A sunrise picnic by the lake | © Maria Angelova/ 203challenges.com

A picnic can be so much more than eating an alfresco meal on a blanket. Simply changing the time of your picnic can completely change the experience. Leave home an hour or so before sunrise, take a flask of coffee and breakfast in a basket, then drive somewhere beautiful to greet the new day.

>>> Try more creative picnic ideas.

#2 Head outside for your morning workout

Outdoor yoga routine | © Maria Angelova/ 203challenges.com

Yoga, tai chi or downhill biking – whatever your sporting passion is, try it somewhere new and exciting. Why practice your morning meditation in your living room when you can do it in a forest or a quiet park?

#3 Go ‘forest bathing’ like the Japanese

Go forest bathing | © Maria Angelova/ 203challenges.com

The Japanese call it shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) – the practice of walking in the forest to improve your health. The Swedes have a somewhat similar tradition called gökotta, which involves heading to a forest before sunrise to listen to the first birdsong of the morning. It’s much more exciting to tell your colleagues you practiced shinrin-yoku or gökotta instead of simply saying “I went to the park this morning.”

#4 Walk to work

Swap your daily commute for a walk to combine a healthy lifestyle, physical activity and a peaceful rebellion against big city’s pollution. It’s no coincidence that there’s a Walk to Work Day – use it as inspiration!

#5 Do something unusual in your lunch break

If you stop thinking of your lunch break as just a meal time, you’ll be able to come up with tons of amazing activities that you can squeeze into your day. If you’re struggling for inspiration, read this list of unusual lunch break ideas.

#6 Hop on your bike and ride to the nearest peak

Cycle for the sunset | © Maria Angelova/ 203challenges.com

All the sweat and pain of climbing a hill on two wheels is worth it when there’s a jaw-dropping view at the top. Take a bottle of wine and share it with your fellow mini-adventurers on a summer’s day; you can enjoy the sunlight long after work is over.

Psst. We’ve compiled a cycling playlist here.

#7 Dine on a lake shore

Dine on a lake shore | © Maria Angelova/ 203challenges.com

Instead of having dinner at home or at a restaurant, grab your favorite takeaway and head to the nearest lake. Reservoirs, river banks, city ponds and fountains will also suffice if your neighborhood is lacking in lakes. Of course, lakeside meals are often interrupted by lakeside birds, so keep some crumbs at hand for your feathered friends.

#8 Book a table at a restaurant in another city

Indulging in a scrumptious meal is always a special event, no matter whether you’re abroad or at home. To make this weekday night even more special, research a good restaurant in a neighboring city and head there. Don’t forget to try the dessert of the day!

#9 Go stargazing

A blanket, a friend and a half-hour drive out of the city are the only three ingredients you need for a memorable night under the stars. If it’s August and you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you can plan to see the Perseids meteor shower.

#10 Sleep in a hotel in your own city

Choose a cozy boutique hotel in your own city and treat yourself to a midweek vacation. Take advantage of all the services: the spa center, the gourmet restaurant, the rooftop bar…

#11 Go midweek camping somewhere close to your city

Go midweek camping | © Maria Angelova/ 203challenges.com

Midweek camping is so unexpectedly refreshing that once you’ve tried it, you may wonder why you’ve wasted all those years sleeping under a ceiling. It’s much easier than it sounds; you don’t need a day off and you don’t need to drive for miles. Simply read our guide: How to organize a midweek nature escape in 10 easy steps.

#12 Go on a night hike

Provided you have an acceptable mountain/hill close to where you live and there’s a trail you know like the back of your hand, you have no excuse not to put your headlamp on and head on a refreshing hike under the moonlight. Choose a night with a full moon for an extra special experience.

Featured image: © Maria Angelova/ 203challenges.com

Like these ideas? Pin them so you always have them at hand:

The post 12 midweek mini trip ideas for when you can’t take a day off appeared first on 203Challenges.

What if it was possible to keep all the joy and the sense of ‘wow’ even after your trip is over and you’ve come back home?

Actually, it’s possible. All you need to do is to preserve some of the habits you have on the road and apply them every day when you aren’t.

But first of all, let’s see…

© Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

Why is traveling so special?

When you travel, you pay attention to events you normally ignore at home. For example, you are excited about what you eat, you wake up to see the sunrise, you remember sounds and smells, you spend time people watching, etc.

That’s because everything is unfamiliar and new for you. When you spend a week in a city abroad, however, your excitement decreases and your brain gets back to its normal, not-so-special state. In psychology, this is called hedonistic adaptation – getting used to the good stuff in life, and it’s common to all people. This doesn’t mean you can’t change it, though.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia © Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

How to turn your everyday life into an eternal exciting trip

First of all, you have to beat the hedonistic adaptation. You can choose one of the two approaches – either to start paying more attention or to make sure you bring more diversity in your daily life. If you choose the latter, you will still need to pay more attention, otherwise you won’t feel the positive effect so intensely.

And as the idea might seem pretty obvious, it gets tricky when it comes to its implementation. To say ‘bring diversity’ is somewhat vague and doesn’t change anything. So here are a few specific fun ideas.

© Lachezar Sokolov/www.203challenges.com

Ideas that really work

These are just to get started. After a while, you will be able to turn your life into an endless flow of positive experiences naturally coming with more and more exciting ways to do so.

1. Weekday mini-trips – Stop thinking of traveling as a weekend activity and bring some adventure in your weekdays. Go night hiking or night picnicking, watch the stars somewhere away from the smog and artificial lights of the city, organize a treasure hunt with friends or with your family. You can also take half a day off and head for your favorite destination after lunch. 
2. Travel at the tip of your tongue – Explore a new restaurant offering exotic food, or just search the internet for the craziest country you can think of, find a recipe and turn your kitchen into a food discovery base.

James Sutton

3. Change your route to work – Simple as that, changing the most boring part of your day is an eye-opening experience that proves how little effort you need in fact. Walk to work. Bike to work. Go one hour earlier to see different scenery and to find out that commuting can be fun. To make it easier you can set a specific day in the week or the month, let’s say ‘Discovery Tuesday‘ or just every 5th day of the month.

4. Practice mindfulness – This is a whole new topic for another article, as mindfulness has turned out to be the new worldwide trend and there’s a reason for it. With so much pressure from society and the ceaseless bombardment of adverts, it’s getting harder and harder to be present and appreciate what you have instead of what you don’t have. Take a deep breath, feel the textures that touch your body, become aware of the smells and sounds around you as if you are experiencing them for the first time in your life. Repeat as often as possible. You can read more about how to be mindful here.

Practice mindfulness

5. Make friends with foreigners. – Keep in touch with friends you’ve met abroad. Say hi from time to time and ask them how life is. Their stories and different point of view will be a breath of fresh air for you, as yours will for your foreign friends. Set an alarm (right now) to say hi once a month.

6. Go on a photo hunt – Explore your city by going out to shoot a few photos imagining you’re there for the first time in your life.

© Patrick Tomasso/Unsplash.com

7. Become a local guide – There are many web platforms allowing you to be a local guide to someone who has never been to your city (such as Couchsurfing, GlobalGreeters, ShowAround, etc.). Showing the local attractions forces you to see them as a foreigner, and thus, reassess them. But before that, you may want to rediscover your hometown.

8. When was the last time you tried anything new? – One of the greatest pros of traveling is that it inspires you to try new stuff. Why wait for your next vacation if you can try painting, horse riding, snowshoeing, or snorkeling this weekend?

Pin it for later to have it as a reminder:

The post How to apply the best of traveling in your everyday life appeared first on 203Challenges.

Long post alert: This story will take you 14 minutes to read but I promise you’ll laugh, cry and cringe. You can, however, skip to the practicalities at the end if you want to.

When summer hits, you know it’s going to be hot. But sometimes it’s hot and you live in an apartment with no AC and every time you get back from work, you feel like you’re entering a giant blast furnace. You start sweating as soon as you thrust the key into the keyhole. Then you open the door and you’re knocked down by an even more potent heatwave from inside. It’s at this moment that you say to yourself “Enough’s enough!”.

In short, this sweaty scenario was exactly why I decided to evacuate myself from my home for a week this August, swapping my bed for a hammock in the forest. I’m not talking about a vacation here, just a normal working week in which I began every day (well, kind of every day) by jumping out of my hammock, making a campside coffee then heading to work in my inner-city office.

By the moonlight | ©Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

Day 1 (Sunday): First hammocking

As fearless and crazy as this idea might look at first sight, I have to admit that only the latter is accurate. The truth is that I love the forest but I hate bugs. Bugs are not my friends.

The solution: I bought a portable hammock with a mosquito net from a Chinese online store. Judging its comfort and glamor, I can only compare it to a canopy bed (prices start from only $20 if you’re interested). Besides being lighter than a tent, in many countries a hammock like this can be hung in national parks and other places where camping is forbidden (anyway, if you choose to stay in remote places like these, you know what NOT to do: don’t leave your trash, don’t pick rare flowers, don’t hunt for endangered animals etc.).

So, Day 1. I set off from the city to a nearby village with Lucho – my fearless travel and life partner and personal aviation mechanic (you never know when you’re gonna need one). The full moon was as bright as a street lamp and we didn’t even need to turn our headlamps on. After 30 minutes of walking, we found a perfect piece of forest to settle down in for the night. A short while before midnight, we were having dinner under the light of the moon and the stars (oh, how romantic, you should try it!) when we heard a piercing bird call that sounded like the blood-curdling screams of a damsel in distress. That gave us the heebie-jeebies and we were forced to gulp down two shots of vodka to regain courage. Then we tucked in our sleeping bags and watched the pine tops reaching each other somewhere high above us.

The light of the full moon woke us up a few times, but it could’ve been worse if we were, let’s say, werewolves. Thank god we’re not. Despite the interruptions, the gentle whiff of pine needles on the breeze proved that sleeping in the forest was actually a genius decision!

Sunrise | ©Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

Day 2 (Monday): Lunar eclipse… almost

I spent the whole day following the weather forecast with my other fearless hiking and sleeping-in-the-forest-on-weekdays partner, Eva. The weatherman predicted heavy rain, a natural phenomenon very much at odds with our plan to scale a near 2,290-m (7500-ft) mountain peak and watch the partial lunar eclipse from there. Late in the afternoon, it started raining cats and dogs in the city, while the live cameras from the peak showed nothing better than chin-deep mud. “Let’s leave this for the weekend when we’ll watch the Perseids, too,” said Eva wisely. So we ended up peeking at the eclipse from our apartment windows, just like all the other boring city people around us.

©Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

Day 3 (Tuesday): Pause for a night sleeping in the blast furnace

Day 4 (Wednesday): Sleeping alone in the forest

For a third day in a row I came home thinking I’d be lazy and sleep in my bed, but things escalated. When I opened the door of my apartment a burst of scorching air burned me down and only a small pile of ashes fell on the doorstep. You imagined it. I had no choice.

10:30 pm. I took my hammock, a sleeping bag and breakfast for the next day and headed for another village close to my city. I gulped my shots of vodka early that night as this time I was going to be all by myself. It was going to be my first solo hammock night in the forest. A piece of cake! What could go wrong?!

Once I had arrived in the village, a pack of stray dogs started chasing me, which, let’s face it, was not a promising start to the night. After getting rid of the dogs, I entered the woods and 30 minutes later I found a perfect spot to hang my hammock. The air was pine-fresh and a brook was babbling somewhere nearby. What an idyll!

My hammock in the forest | ©Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

I fell asleep almost immediately. Then, I woke up almost immediately. My sick mind was dreaming that a psychopath was leaning over me (let me remind you: I was a woman sleeping alone in the forest). As I mentioned, I’m not fearless at all, and there are worse things out there than bugs. I looked around – there was nobody, so I tamed my palpitations and fell asleep again almost immediately. Once again I woke up almost immediately after I had dreamt about another psycho. And this, my dear wannabe solo-hammocking enthusiasts, continued for the whole night! I had only one dream that didn’t involve a psycho, but it was just as terrifying: a fox took away my sandals and I had to walk barefoot back to the village.

In spite of the pines, the babbling river and the refreshing whiff of the wind, I had just endured the worst al fresco night of my life so far.

Morning coffee | ©Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

However, I want to clarify that the night was not all psychos and sandal-loving foxes. For the first time I had the chance to really appreciate the net of the hammock. When I woke up for the last time in the morning, I saw that a forest spider had illegally used my hammock net as a base for his web. I imagined how, if it hadn’t been for the hammock net, I’d have woken up entangled in cobwebs from head to toe, with a giant spider staring directly into my eyes. Don’t judge me. I’ve seen too many thrillers in my life.

Now I’d like to take a moment to share my thoughts on meeting other people in the forest. The scariest of all encounters you can have in a dark forest at night is not a bear, a wolf or even a flock of hungry mosquitoes – it’s another human. What would a normal person be doing in the dark, more than an hour away from the nearest village? He must be a psychopath. Except for you, you are slightly adventurous but completely normal on the whole. Yet, sometimes people don’t get it and the roles swap. Especially when a father and son walk their puppy in the wood above their village at 6 in the morning and you jump out of the bushes with messy hair and bloodshot eyes because you haven’t drunk your coffee yet. Oh well, in this case you are the psycho and you can be sure that the father has squeezed the phone in his pocket ready to call 911 or, if necessary, is prepared to knock you down and drown you in the river.

Morning coffee and planning | ©Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

Day 5 (Thursday): Pause for another night sleeping in the blast furnace

Day 6 (Friday): The Perseids and sleeping on a mountain peak

I don’t want a fox to lick my nose while I sleep. I just don’t. Everybody has their irrational fears, and that’s (one of) mine. I’d bought a hammock with a net and now I was forced to sleep in a meadow (try to hang your hammock in a treeless meadow!). But being a part of a group of four (I’ve already mentioned Eva and Lucho, plus Ilko) dedicated to sleeping in the fresh air and watching the Perseid meteor shower, I decided to keep my fears to myself and daringly lie under the stars, stuffed in my sleeping bag and zipped up to the top, with only the tip of my nose poking out.

Earlier this evening, we’d hiked for more than an hour up in the mountains and had chosen a peak (1300 m/4200 ft) with a magnificent view of the surrounding area. We saw tens of blinking villages down in the valley, while the shooting stars above us were doing what they do best – they were leaving their bright trails in the sky while we were ticking off wishes from our lists. We ate dinner with no light other than the moon, laughed and ate home-grown tomatoes… And I slept like a log for the first time in a week.

For the record, no fox licked my face that night.

Day 7 (Saturday): Thunderstorm = sleeping in the blast furnace (again!)

Next days: all summer hammocking

After the first experimental nights, I’m sure sleeping in a hammock will turn into a summer tradition around these parts. Maybe it’ll go beyond summer, too. Has anyone come up with a winter hammock yet?!

Sunrise | ©Maria Angelova/www.203challenges.com

Q&A: Practicalities

– How do you get there?

– This challenge was completed around Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and my destinations were the villages of Zheleznitsa, Simeonovo, and Yarlovo, between 5 and 50 km (3 and 30 mi) away form the city. I used both my car and public transportation to get to the villages, then relied on my own two feet to find a sleeping spot in the forest. Regardless of where you live, you can create your own hammock map with suitable locations around your home.

– Do you shower at all?

– In general or during this adventure? Yes, I take a shower at home before I head to the office. But even if I can’t make it, I have a bathroom in the office, so this is not an issue. Anyway, sleeping in the forest is more refreshing that you’d expect.

– How early do you wake up for work?

– It depends on a bunch of factors, but I usually wake up at 6 am, make some coffee and breakfast and get to the city before the morning rush hour. It’s a well-known fact that you sleep better in the forest (unless you dream about psychos 20 times per night).

– What’s in your backpack?

– A sleeping bag, a mat, a hammock with a mosquito net, gas stove + coffee, breakfast (I usually take a few tomatoes, bread and cheese), vodka (a shot before bed to pay homage to an old tradition), water, headlamp, cup, a long-sleeve blouse (I sleep with my shorts only) and a camera.

This was one of the 5 travel challenges for August 2017, inspired by the book “203 Travel Challenges”.

Pin it for later:

The post How I swapped my bed for a hammock this summer (and kept on going to work) appeared first on 203Challenges.

Seeing a shooting star and making a wish may seem to you like pure chance. However, the truth is you can help chance come your way by being in the right place at the right time. Every year, around 12 August, the night sky fills with hundreds of shooting stars (or meteorites, to be exact). That’s thanks to the Perseids, a spectacular annual meteor shower.

How to watch the Perseids

The Perseids can be observed from late July until late August, peaking around 12 August (The 2018 Perseids will peak on the night of August 12 and early morning hours of August 13. This year, the thin crescent moon will set early in the evening leaving dark skies for what should be an excellent show. Best viewing will be from a dark location after midnight.). During the peak of the shower, hundreds of meteorites can be seen every hour. To make the most of the experience, you need to go to a place with minimal artificial light (as far as possible from cities and villages). It’s the perfect opportunity to combine the meteor shower with a night picnic – just pack a meal, find a nice patch of grass and enjoy! You can see the Perseids meteor shower best in the northern hemisphere and down at the mid-southern latitudes.

Fun fact…

The meteors are called Perseids because when we look at the sky it appears they come from the constellation Perseus. In Western European countries, they are known as ‘the tears of Saint Lawrence’, due to the fact that the Perseids peak on the night of the Catholic holiday celebrating St. Lawrence. In fact, the shooting stars we see in the sky are part of the comet Swift-Tuttle.

Spice up the night with a picnic

Organize a night picnic in a dark area, far from the city. Bring some food, beer, and blankets and indulge in sweet chats with friends in between the shooting stars. You can make a list of your wishes and tick them off once they have been assigned to a certain meteor.

Other meteor showers to watch

There are other meteor streams throughout the year: Geminids in mid-December, Lyrids in mid-April, Quadrantids in late December/early January. Mark them in your calendar to keep your wish-making options open all year.

Or alternatively, you could visit some of the places around the world that promise making wishes come true!

The post Perseids 2018: How to see the brightest meteor shower of the year appeared first on 203Challenges.