Adventures covers a lot, from a spa at home to glamping to making masks to big adventures like paragliding, kayaking and dogsledding.
Broadly, my adventures fall under the headings of On the Water, On the Ground, On the Rocks and In the Snow so do take a scroll or look at my top menu to find your favourite adventurous activity. Other than bungee jumping, if you can think of it I’ve probably tried it.
Last weekend, I had my first wild swim adventure and it was… well, mixed emotions. I’m opting for “wild swimming” rather than “open water swimming” or “cold water swimming”, by the way, mostly because the Rebel badge on the subject is called Wild Swimmer. It’s a badge I dithered over doing – it’s from the… More My first wild swim adventure!
The horse’s name was Vorboðar, which means Bringer of Spring and he was not doing his job. Naively, I’d expected spring in Iceland to look quite a lot like summer – sunshine, leaves, people in lighter clothes – and what I’d seen of it so far had been winter but without the fun stuff like… More Horse riding in the rain | Iceland 2022
I notice I write a little more about archery than fencing here but I teach both and my latest fencing session went well enough that I thought it deserved a post of its own. My first session back in the hall with my Brownies after two years and two weeks didn’t go great. By the… More Fencing with my Brownies
It’s summer! The boats are back! I went canoeing! Ok, it’s not summer. The weather sometimes remembers it’s trying to trick us into believing it’s spring but it’s not summer. But the boat hire has reopened for the summer season and to be honest, if it had been a full-on named storm, I’d probably have… More My first paddle of 2022
This is probably the last virtual event I’ll do with Girlguiding – or at least, the last major event. I have no doubt we’ll do another Zoom Brownie meeting at some point when half the unit gets the dread plague from school, but virtual events are noticeably dwindling. All the big in-person camps and festivals have… More Castaway: a virtual sleepover
I planned to write a post in July about how I’m a kayaking instructor, guys! and that post is still coming, I (more or less) promise – but it won’t be this summer. You might have heard my kayaking story a few times. I’ve done a few half-day sit-on-tops tours on the open sea, I graduated… More My 2022 kayaking and wild swimming plans
There are certain sports that come with a lot of kit. With caving, depending on your budget, you can just keep buying more and more stuff and although vertical kit will give you easier access to certain caves and certain parts of caves, keep in mind that “more kit =/= better caver”. If you’re a… More Caving kit to buy as you get into it
Welcome to 2022! Traditionally, the first or second post of any year is my Christmas Adventure With Tom, depending on whether I have time to finish it in time for the first post of the New Year, and this year here it is up first – with some changes. Of course there are changes. We’re still… More Two Bears and a Barnacle
Hi, welcome back to normal blogging! I hope you enjoyed the Polar Bear Winter Festival but now Christmas is over and we’re back to the regular non-winter-related twice-a-week posts. I don’t talk about TV much and when I do, it’s either about Iceland or somewhere suitably Nordic. But today I’m talking about Marvel’s Hawkeye miniseries.… More Archer reacts to Marvel’s Hawkeye
While I was at my cottage last week, in a rural bit of Somerset, I wanted to go for a walk. I had my daily 2km to walk – yes, even when I’m on holiday – and I’d invested in the cutest map. I knew Ordnance Survey offer custom maps (see my Single Map series… More A custom map, a muddy field and an unexpected hillfort