Make an old adventure new again

There's no need to be bored

Longtime Vanderhacks readers know that one of my favorite time management rules is to plan one big adventure and one little adventure each week. A big adventure could take 3-4 hours — so think half a weekend day — and a little adventure could be less than an hour, as long as you do something out of the ordinary. Routines are great, but too much sameness means time seems to disappear. Two adventures a week won’t exhaust or bankrupt anyone, but they can change the experience of time.

All this sounds good in theory, but when I suggest this rule, people sometimes note that there aren’t that many new places to try in their communities. If you’ve lived somewhere a long time, even if you draw a 50-mile radius around your house, after a while you will have visited many of the major destinations. But even so, you can make an old adventure new again by switching things up.

Think where plus who

For instance, even if you’re going somewhere you’ve been before, you can take someone new with you. A museum is different with a companion who likes different things than you. If you’re a regular at the aquarium or children’s museum, asking another family to join you will have your kids interacting with the exhibits in different ways.

You can also check out any special exhibits or events. The zoo is a different experience during a food truck festival than it would be otherwise. Most museums have special exhibits that change over every few months. Or they might host performers whose shows will definitely make a repeat visit into a new adventure.

You can approach an old place in a new way. Many of us have our usual routes through our usual places, but if you go to the left rather than the right when you start a familiar loop trail through the state park, you’ll see different things. You might create a quest of sorts — like challenging yourself to take twenty pictures of depictions of flowers in an art museum, for instance, or deciding to watch a single animal exhibit at the zoo for longer than you usually would. If you visit someplace during different seasons, you can experience it differently — going dirt biking for instance, at a place best known for its sledding hills.

You can also tack on a secondary adventure to a regular haunt. If a new milkshake place opens a block from the zoo, you can make sure to go there after a quick zoo trip. The combination makes it new even if the main destination is a standby.

Stretch the radius

And if you are truly feeling bored with what’s around, maybe it’s time to go farther afield. Perhaps a 2-hour drive won’t fit every weekend, but it might every month or two, and depending on where you are, that can open up a lot. Here in suburban Pennsylvania I can be in New York City in two hours. I can be at the beach or in the mountains in about 90 minutes. When you widen the circle, you visit the closer places slightly less often — and that can make them feel newer just by virtue of stretching the time in between visits.

Of course, you’re not going to just wake up some Saturday and decide to go 90 minutes away. That’s going to feel hard to take on in the moment. But if you read this newsletter, you already know the virtues of planning ahead. So take some time today to think about what adventure you can have this weekend, and if it seems like you’re still looking at the same small group of places, think about how you could mix these things up. In my case, some recent weekend plans have involved going to the opening of a new exhibit at the zoo, and stopping at a brewery after a run on the usual trail with a friend. Both were old adventures — but felt new enough to be memorable, which is ultimately the point.

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