Alright, so I’m not exactly a Hobbit. Not at 6’3” and 220 lbs. But I’m still going on an adventure. I will be spending three months living in Lviv, Ukraine. During my stay there I will also be visiting Poland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Romania. ( Side note: My home will be occupied while I’m gone. Sorry burglars. ) This publication will be where I record the experience, beginning now, three weeks before I leave. In addition to photos, my posts will include notes on preparation, experiences, and observations.

Travel vs Adventure

A lot of people travel. Not everyone goes on adventures. My goal with this travel experience is to have an adventure. What is the difference between the two? Adventures infer challenge, excitement, danger, and the unknown. They have a sense of active participation. Further, we expect to find both personal growth and tangible reward from an adventure. Conversely, an individual can travel without experiencing any of these qualifiers. Travel is nothing other than transporting ones self from point A to point B.

In preparing for my trip, I have outlined three requirements for myself to fulfill in order to call the experience an adventure. Each is shared below.

The Unknown

Local travel is a fun and valuable activity. From my home in the rocky mountains I am close to many desirable vacation destinations: Santa Fe, Park City, Lake Tahoe, Moab, Las Vegas, Taos, Vail, and more. Several of these destinations are even candidates for a day trip. None of them, for me, count as an adventure because I have been there before. Further, they are close to home, allowing me to quickly retreat back to my safety net should anything go awry.

When going on an adventure, it is important to go somewhere distant and unfamiliar. Distant, because if it is not you can easily turn around and return home when things get scary or difficult. Unfamiliar, because a familiar destination is already safe to you. A mention here: a pre-packaged, specifically built, vacation destination is always a ‘familiar’ destination, even if you have never been there. Visiting Disneyland never counts as an adventure. Neither does traveling to the Atlantis resort. These locations are built to hold your hand and help you feel safe by providing you with the familiar and expected.

Striding into the unknown is a unique experience. It is a mixture of excitement, trepidation, wonder, and anxiety. Plans may or may not have been made, but there is no telling what will actually happen and there is no place of comfort to run to if things go wrong. Often, even basic communication can be difficult as you struggle through simple phrases of a foreign language and cope with unusual cultural mannerisms. These types of experiences cannot be matched in familiar territory.

Participation

Those who travel often start with a familiar-sounding mini-list of highly-desirable locations: Venice, Paris, Rome, the Caribbean, London, Tokyo, New York. Vacationing in these places is then spent going to all of the same sights every other traveler has gone to. The Louvre, St. Marks Basilica, the Colleseum, the Empire State Building, and more. Many persons carry tour books. About half have tour guides. Everyone has a camera. No one is a native.

Visiting major tourist destinations is cool. I’ve done it often enough myself and highly recommend taking the time to see the sights you have on your bucket list. If you were to visit Florence, Italy and not see David or the Duomo you would regret it. But an adventure is more than just joining other tourists at major destinations to see popular sights. It requires going beyond sectioned-off tourist areas to participate actively in the day-to-day culture and environment of the area. In this sense, something as simple as riding public transit or eating at a restaurant without an english menu might be an adventure. Participating in this way gives the adventurer an opportunity to leave their comfort zone and experience the place they are in rather than just the packaged product surrounding the popular destination.

Participating does not mean you will find that perfect hole-in-the-wall restaurant or strike up a conversation with the most interesting local you have ever met. In fact, chances are greater that you will eat at a place that has no particular quality to it and the locals you speak with have other things to do and are only willing to talk because they are being polite to a foreigner. But the experience is worth it anyway, because it is an experience of the place and not the travel industry.

Risk-Taking

Carpe Deim. Seize the day. I don’t care if it’s an over-used quote from a very good movie. It’s a true statement. When I’m in Ukraine, it will be very easy to wake up in the morning, carpool to the office, spend the entire day only with people I know, return to my apartment at night to have dinner and watch TV, and claim that I participated in Ukrainian life for several months. Technically, I would be right. I would also minimally qualify for having an adventure in both visiting the unknown and participating in day-to-day activities of the local culture, but I would be wasting my opportunity and letting life slip through my fingers.

For my travel to be an adventure, I will have to participate in actual mini-adventures. Such mini-adventures will include planned activities like hiking and kayaking along the fjords of Norway, but they should also include spontaneous opportunities like going out on the town with a group of newly-met locals or wandering off into unknown areas. Instead of staying in hotels, I will be renting rooms in otherwise occupied homes through Airbnb. Rather than sit inside and watch TV, I will explore the neighborhood and wander down unfamiliar streets. Maybe the street I walk down is quiet and filled only with residences, but maybe it also contains a unique used book store or a bakery with an amazing type of bread I have never before seen or tried.

Why?

Something happens when you go on an adventure. You grow. You discover yourself. You learn your strengths and your weaknesses, and you gain a self-assured confidence that is hard to shake. This travel opportunity will not be my first adventure, but it is so far my most ambitious. Already, I am so excited that I can hardly sleep. I hope that by sharing my thoughts and experiences on this publication I can also share some of the joy, wonder, and excitement of the adventure.

My goal is to publish a minimum of once per week here, while also keeping up with my semi-regular Medium posts on other topics. Most of the posts on this publication will be short on text and long on pictures. Hopefully at least a few of them will contain helpful information for others traveling or interested in travel. I know at least one of them will contain a story of some embarrassing or rookie mistake I make. A few more might include particularly cool stories or references to interesting places. So follow me and this publication. You know you want to.