Opinion
The little adventures are sometimes the best
November 8, 2017
I find great value in random, little adventures.
Well thought out, carefully planned adventures are great in their own right. I went to Scotland last summer, and though the trip took a lot of planning and effort, it was one of the most fantastic trips I’ve had a chance to go on during my college career.
Mini-adventures, however, have a special place in my heart.
I have two friends that I consider to be my partners in crime when it comes to these ill-planned excursions. Our first one began when we were messaging one another back and forth over Facebook, and someone said, “Let’s go camping tonight!” Someone replied, “Yeah! Where?” which was followed by, “I don’t really know. Let’s just meet at the gas station with our sleeping bags.”
We did just that, and someone had the idea of camping in a nearby park. After getting there and walking with our gear under our arms for about an hour (we’d forgotten backpacks), we realized that we weren’t going to find a campsite. Determined to camp anyway, we found a clear-ish shelf of dirt halfway up a hill and pitched our tent.
Most people would consider what followed a disaster. Only one of us thought to bring food, which consisted of a watermelon, a bag of beef jerky and six bottles of black tea. We also found out, when we were trying to sleep, that we were fighting two separate downhills: one that caused us to slowly slide towards our feet, and another that caused the two people on the sides to roll on top of the person in the middle. I don’t think any of us ever actually fell asleep.
I wouldn’t trade that adventure for anything in the world. We played a stupid game while we were cramped up in our slanting tent, we spent the sleepless night having loopy, tired conversations about our goals and fears in life, and we’ve been able to brag about the experience ever since.
Little adventures like this are the ones we remember. Even on the big trips, it’s actually the little mini-adventures that happen along the way that we recount to our friends and family. We learn from the experiences, and when we go with friends, we learn about one another.
My two friends and I have gone on several other adventures since, and I’ve begun to fill a journal with everything we do. We have a couple more planned for the winter, the latest of which began with the Facebook message: “Guys, my goal this winter is to build a snow fort, camp in it, and order pizza to be delivered to it.”
Let’s see what happens.
Sophia Koch is a student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.