1KHO 412: How to Do More With the Life You Have | Alastair Humphreys, Grand Adventures

Summary

Summary of Episode 1KHO 412: "How to Do More With the Life You Have" featuring Alastair Humphreys

Published on January 10, 2025, on "The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast" hosted by Ginny Yurich.

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Introduction: Welcoming Alastair Humphreys

The episode kicks off with Ginny Yurich warmly welcoming Alastair Humphreys, a renowned adventurer and author. Alastair expresses his genuine enjoyment of the conversation, likening Ginny to a long-lost friend joining him in his shed to chat about his adventurous endeavors ([00:24]).

Exploring Alastair's Literary Journey

Ginny shares her admiration for Alastair's books, particularly "Grand Adventures" and "Micro Adventures." Alastair reflects on revisiting his earlier works, noting, “I thought this book was great. He says modestly, oh, it is a great book. Yeah, I was really pleased” ([00:40]).

Ginny elaborates on how "Micro Adventures" transformed her perspective by emphasizing short, accessible adventures. She praises "Grand Adventures" for its compilation of stories from diverse adventurers, stating, “It's such a cool book. … It's like you could leave it out all the time and always be flipping through and getting stuff out of it” ([02:35]).

Overcoming Financial Barriers to Adventure

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the misconception that adventures must be expensive. Alastair shares his personal strategy of traveling cheaply to extend the duration of his adventures. He recounts a pivotal conversation with Rob Symington about creating an “adventure fund,” where saving just £20 weekly could accumulate £1,000 annually for grand adventures ([04:32]).

Ginny relates this to her own experiences, comparing budget camping trips favorably against pricier alternatives like theme parks, highlighting the reduced pressure and enhanced memories from simpler adventures ([06:18]).

Alastair emphasizes practical tips for saving, including innovative methods like Matt Evans' ceramic pot for storing change, ensuring savings are untouched until intended for adventure ([11:43]).

Personal Adventure Stories: The £5 Spain Trip

Alastair shares a memorable adventure from the late 1990s when he and a friend traveled to Spain with an extreme budget of five pounds for the entire week. This journey involved hitchhiking to Ronda, interacting with locals, and embracing the unpredictability of adventure. Alastair reminisces, “It was a wonderful, wonderful little adventure” ([20:10]).

Ginny vividly recalls the journey, emphasizing the spontaneous and enriching experiences, such as sleeping in sewage pipes and interacting with construction workers upon waking ([23:09]).

Time Management and the Urgency of Adventure

The conversation shifts to the concept of time as a critical barrier to pursuing adventures. Alastair references Oliver Berkman's "4000 Weeks," highlighting the finite nature of time and the importance of prioritizing meaningful experiences. He humorously mentions using a “death clock” as a personal reminder to seize the day ([25:53]).

Ginny concurs, stressing the importance of not deferring adventures to a future that may never come, reinforcing the idea that life is ticking by and adventures shouldn’t be postponed ([28:19]).

Minimalist Packing and Psychological Preparation

Alastair advocates for minimalist packing to reduce both physical and psychological burdens during adventures. He shares his own simple kit list, including essentials like a raincoat, sleeping bag, and a toothbrush, and underscores the psychological benefit of carrying only what’s necessary: “It can weigh you down physically and psychologically” ([33:50]).

Impact of Adventures on Personal Growth and Community

Reflecting on how adventures shape personal lives, Alastair discusses the dual nature of adventures—they enrich life with experiences and memories but can also create a longing for the excitement and community left behind. He notes, “They've made my life more interesting and rich and rewarding, but I also think they've made my life harder and more complicated” ([45:25]).

Diverse Types of Adventures and Inclusivity

The episode explores various forms of adventures, from biking and walking to rowing and traveling with animals. Alastair emphasizes that adventures are not one-size-fits-all and can be tailored to individual circumstances. He highlights inspirational stories, such as Tom Turkic’s journey accompanied by a dog, illustrating the profound lessons learned from living in the moment and building human connections ([49:44]).

Encouragement and Inspiration for Listeners

Ginny concludes by expressing how Alastair’s books have opened her eyes to a myriad of adventure possibilities, inspiring her and likely many listeners to embark on their own quests, regardless of scale or budget. She appreciates the accessibility and motivational aspect of Alastair’s work, reinforcing the podcast’s mission to inspire others to take back their childhood and embrace the outdoors ([54:02]).

Closing Remarks

The episode wraps up with heartfelt thanks between Ginny and Alastair, leaving listeners with a sense of inspiration and the encouragement to pursue their own adventures, big or small.

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Notable Quotes:

• Alastair Humphreys ([04:32]): “What was my choice going to be? So with adventuring, I've always, always chosen to travel really cheaply and have a longer adventure.”

• Ginny Yurich ([06:18]): “If you just go. And I would say that camping gave us as many pleasant memories as something like a theme park, if not more…”

• Alastair Humphreys ([25:53]): “A sobering website called deathclock.com … That's a real reminder to me of, wow, if I want to do something, it's got to be done before there [the estimated death date].”

• Alastair Humphreys ([33:50]): “It can weigh you down physically and psychologically.”

• Alastair Humphreys ([49:44]): “Dogs are just so good at living in the moment, being in the present, making the most of today…”

• Alastair Humphreys ([45:25]): “They've made my life more interesting and rich and rewarding, but I also think they've made my life harder and more complicated.”

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This episode of "The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast" serves as a comprehensive guide to redefining what it means to embark on grand adventures. Alastair Humphreys, through his engaging storytelling and practical advice, dismantles the myths surrounding adventure, making it accessible to everyone regardless of financial or temporal constraints. Listeners are left inspired to seek out their own adventures, armed with the knowledge that even small steps can lead to significant personal growth and memorable experiences.

Transcript

[Alistair Humphreys]

What's the best time of day to get a deal?

[Ginny]

All day with Jack in the box's all day.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Big deal meal. You get to choose from four entrees like the supreme croissant and five tasty.

[Ginny]

Sides, plus a drink starting at $5.

[Alistair Humphreys]

So hurry in or take your time. You've got all day at Jack. Every bite's a big deal.

[Ginny]

Thanks for doing this.

[Alistair Humphreys]

My pleasure.

[Ginny]

I finally read Grand Adventures and I love it.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Thank you. It's been interest for me to think about our chat because this is, you know, I've been doing much more small stuff for a long, long time. So this was a trip down memory lane for me.

[Ginny]

Yeah.

[Alistair Humphreys]

And it was actually really nice to look at this book because normally when I look at stuff from my youth, I'm embarrassed and think, oh, that's terrible. But I thought this book was great. He says modestly, oh, it is a great book. Yeah, I was really pleased.

[Ginny]

Well, we're in it. Let's keep going.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Okay.

[Ginny]

I was thinking, I looked back because I was like, this guy's probably sick of me.

[Alistair Humphreys]

No, I really genuinely enjoy our chat. I feel like you're my friend in North America who I've never met. You come and we chat together in my shed. I enjoy it. It's nice.

[Ginny]

I mean, we've done a lot of them. What's been interesting to me, Alistair, is that you've opened my world to a bunch of different types of books that are out there and just different concepts. And we originally talked about Micro Adventures, which completely changed my life. I mean, I was really grasping onto these longer adventures that we were having and weren't able to anymore as our kids got older. And it just was a reminder, like, if you could only go for 45 minutes or where can you find that little pocket of time? And so I've had Grand Adventures. Which you wrote a year later after Micro Adventures. It came out in 2016, I think. Right. Micro Adventures came out in 2015. It's been sitting on my shelf the same time. It's the same type of book. It looks the same. It's like a little series. And I was just thinking, oh, I don't know, like, I'm maybe not the Grand Adventures type. And so I started reading it and I was like kicking myself because I have liked every single one of your books so much. And this is such a cool book, Alistair. Oh, my goodness, it's such a cool book. You interviewed all of these different adventurers and they're just doing things really, that a lot of People could do their walking places, their biking places. They're taking their kids, they're not taking their kids. And I thought this turned out to be a wonderful, wonderful book. It's like you could leave it out all the time and always be flipping through and getting stuff out of it. That's how I felt.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Oh, good. Yeah. Nice book to dip into talking to you now. I really regret that I didn't record those hundred interviews and whack them out as a podcast. That would have been fantastic. But hey ho, technology moves on.

[Ginny]

It probably wasn't as big of a thing back then.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, exactly. I thought this podcast stuff, it'll never take off.

[Ginny]

You know what, though? I bet you could go back and do it.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, well, I think quite a quiet because quite a few of them were in pubs with a piece of paper and a pen.

[Ginny]

Sure, sure. But a lot of them have social media. So in the back, you know, there was like. I thought that was really cool too. You put everyone's social medias or websites like, hello, Henrik Frederickson, an engineer and adventure who did a bicycle journey around the world with two surprising detours, worldonbike.com and then it's got his social media. So, I mean, there's gotta be 40, 50 people here.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, I think there's about 80 odd people. So, yeah, there's quite a good collection of Internet websites for anyone who wants to explore these explorers in greater depth.

[Ginny]

Yeah, this is like one of the coolest books I own. I was a little intimidated, like, like I said, I'm not really maybe the grand adventure type, but it changed my mind about it. You went down so many different paths of different ways that you could do these bigger adventures. So one of the things that you talk about is, and you talk about this a lot, what stands in our way. But these are ordinary people, you say they're ordinary people who do more than ordinary, even extraordinary things. And they have all of these memories that they've made and they've gotten over the hurdles. So the biggest hurdle is money. This is the biggest hurdle. An assumption that adventures have to be expensive and you change the reader's mind almost immediately. You're like, well, if you just go and you know, you sleep in a tent and you know, you eat, you don't eat out at every single thing. Adventures can be cheaper than you might imagine. How are some ways that our adventures, you know, heading into a new year, how could they be cheaper than we might imagine?

[Alistair Humphreys]

Well, I've always had a really. In my adventuring world, there's always been a really strong connection between adventure and money because unfortunately I'm not yet a millionaire, even though you've bought most of my books. So. And certainly when I was starting adventuring, I was a young guy in my 20s. Money was tight as it is for most people in their 20s. And so. But I wanted to have really long adventures. So I realized very early on there was some simple maths you can do. You can go to Las Vegas and drink champagne and stay in a five star hotel for a weekend or you could, for that amount of money you could ride your bicycle somewhere for probably several months. So what was my choice going to be? So with adventuring, I've always, always chosen to travel really cheaply and have a longer adventure. And that's, and there's lots of interesting stuff to that. It teaches you about the value of money. It makes you really grateful for when you come home and you open your fridge and there's loads of food and you're like, wow, I'm so lucky in my life. It reminds you to be grateful. So there's that sort of stuff. Similarly, sleeping in an uncomfortable tent and not washing for a while just makes you feel like your own bed and your shower is luxury. So there's, so there's lots of benefits to having cheap adventures as well as the fact that it enables you to have an adventure in the first place and makes you be able to go on a longer adventure. So I've always seen traveling cheap not as a disadvantage or an unfortunate consequence, but almost an extra bonus part of adventuring. It, it shows you a different perspective on life and, and I think cheap adventures are, I would argue, a better adventures than if you happen to just get a million pounds to go off and do whatever you wanted with no effort.

[Ginny]

I mean, I relate because we would take our kids camping when they were little and I remember thinking it was $30 a night and I thought, well, we could go for a whole week for the same price as staying in a hotel room a whole week. And it's just as good of an adventure, if not better because there's a little less pressure too. I think if you think your grand adventure is to Disney World and it's going to cost $1,000 a day, there's a lot of pressure associated with that. But if you just go. And I would say that camping gave as many pleasant memories as something like a theme park, if not more, because there's not that pressure of we just spent X amount of dollars, we took one of our kids to the zoo once for their birthday and it was like $220 to get in. We didn't know before we got there. And then it's like, that's a lot of money. So there's a lot of pressure associated with that to make the experience be something that maybe it wouldn't be if you just did a hike in the woods. You would have just as good of a time. So you talk about this guy named Ron Smith Simmington.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes, Rob. Rob Symington. So he was the starting conversation for what turned into this whole book. And interesting that as. Maybe we can talk about this a bit later. But as I'm talking to you now, I did the Micro Adventures book, which was about having small adventures. And then I did this Grand Adventures, which was my thinking almost 10 years ago, was I'd encourage people to go and have small little adventures and then they could go off and do big ones because that's all the cool stuff, the big adventures. But in most of the years since then, I've actually been saying the complete opposite in life, which is, hey, you guys used to do lots of adventures, used to have lots of travels and fun times and stuff when you were young, but now you're middle aged and you've got kids and you haven't got the time and the money, so let's do micro adventures. So in recent years I've been encouraging people to go smaller. So this, this conversation is an interesting flashback for me, but at the time what I was thinking was what I wanted to do is encourage people to get some confidence by doing short little micro adventures. And then when they had the confidence, they were ready for some bigger stuff. Big adventures are great, but immediately you come across this big hurdle of money. And I was sitting in a cafe with Rob in London. I can still remember exactly the cafe. It was South London, Clapham Common, nice little part of London. And he talked about the idea of having an adventure fund. And what he'd done was start a new bank account and every week he would transfer £20 into that bank account. I thought, oh, that's quite a cool idea. And he said to me, so after a year I'll have £1,000 and maybe I'm not very good at maths, but suddenly that amazed me because for me, I can afford £20 a week. That's not a, it's not the end of the world for me. But £1,000, that's a lot of money for me. And I could go on a big adventure for that. And suddenly the idea of Just automating this to start a new bank account. So you set it up, you forget about it. You set up an automatic weekly transfer that takes, I don't know, 20 minutes of boring effort on the computer. You forget all about it and suddenly a year later, ding, you've got £1,000. And in that year I realized that gives you all the time necessary to deal with all the other barriers and obstacles that get in the way of people having adventures. You know, commitments, family, work issues, planning, preparation, getting fit, sorting out equipment, all that sort of stuff can be done while your money is secretly accumulating. And that really excited me and I thought, this is, I'm onto a project here. What can I do if I encourage lots of people just to start saving 20 pounds, $20 a week and then get dreaming and a year from today you have to get out your front door and begin. And that really excited me. And that was the starting point of it. And I think it's an important thing to say that what you should do here is do an appropriate amount of money for you. So if you can't afford $20 a week, don't just give up on the whole and say, oh, this is terrible, save, I don't know, $2 a week. By the end of the year you've got $100. And as you've proved, you can go camping for three nights for that, so whatever, but don't do nothing. That's what I'm saying. But yes, start this little 20 pounds a week after a year you got a thousand pounds, $11,000, you're ready for a, you've saved up a grand, you can go have a grand adventure.

[Ginny]

I love it. So micro adventures, you went through all of these different little types of adventures that you could do. And you talked about the 5 to 9, you know, the 5pm till 9 the next morning. And sometimes you're wild camping and sometimes you're sleeping out on a mountain and sometimes you're swimming in the river and then going to work. And in this book you have the different types of adventures as well, like biking and you're on foot or you know, someone's on a, they're going with donkeys or they've got a pack of huskies, you know, you're in the water, you're taking a kayak down this river. But in this one in particular, you interviewed all of these people and asked them, these adventurers that you know, or like you said, you're in a pub with them, you talked to 2000ish people about what stands in their way? And so, like I said, I mean, it's just a fun book that you could pick up all the time and just, you know, flip through, like, what did this person do? Or what did that person say? And in this part about money, there was another guy named Matt Evans who bought a ceramic pot. So people just give all these cool little ideas. He buys a ceramic pot that you would have to smash in order to open and he just starts putting his change in there.

[Alistair Humphreys]

I have one on my desk.

[Ginny]

What does it say?

[Alistair Humphreys]

It says. Well, it says two things. One is nice, one is not so nice. So on one side it says, this money pot is for hopes and schemes to help you save for all your dreams. That's lovely, isn't it? On the other side, I've written a note if any thieves break into my shed, saying something about. To the thieves, about not stealing my money pot, but we'll stick to the nice side of it. Do you know these money bots, they're great, aren't they? You can't get into it.

[Ginny]

I've never seen.

[Alistair Humphreys]

They're cheap on Amazon.

[Ginny]

No, it doesn't have the little opening.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, exactly. You can't cheat and sneak out a few dollars to go and buy a chocolate bar. You put your money in, it's only coming out when you smash the entire thing. And by the end of it, you've got it. Saves up, certainly enough for a big adventure.

[Ginny]

And then Matt said he would have a smashing of the jar ceremony once it got full. And I thought, well, these are just really cool ideas. Someone named Ants, I guess. Ants Bolingbroke, Kent. My money diet mantra was no unnecessary spending. Hannah says walking and camping is likely to be an awful lot cheaper than ordinary life. People just give advice after advice and it reminds you that, I guess this is what you do it. You remind people that there's a way, that there's a way, and you entice people to go do it. One question that you asked in here, which I actually think is also a big one, you know, you save this money in the pot. And I've thought this before, too. We've taken our kids here or there to go see different things and I sometimes think, is this a flippant use of money?

[Alistair Humphreys]

Wow. Yes. Yeah. Well, it certainly is on those charming occasions when your kids turn into vile, ungrateful creatures and they're like, what do you mean we're only going to Disneyland for one day? I want to do three days and I want a giant Coca Cola. And you Want to go. Ah, you want to scream. So, yeah, gosh, I think it's a very important question to ask often, isn't it? But I suspect that a lot of things that all of us who are lucky enough to be listening to this podcast, a lot of what we all do with our money is potentially flippant on a grand scale of things. So I suppose you just need to, you know, compared to billions of other people in the world. So I suppose you need to try to remember to do it with gratitude and learn good things from it and try and pass that on in a, in a good life somehow. But yeah, that. You're in with the big questions now, Ginny.

[Ginny]

It's a big question, but I want to read what you wrote. I suspect that when I'm on my deathbed, I'll be more grateful for the experiences that adventures have given me than for spending that amount of money on things like a massive TV or a trendy handbag.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, experience is not stuff for sure. And certainly one, because I hung this book all around the idea of a £1,000 or $1,000. That was the sort of underlying things, everything that then got me looking quite differently when I was out in the shopping mall and you're walking around looking in shop windows and you see as like a television you could easily spend $1,000 on, or a handbag or a watch you could spend $5,000 on and seeing these things thinking, wow, would I rather have an adventure for weeks with my friend or would I rather have this thing that will be out of date in two weeks and I'll want a bigger one? So, yeah, it's, it's good for perspective, I suppose.

[Ginny]

You had this quote from Patrick Martin Schroeder, traveling made me richer even if I had less money. Oh, that's big. Yeah, that's big.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Well, there's the, the lovely. It's a Jack Johnson lyric. I've got it above my desk here. We've got everything we need right here and everything we need is enough. And I love that when you're off on an adventure and you've, you haven't forgotten your raincoat or something, so you've actually successfully packed correctly for once. But then you know that everything you need for this period now is in my backpack. And that's wonderful. That's literally all you need. You could put a thousand dollar television in there as well, but you're just going to get annoyed because it's heavy and there's no electricity. So it's pointless. So it's a real, real appreciation of the most important things, isn't it? In the same way that when you're really hungry out on a hike and an apple tastes incredibly delicious, whereas at home you might just eat it without literally not even noticing it.

[C]

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[Ginny]

This story when you went to Spain and you were still a student, you go to Spain, you got a cheap flight, you had to pay for the flight, but it was a cheap flight and the goal is to spend, I guess, five pounds in the whole week. That's right, five pounds for the whole week. I guess, you know, you pick up a book called Grand Adventures and knowing that you're a National Geographic Explorer of the Year, I'm thinking in my mind of like, you know, when you get the Sherpa and you have all the equipment and you hike Mount Everest and it. And you had, you know, to get a sponsor and you know, I'm sort of thinking of those types of things, but this is really not about that. It's about, it's almost about the adventure of like how far can I go on this little amount of money just so that I can have these experiences and so I can meet these people and so I can go to these places and so that I can challenge myself. So talk to us. You went with a friend and you is that is really the thing, five pounds for the whole week.

[Alistair Humphreys]

So I should, I should caveat this by nowadays I suppose feeling a little bit ashamed about it given the problems of too much air travel. But this was in the late 1990s when cheap airlines first existed and suddenly for the first time ever, you could get a flight somewhere crazy cheap. And there's the bigger. A big company started called EasyJet. I remember it and it was the offering fly to Spain for five pounds. And that just blew my mind of wow, that's incredible. So then we thought, right, let's just buy this ticket. We had no idea what we're going to do. And then I can't remember if it's my friend Rob or me. It was probably him came up this idea of why don't we just match that? Let's only allow ourselves £5 for the week when we get there because, you know, for £5 you can buy a giant bag of rice and that's pretty much all you need to eat for a week. So our plan was to. We arrived there, gosh, this is bringing back all sorts of fantastic memories. We arrived there and we had just wild camped somewhere and then we just decided, we just thought we'd trust to luck, see what happens. We stood by the road, stuck out our thumbs to hitchhike. We didn't know where we were going to go, we didn't care. That was part of the joy. And this person gave us a lift for about two hours up into the mountains A lovely place called Ronda. If you Google it, it's beautiful. Ronda. And we got there and thought, this is cool. What should we do? We had no idea. So we thought, I know, why don't we walk back to. Off. Back to the airport? We've got six days to get back there. Let's go. We didn't have any maps at all, but we knew that it was south from here, so we just looked at the sun, aimed ourselves south and just started walking cross country and through that. You'd end up chatting to shepherds and camping in hillsides and we were really hungry, but that was just getting us so excited about how much food we were going to eat when we got home. It was a wonderful, wonderful little adventure. Yeah. And the mem. You know, I could quite easily go to a pub in London, spent five pounds on a drink and I've forgotten about it an hour later. But here I am talking about this adventure almost 20 years later, and it's delightful.

[Ginny]

We followed our noses washed in streams, slept under the stars, warmed ourselves by campfires and chatted to farmers who were surprised to see us so far from the tourist trail. On the final night, we slept in sewage pipes.

[Alistair Humphreys]

I left that part out of the story for you, but go on, carry on. This. This is silly.

[Ginny]

You slept in sewage pipes, so I'm sure people would love to know more.

[Alistair Humphreys]

So, you know, in a builder's yard, when you build a big road, they put those huge pipes under the road. They're really, you know, quite big pipes, big long concrete things. And we were quite near the town, quite near the airport by now. Obviously we didn't have enough money for a hotel and there was just a big pile of these all by the road, so we just thought, no one's around, let's just crawl into it. And we basically had. They were on the road and not underground, they were clean. So we just slept in one of these pipes the night, which was, you know, sheltered from the rain, you're nice and safe. The bonus, it was hilarious. We were just giggling and giggling and giggling. And then our favorite part was, by the time we woke up in the morning, all the workmen had arrived and all the builders were already there. So Rob and I, we had to just come out of this pipe and just in our best English, Spanish. Ah, buenos dias, senor. And said good morning to these builders, put on our packs and walked out, just killing ourselves laughing. It was. Yeah, you don't get that in a fancy hotel.

[Ginny]

Oh, I'm so glad you Told the story. We flew home hungry and smelly from one of the best adventures I've ever had. I still think of it often.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, that last sentence is a bit of a lie because I'd forgotten, almost forgotten about it till you reminded me. So thank you Ginny, that was a lovely. Yeah, and in fact the guy who I did it with, I will WhatsApp him after this chat and we'll have a good old chuckle about it.

[Ginny]

This is the encouragement that there are less barriers than you think. There is an assumption that adventures need to be expensive but they need not be so. Then you wrote, don't wait until you think you're going to win the lottery or wait until you're going to retire. Go do your adventures now. And if you can get over the biggest hurdle of money, the others might not seem such as big of a deal. The next biggest hurdle is time. Time is ticking. Life is short. It's our scarcest resource. Time. And you talked about this guy, he went around the globe with no luggage or bags. Ralph Potts. No luggage or bags. He says we keep thinking that there will be a better time. A time when we have more money or fewer obligations or when the world feels safer and more open. And I read this book by Richie Norton called Anti Time Management and he said. And I was like why, why don't we think about this? We always think we're going to have more time later. But he's like, every day you live you have less time. So how do we get over the time barrier? I know it's a tricky one and you've got to cut some things out but life is ticking by.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, it certainly is. And I think one of my favorite books about time management is called 4000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. Because we all have, well, if we're lucky we have 4000 weeks. And I found this so helpful because he talks about each week being a bucket and you can only fill 4000 buckets. And that got me thinking, wow, I can't possibly do everything I want to do in the universe. I'm, I'm never going to be an astronaut. I've got time. And rather than feeling sad about that, he talks about how that's actually quite a weight off your shoulders. Like ah, I can just let that go and concentrate on what I am going to put into my bucket. So yeah, really highly recommend 4000 weeks. Also Rolf Potts who you mentioned there, he's written a book called Vagabonding which has done really well, because it was a champion by Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss thought it was great and he, he's an American guy. He's. He's got a travel podcast of his own called Vagabonding, so if you're interested in that. But yeah, trying to value your time is such a precious thing, isn't it? It really is. There's a sobering website called deathclock.com which I love because you type into it your. How old you are, your, Your weight, your height, whether you smoke, things like that, and it gives you a rough estimate of what day you're going to die. Very cheerful. And I've put this day in my Google calendar. You know how you can put this event today and all days following. I've got it. So a certain date and that's the end for me. Boom. And I just. That's a real reminder to me of, wow, if I want to do something, it's got to be done before there because my Google calendar says I'm pretty busy after that, being dead. So, yeah, death Clock is quite an encouraging thing in that regard.

[Ginny]

Well, I remember looking at it because I read about it, I think, in another one of your books, Death Clock, and it doesn't ask for many details, like you said, like your weight, your height.

[Alistair Humphreys]

No, it's very rough.

[Ginny]

However, it does ask you if you're a pessimist or an optimist and that changes your number by something like seven years. It was a big difference.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Wow. Wow. Gosh, yeah, that's really interesting, isn't it? The death rate. So this is now a total change of topic. But death rates were on the news in Britain yesterday because life expectancy for men in Britain is actually dropping now, having improved for, you know, hundreds and thousands of years. It's now going down due to our diet and exercise. So, yeah, another reason to go on a long, physically energetic adventure, eating healthy bananas and vegetables.

[Ginny]

You wrote too many people are waiting to. To settle for. I'm, like, kind of sick. I'm struggling through just a little bit, doing well, like my eyes. My eyes are not really working. Too many people are willing to settle for waiting until they retire. And this always makes me sad. Why is that not the way to go?

[Alistair Humphreys]

Well, because generally speaking, next. Well, definitely next week you'll have less time than this week, but also probably next week, next month, next year, you'll probably be busier than right now, certainly until you become retired. But by the time you retired, your knees hurt and, and maybe you're maybe appetite for some of these other things might have faded away. Maybe not. You know, there's lots of older people doing some fantastic and crazy stuff. They keep emailing me. So it's not a meaning that you can't do things when you're old, but it does probably mean that if you start when you're old, I suspect you'd probably regret not having started 20 years earlier. It's like that lovely saying about trees. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. So I think the same certainly applies for adventure. But assuming that somehow in the future you're going to miraculously have loads of time and everything will be simple is probably unlikely.

[Ginny]

I like this quote you have by actor Brandon Lee, who said, because. And I thought this is really what's happening because we don't know when we will die. We think of life as inexhaustible, and yet everything happens only a certain amount of times in a very small number, really. We talk about this because we live not super far from Lake Michigan, which is one of the Great Lakes. And it's just beautiful over there. It's fresh water and there's these really pretty sunsets. But we only get over there a couple times a summer, and sometimes it's cloudy. So the amount of sunsets that we will see in a full year is only a couple. It's very countable. And then over a lifetime, because the kids are always complaining, why do we have to stay for the sunset? We're ready to go, you know, and we're like, well, because, you know, you might only see five in a summer or. Or two. And then over a lifetime, how many? Maybe you get 100, maybe you get 40. It's a countable number. And this actor Brandon Lee, said, it seems limitless, but it's not. It's very countable and often very small. So just a lot in here about your time. You go through the hurdles of commitments and relationships. You have all sorts of people who weigh in. Like, there's like six or seven pages of people who write in and say, well, this is how I do it with a family. Or sometimes I leave my family and they know that this is my time to adventure and it makes me a better person, that type of thing. And how to come up with your plan. You have all sorts of list of clarifying questions and a kit list which is pretty small. You say, if I only had 10 minutes to pack, you would know what to pack.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes, I'm going to answer the kit list, but can I can I quickly zoom, rewind a couple of minutes to you talking about the different. The amount of times you see the sunset in the year. Because I want to tell people about a wonderful blog post. It's from a website called Wait, but why, Wait, but why dot com. And it's a blog post called the Tail End. And in that he starts by talking about, oh, we've got 4,000 weeks in life. So that. And then he does his little grid chart of, oh, that's this many weeks. And then he does a grid chart of how many days you've got. But what starts to blow his mind is when he thinks, hang on, I really like watching the Super Bowl. So he then draws all these little Super Bowls of how many he's got in his life. He crosses them off and he thinks, hey, I've only got about 60 Super Bowls left. And then he says, I love going swimming, but wow, I don't do that very often, so maybe I'm only going to go in the sea 60 more times. And he took. And on and on it goes. So it's a brilliant visual thing. Wait, but why the tail end? But to go to your actual question, which is about kit list, I think I do several different options on the kit list because one thing that people who are planning adventures love to do is to procrastinate eternally by endlessly reading endless websites about kit and equipment and spending hundreds of hours wondering whether they need to buy this coat or this coat. Whereas the reality is probably the coat you already have in your house is probably fine. So I try and make the kit list simpler and simpler and simpler down to just something that will keep you warm, something will keep you dry, something will keep you warm and vaguely comfortable when you sleep, maybe a toothbrush to keep yourself hygienic and a spoon to eat some food and your passport and you're ready to take on the universe. You don't really need a great deal more than that.

[Ginny]

The list is small and you've got this fantastic picture of everything laid out in one spot.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Well, it's so satisfying as like a Rolf took it to hardcore extremes by traveling around the world with, with basically just what he could fit in his pockets. Which is crazy. But I've regularly traveled for quite long periods with just a small backpack, the sort of backpack you might take to your office. I remember when I was a, when I was a student in 1999, I went to live in the Philippines for two months to live in this little village and doing some charity work there And I traveled with just one small little pack, like I would take if I was going to go to school for the day. And it was so satisfying to just simplify my life down to that for that period of time. It's so lovely. And also when you see people out backpacking on adventures and they've got huge kits, they're miserable because it's heavy, it's painful, it's hard work. So the lighter, you can make your gear light of gear, light of soul as well.

[Ginny]

Oh, that's what you wrote.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Oh, did I?

[Ginny]

Because it can weigh you down physically and psychologically.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Oh, man. I thought. I just thought of that just now.

[Ginny]

Well, no, that wording was really good. That was amazing wording.

[Alistair Humphreys]

I haven't had an original thought since 2016, clearly.

[Ginny]

But I like that you said it would weigh you down psychologically. I didn't think about that. So you go through and you say, you know, get a small sleeping bag, because it's far better to just wear all of your clothes than have this really heavy sleeping bag that you have to lug around. Or, I mean, this list is really small. It's like your shoes, you're wearing, your backpack, your base layer of clothes, a buff, some zip off trousers, your sleeping bag, maybe a sleeping bag liner, a therm, a rest, a raincoat, a Ziploc bag, a toothbrush and toothpaste, head torch. The end.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes, I think that's. I mean, that's. That's pretty hardcore. And I suspect if you're actually planning an adventure, you would maybe start with that and then you'd layer on a few things that feel essential to you for your particular life and perhaps one or two luxuries that you just think, no, that's non negotiable. I'm not going without whatever it takes to make you actually commit to doing the adventure. But I think I was trying to be really minimalistic to try and make the point that it's not very complicated, it's not necessarily very expensive, unless you choose for it to be complicated and expensive.

[Ginny]

Right. You could add on a journal and a pen, which might be smart, because you could write about your adventures, a book. And then you say, an open mind, patience, and a healthy sense of the ridiculous. So Grand Adventures is about how to do amazing things in a way that is accessible to a whole lot of people.

[C]

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[Ginny]

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[D]

Edu when it comes to raising kids, there's so much to consider. Things like what do we feed them? When do we feed them? How do they sleep? What does it look like to raise kind kids? How does their nervous system work? How do I keep myself calm? What are my triggers? There's so much that comes into play and we are distilling all of that information for you at Voices of of your Village podcast, where we bring experts in the field of early childhood and education and psychology and across the board so that you don't have to comb the Internet for information. You get to show up and hang out and have shame free judgment, free conversations and insights into what it looks like to raise kind, empathetic, emotionally intelligent humans. I'm Alyssa Blask Campbell. I have a master's degree in early childhood education. I'm a mom of two and I am walking this journey right alongside you doing Come hang out with me at Voices of your village and we can dive into real conversations with actionable tips.

[Ginny]

So then you go through all the different types of adventures that you could do and you've done a lot of them. Like the rowing across the ocean and you wrote kids book series about that. You've done the biking, you've done the walking. There was a couple that you haven't done and you wrote about those as well, which I thought that was really cool. Like the animal one. You're like, I haven't really done this, but I'm going to interview these people who have motoring people going on motorbikes, you know, on a pizza delivery bike all across Europe, that type of thing. And then you have different everyday type adventures that families are doing. Let's talk through some of the ones that you have done in terms of biking. And I just love so many of these things. You talked about this guy named Tom Allen who is a self unemployed traveler. There's a great phrase, self unemployed, self unemployed. I think that's so good. But these people are giving advices, giving their advice. And this one guy, Andy, says he doesn't want his gravestone to say, here lies Andy. He sure knew how to turn on a computer. But biking seems like a great way to go. And there was a story of someone who tandem biked but without another person. And then they just picked up people along the way.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes.

[Ginny]

So just talk about some of the different ways that you could do the biking. Like you could have a really fan. I know bikes can really range in cost, but there was all of these different ways you could do it. From the tandem bike, there was a picture of someone that had the, the attachment, they had the kid on the back. So they're biking with a kid.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah. The Internet, once you start searching now is full of families doing massive journeys around the world with their kids on bikes. There was a couple who cycled basically across the globe to get to their wedding together. And that's a very good way of stress testing your marriage before it actually begins. The chap on the tandem is called Dom Gill. He's a British guy, but he now lives in America. And the reason for that is because he met his wife on his adventure. So he was on a tandem, you know, the bicycle for two, sitting on the front with a camera pointed at him and towards the back seat. And then he just picked people up and off you go. They join him for, I don't know, an hour, a day, a week, whatever suited them. And you just get to have conversations and meet people and it's. That was such a brilliant idea for. For this. Quite a few of these people in this book are people who've got some sort of online presence for their adventures. They've obviously chosen. And you don't have to do this at all, but they've chosen to have some sort of storytelling element to their adventures, which can be like that. I mean, that's wonderful. You've got all these conversations you'd be having with that. Or you can go for the sort of comedy approach. Someone, you know, the. The iconic London taxi. Someone drove around the world in a London taxi, but with the meter running for the entire way around the world. It's quite a fun and expensive cab ride. There's so many ways to go. But what I think a bike, bicycle is a brilliant way to travel because it doesn't have to be expensive. You've probably got a bicycle in your house. If you pump up the tires on that and put a bit of oil on the chain, you literally could cycle across the continent on it. All you need to do is put a tent on the back and go. It's no harder than that. People will have cycled thousands of miles on bikes, much worse than the bike you currently have in your house. So, yeah, I think a bike is a really great way of adventuring because it's not expensive. It doesn't matter if walking a long way is pretty tiring and painful, but cycling, you just cycle till you get tired, usually because your butt hurts in the early days, and then you just have a rest and then the next day you carry on and you'll probably go a bit further and within a couple of months you'll be really fit and you'll be also a thousand miles away from your front door under your own steam, which is incredible. So, yeah, I'm a big, big fan of a bicycle and I say that not as a cyclist. You don't need to be a cyclist to travel by bicycle. They're two very different activities. I think it's not. You're not sort of Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France. It's a very different thing being on an adventurous slow, it's steady. It's just a way to see places and Meet people.

[Ginny]

I think one of the things that really draws you in are the pictures. The pictures in this book are phenomenal too. So if you've got kids. The subtitle is Dream Big Plan. Quick, go explore. If you've got kids. I think that they would get a lot out of having this book sitting around, have it sitting around on the coffee table because the photos are so enticing. So in the bicycle section and I think a lot of them are you and some of them aren't. But there are photos of like in this bicycle section. There's one of. This is an adult with a kid on the back and they're pulling a little trailer full of equipment. And then there's one here of a parent and a younger child. And they're set up on this stunning mountainside with a tent and the bike and one of those trailers that you pull the kid in. I mean it couldn't be more pretty. And then there's pictures of the bike at sunset or sunrise. Sunrise. And it's a reminder that I don't even know what this one is. It's like one big tire and then one small tire.

[Alistair Humphreys]

I didn't mention that in my chat about it, but I was thinking of it. That's called a penny farthing, which we went. But basically when bicycles were invented 200 odd years ago, that's what a bicycle were. They were these giant front wheels which are much higher than you or me are, and then at the back a tiny little wheel and you have to climb up ridiculously high on top of that and off you go. Yeah, he's gone around the world on that bike. So that's definitely worse than whatever bike you have sitting in your backyard. Yeah, that's another example of how adventure becomes about meeting the people you get along the way. Because imagine if someone arrives in your town on a 200 year old bicycle with a eight foot front wheel. You're going to go and talk to that guy, go, hey, tell me your crazy story. And while you're at it, come to my house for coffee and cake. And then suddenly you make connections and friendships. A friend of mine, he's. He set off to cycle around the world dressed as Superman and super, he called himself Super Cycling Man. And he was a elementary school teacher, but he would stop in elementary schools all the way around the world to talk to kids. And the point he was trying to make is that everyone can be a hero every day. You don't need to be a real superhero to do small little heroic actions, basically giving A message of kindness, essentially. But along the way, of course, because he was dressed like an idiot, like a superhero, he had fun encounters with everyone he met around the world. In that instance, you're traveling solo, but you're not alone. And I certainly found that from my own experiences was that. Except on the occasions when I've deliberately chosen to be away from humans, eg, walking across a desert or rowing across an ocean, generally my adventures by myself are very much about the people that you meet along the way and the shared human connection about it. And in that sense, it's a wonderful education as well.

[Ginny]

So random, Alistair.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes, it is random.

[Ginny]

Yes, it's so random. Like, the rest of our life is fairly controlled. I think you control your whole schedule and you control what things you're going to sign up for and what's your meal plan. And then here, this is like, I don't know who I'm going to meet. I don't know how far I'm going to go today, but you just go. And it's a really interesting way to live. Does that seep back into life at home? I mean, I've never done anything like this. Does it change you?

[Alistair Humphreys]

So I. Yes, I think this. Yes, it's had a big impact on me. So I cycled around the world for four years, and that meant that for four years, essentially, I had no idea where I was going to sleep tonight. And not only did I not know where I was going to place, I couldn't picture the place because I'd never been there in my life. You know, all the places on my map, they were just words and dots. There was no picture in my head of them. But if I looked back at the places I'd been yesterday, last week, last month, the dots on the map were pictures in my head. They were stories, they were the people I've met, they were the memories of where I slept. So in that sense, it's really exciting that where will I sleep tonight? Who will I meet next? It's thrilling and fascinating. However, if you do it for too long, you start to yearn for the familiarity and comfort of home and you start to become grateful and appreciative of community. So that was a good reason for me to come home, was that, hey, it's kind of fun, but also I'd really like a community, so that's good. The problem is, though, once you get home and back to your community for too long, you start thinking, man, I need some crazy excitement back in my life again. So I feel that my big Adventures have made my life really interesting and rich and rewarding, but I also think they've made my life harder and more complicated. In some ways, I think it's made my life more interesting, not necessarily more happy and certainly not more content and satisfied. And something I've often enjoyed on my travels is you get to some place in the middle of nowhere and you meet some really interesting person who's never left that town in all of their life, and they're fascinated to hear your stories of the world. But I'd be fascinated to just try and learn from them about just how to be grateful and settled and grounded and think. And I'd be thinking, man, I'm jealous of you. You've learned how to be happy at home and that's a skill I haven't yet mastered.

[Ginny]

Wow. Both sides of it. Someone wrote, this is James Ketchel. He cycled around the world. You cannot buy back time no matter how wealthy you are. So my appreciation of time has changed massively. It's like you get this, these bits of wisdom from all of these people that have done these really grand adventures. So it's a really cool way to set up a book, Alistair. Like, you didn't have to do that. You could have written the whole book yourself. But to have pulled in all of these other voices, you kind of like, oh, I want to see what that person says. I want to see what that person says. And to read what they did, their name is always next to what they did. Paula Constant spent two years crossing the Sahara with camels. Hannah Engelkamp walked a lap of whales with a donkey. I mean, it tells you right away what they did. And I just think it's a wonderful. I was really enticed from the very beginning. Alistair, what a cool book.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Grand adventures, those two you just mentioned there. Paula, crossing the Sahara Desert with camels. I mean, that's like something on the National Geographic, crazy, epic stuff. But then Hannah with a little donkey going around Wales, and she's from Wales, so it's not. So if you just substitute your local county into that, then it's, you know, it's exploring close to you in a way. You can see how that's not that expensive to do and maybe not that terrifying to do once you know how to look after a donkey. So there's a great scale of things within this and you can pick what is appropriate for you, for your confidence, for your stage in life. Are you at the crossing Sahara with camels phase of life, or would you rather just maybe Go around your county with a donkey. But. And this. There isn't a better or worse within that. It's just different.

[Ginny]

And just the fact that the animals won. You wrote about how they said it actually was pretty hard because you have to take into account the nuances of the animal. A journey with an animal is one long lesson in living in the moment. And Tim wrote, the easiest day on the horses was harder than the hardest day of any other journey.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes. Yeah. It certainly teaches you to be not selfish and to care for other people. And that's a really good lesson of doing something with an animal. I've. I've never done that before, but since this book's come out, there's a guy who I. I would recommend for people to follow on Instagram. His Instagram is at the World Walk, and his name is Tom Turkic. He's an American guy, and he walked all the way around the world, which is a pretty cool story, but, you know, a bunch of people have done that. But what's interesting is along the way, he found a dog. And so he was accompanied by a dog for seven years around the world. And his new books just come out. It's called the World Walk. And what I find fascinating about that is that he walked for 45,000 kilometers, 20,000 miles. But then he got home and he knew that was the end and he'd achieved something. But for his dog, it was just every day, let's just get up and go for a walk. And, oh, look, the sun's shining. And, oh, there's some nice things to sniff at. And the dog is. Dogs are just so good at living in the moment, being in the present, making the most of today, not regretting what happened yesterday, not fretting too much about tomorrow. They're just walking. They're just out for a walk today. And I find the. The. If you can have the philosophy of a dog when you're on a big adventure, then you are the wisest person there is.

[Ginny]

I love that you've opened my life to all of these different types of books that I would not really have. I didn't. I guess I didn't even really knew they existed. And then there's so many of them. I mean, if people look and I post a picture of your shed which is like. Is your head pretty close to the ceiling?

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes, I can head. I can head, but the ceiling.

[Ginny]

Okay.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes. Yeah, it's a.

[Ginny]

Can you even stand up?

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yeah, I can stand up in here, but my head's close to the ceiling because I Put loads of insulation in the floor and the ceiling so that it's warm in the winter. And I made the amount just about right for my head. So it's a customized shed, but there's lots of. Lots of books to read on the, on the walls.

[Ginny]

Lots of books. Yeah. So a book like the World Walk. It's like an adventure, autobiography, adventure, nonfiction. And there's a lot of those. I didn't realize how many there were. And it's so encouraging and inspiring to read other people's stories. And I would imagine that a lot of the people that you write about in this book would have something. I mean, they at least have websites. So I would bet a lot of these people have different books or things that they've put out in the world that you could learn about.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes.

[Ginny]

After the fact.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Definitely. And just off the top of my head, I mean, just to prove that it's not a young man's game, a book called Just a Little Run around the World by Rosie Swale Pope, who. Her husband passed away from cancer when she was in her 50s, I think she was about 57. And so Rosie decided to run around the world as a way to try to take control and ownership of her life again. And she ran for, I think it was three years right the way across the world. She's got crazy stories of being in Alaska in the middle of winter. And she's the most cheerful, upbeat, fun loving person and a real reminder that you don't have to be a special person to go do these adventures. She herself would say she was just a normal woman in her late 50s. That's not necessarily who you're imagining is going to go run around the world, but she did it and she did. She nailed it.

[Ginny]

Oh, yeah. You have opened my eyes to all of these different types of books. I read one called One Breath, which is about solo diving, like free diving, where you go on one breath without any equipment. It's by Adam School Nick. And he was talking about how a lot of the people who join in are. They start in their 40s and their 50s and it's just something to do and, and they love it. And it's huge community and I'd never even heard of it. So it's really amazing that you have this incredible ability to open people's eyes to that. There's more, there's more. There's more out there. There's more that you could read. There's more that you could learn about. There's more that you could do. There's More life that you could live. Look at these little pockets of time. Get your smash ceramic jar, set aside a little money. All of your books are like that. All of your books are like. They're like a perfect nudge of, hey, there's a lot more out there than you think. That there could. There. That there is. I'm so sick.

[Alistair Humphreys]

No, you're doing well. You're battling on well. A few more minutes to go, then you can go back to bed.

[Ginny]

Oh, goodness. I was like, I'm. I'm. I'm fine. And then I'm like, I'm not fine. I'm fine. Okay. The walking was interesting because to me, I just feel like that would feel so insurmountable. It's so slow. But you had this quote from someone named Lev Wood, who walked the length of the Nile, and I thought this was actually a really encouraging statement. So Lev said. Okay. He thought it would be 80, 20 in terms of. And that's sort of probably what I would think. Like, 80% is going to be awful and 20% is going to be good. Because walking, you're just like, oh, gosh, it could be so boring. And he said he thought it would be 80, 20, but that ended up being 50. 50. He said half of it was miserable and boring and generally crap, and the other half was really interesting and fun. And you've done a lot of walking, too.

[Alistair Humphreys]

I have.

[Ginny]

I mean, does it just feel like I'm going to be doing this forever?

[Alistair Humphreys]

Yes. So the good side of walking is that it's really slow and you can really talk to people and you can really look at the flowers and smell the roses, and it's really. You're really immersed in where you are. The downside is that it's so slow that it can take all day to reach the horizon and that it's. If you're. If you've packed too much in your bags, it's really painful. And that's why I think the bicycle is a brilliant compromise, because it's slow but not too slow. It's quite. Quite a bit of effort, but not too much effort. I've enjoyed the walks I've done, but they're definitely quite masochistic and painful, but they're also very simple, which is kind of nice, too. So. But, yeah, I'm definitely team bicycle.

[Ginny]

Right. But then you did. You interviewed all these people who have done these different walks. You did say that the pedestrians discuss the notion of failure more than the cyclist. So it's realistic that it. In a lot of Ways it can be harder. However, like you said, it's very simple. It requires no expertise and can, if you prefer, entail zero training, preparation or planning. You just go. So you interviewed a lot of people in this one, Walked the length of the Amazon, walked across Australia unsupported, ran around the world, walked from the UK to Africa. I mean, it reminds you that there's all sorts of different types of plans, and that's something that you go through at the beginning of the book, is how to make your plan. But when you go through each person's different thing that they did, it's very different. And they just decided what their route was going to be. Nick Hunt walked across Europe, and you did yours. You did across the desert. So it's just a reminder that there's all sorts of ways that you could do it.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Absolutely. And there's no right or wrong side of it, which is really lovely. I realize we're using the word walk a lot, but maybe you can't walk if you're in a wheelchair. Then look at the example of Rick Hansen, a really inspiring guy, went all the way around the world in a wheelchair. So there's opportunities to fit things to your circumstances and. And, you know, maybe you're some really tough person who wants to go further and faster and harder than anyone's gone and make it a real physical challenge. Maybe you much prefer to just walk to every coffee shop for the next hundred miles and have a cup of coffee and write a poem in everyone. I mean, hey, that would be a lovely book in itself, wouldn't it? So there's no right or wrong in this. And the key is to try and work out what excites you, what interests you, what overlaps with your interests. Because if you go on an adventure and trying to pretend that you're somebody you're not, then that won't work. Because one thing that's very clearly stripped away when you're on an adventure is learning who you are. And that's not always pretty, but it's also often encouraging as well. You realize that you're maybe not as wonderful as you thought you were, but you also realize that you're more competent and you've got more resilience than perhaps you've given yourself credit for. So it's a really good way of knowing yourself. The. The Ocean Rowing Society, which is a very niche group for people who row across oceans. Their motto, the motto of their society is the Latin for know yourself, which I think is really interesting because, yeah, you certainly learn about Yourself on a. On a long adventure.

[Ginny]

I loved the photos that were in the water section. Oh, they were so good. One of them's on the back cover. But this is like this guy, he's just like, he's got a. The life vest on.

[Alistair Humphreys]

And that's me and my friend.

[Ginny]

Is that you?

[Alistair Humphreys]

I took that photo. But yeah, it's my friend Chris. And we crossed Iceland walking on the land parts. And then we had these small little boats called pack rafts, which are actually quite cool, tough little boats, but they're essentially like a rubber ring that you take. Yeah, that's. That's my friend Chris.

[Ginny]

You took that photo. And that's one of my favorite photos in the book.

[Alistair Humphreys]

The one next to. It's me standing there on the. By the glacier. Yeah, I'm not sure that life, that life jacket was particularly safe now I look back, but at least it was cheap.

[Ginny]

And then this one, the photos are so cool.

[Alistair Humphreys]

That's a guy called Jason Lewis. And his books are worth reading because he went around the world. He rode across the oceans and then he roller skated across America. And then when he got to the Pacific, he got in another rowing boat and carried on across the Pacific. It took him 10 years to get around the whole planet and he had zero skills before this. He'd worked in some sort of nightclub or pub in London or something. He had no idea what he was doing. But after 10 years of doing it, he certainly did.

[Ginny]

I picked up this book because this is our seventh time that we've talked and you have so many books and each one I have been so delighted with. And there's more. You posted this really cool graphic the other day and it was like an intersection of all your different types of books. It was like, these are kids and this is adventure and here's how they all overlap. And I thought that was a really cool graphic to show. All of these different books that you've written, I have enjoyed every single one immensely. They have all enhanced my life. And this is one just to keep out Grand Adventures. It goes just right along with Micro Adventures. I think you gotta read them both. And I picked up Micro Adventures. It's been a couple years now. And I was in a local bookshop where we live in Brighton, Michigan. And someone, while I was in the bookshop, someone came in the bookshop and said, I'm looking for a book. It's called Micro Adventures by Alastair Humphries. And she had it. It's just like this little corner bookshop. And I just thought, man, it's amazing how that's amazing. You have permeated. Your works have really permeated and they really connect with your everyday ordinary people who want to get a little bit more out of life. So this one is Grand Adventures. It's been around for a while, but it is just the photos. It is a stunning book and I thought I was maybe going to be a little intimidated by it, but I wasn't. I was like, oh, this is a book about how to attain it, how to attain a little bit more. Have it look like how you want to look with whatever your family situation is wherever you live and how can you do more with the life that you have.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Oh, thank you, Alistair.

[Ginny]

Thank you for being here.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Oh, it's been lovely. I've been the recent years I've been all about the micro adventures, the local adventures. Small, small, small local stuff. So this has been a really nice trip down memory lane for me to talk about big whacking great, thrilling, exciting adventures too.

[Ginny]

Yeah. The options are out there to do either one. Thank you so much for being here.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Thank you. And now you can go back to bed. Sa Sa.

[Ginny]

Sa.

[Alistair Humphreys]

Sa.

[Ginny]

Sa Sa.