The word “adventure” is one of my irrational pet peeves.

Well, not the word itself as much as the way that some people use it.  I low-key hate it when people use that word to describe a vacation to the next state, or a package holiday, or a hike in the suburbs of DC.  You know, just a regular trip that gets you out of your house.

I guess for me, raised on books like The Hobbit, The Wizard of Oz, or Peter Pan, an adventure that doesn’t involve all the magic and peril of those books sounds like a bust.  When I was a kid, it wasn’t an adventure unless you were spirited away to magical islands, learned how to fly, crossed deserts that could kill you , battled the Gnome King for the fate of a free Oz, or hosted an unexpected dwarf rave.

Maybe I sound like I’m joking, but I’m not.

I guess I just couldn’t reconcile the thought that the same word meant both slipping through a wardrobe to find Narnia and and hiking a trail you’ve hiked a thousand times with your gran and a bottle of sunscreen.  Those two things just don’t inhabit the same plane of existence.  They couldn’t be defined by the same word.  After living vicariously, but vividly, through the adventures I found in books, robbing the word adventure of its mythic proportions seemed to me like robbing us of some of the little joy we have left in life.

I don’t think an adventure should just mean getting off your arse, taking some time off work, and getting into the outdoors. I don’t even think it should mean booking a flight to another country, finding a cheap B&B, getting a selfie stick and doing all the touristy things.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s fantastic to experience nature in a set, organized way. It’s fantastic to visit another country and do the whole tourist thing. These are really noble activities.  I just think they are different activities than an adventure. I’ve had just as much fun on a package holiday as the next person.  I just don’t think we can characterize those things as adventures.  I merely think that that wild, sweet word should be reserved for a much greater moment.

Or maybe I’m just a Romantic, and I don’t want to believe the idea that you can buy an adventure.  Romantics and Capitalists seldom agree.

I know opinions differ, and that’s grand and good.  Maybe it’s just me who hates the thought of stripping the word ‘adventure’ of all its wondrous undertones, its sense of the unknown, and the notion of actually facing a challenge.

Or maybe not.

In a Doctor Who episode (I shall be referring to Doctor Who a lot throughout this blog. I can feel it) the gusty, lusty, ginger companion, Donna Noble meets up with the Doctor a year after their first adventure together.  Donna tries to explain what it is that’s so different about traveling with the Doctor through time in space. She tries to explain why there’s a wild tang to a trip with the Doctor, that you just can’t catch when you book a trip with a guided tour.  In the episode, Partners in Crime, when she’s reunited with the Doctor, she tells him how their last adventure together inspired her to do everything, to travel the world…and how that wasn’t even close to the same thing as traveling with the Doctor.

“I was going to do so much. Then I woke up the next morning: same old life..And I tried, I did try. I went to Egypt. I was going to go barefoot and everything. And then it’s all bus trips and guidebooks and ‘don’t drink the water’ and two weeks later you’re back home. It’s nothing like being with you.”

—Doctor Who, Partners in Crime

I’m not positive who wrote that line, but I think they get it. I think they’d get it if I said I believe adventure, should be something very special; something almost otherworldly.  Something where all those rules and regulations — all those bus trips and guidebooks —suddenly aren’t important anymore.

So, in honour of Donna Noble, I’m going to make a list.  I’m going to list  qualities that, in my own little opinion, turn a trip into an adventure. To me, it’s not an adventure without these following qualities:

1) A setting in an unknown place.  And by unknown, I mean really unknown: somewhere that is uncharted, unexplored, and just unpredictable enough that you feel like anything can happen.  It should be a place that you know very little about, and where you don’t have any handy resources to find out everything you need to know to comfortably travel around (smartphones really have killed adventures, I’m just realizing).  In a place like this, you feel like all expectations are out the window, all bets are off. A place like this thoroughly lifts you out of your comfort zone, out of your world.  You feel like this new place isn’t planet earth, but the mysterious realm of the the Unknown, where you would be just as likely to run into an orc, or a dinosaur, as a fellow human being.  Now that you are in such a weird domain, you are in the position to take a hero’s journey, struggling valiantly against the great unknown.  That leads neatly into the next quality on my list which is…

2) A sense of independence. You need to bring a hero’s heart to a hero’s journey. If your phone (or your friends) are a crutch that you can’t let go of, it’s going to be hard to find the unknown. It’s going to be hard to interact with the world of the wild on your own strengths, your own weaknesses, and your own judgment.  An adventure puts you to the test.  It sharpens your strengths, tries your weaknesses.  It lets you be your own person.

3) Going back to the setting of an adventure for a mo (since it’s so important), I think shifts in the landscape are a weirdly specific, yet weirdly important component of a true adventure.  After all, the setting wouldn’t be very unknown if it stayed the same and you got it figured out in the first ten minutes of your quest, would it?  But when I mean shifts in the landscape, I mean dramatic shifts. I mean going from a mountain to an ocean.  From being surrounded by friends to being surrounded by enemies.  From feasting at a new friend’s table to fighting off wolves. From sailing to flying to walking.  If your adventure was a book, each change of the scenery would be a whole new chapter.

4) Now we are going to people our weird landscape a bit.  And the people in the adventure should be just as peculiar as the the wacky world they inhabit. We are adding side characters to our adventure. In the traditional adventure stories, the path is populated by wizards, dwarves, witches, and talking gingerbread men.  But (probably because I’ve read a lot of Charles Dickens) I strongly believe that the spectrum of the human race contains just as many peculiar characters as any fantasy novel.  In a true adventure, you get to see the really colourful, eccentric, delightful side of human nature.  You get to hear snippets of conversation that were never meant for your ears and get to make of them what you will. You get to hear about families and loved ones you’ll never meet.  You’ll get to hear quarrels and old grudges that will make your jaw drop. Of all the strange strange creatures, on earth or sea or land, the strangest are people.

5) You don’t have to take your adventure alone.  I think most good adventures include allies.  Frodo had Sam, Peter Pan had Wendy, Dorothy had Toto.  You need a friend to get through the challenges of the unknown, the shifts in the landscape, and to meet all the wacky side characters with you.  Even if you don’t go on your adventure with any people in particular, I think it’s important to have a safety net: Just someone that’s got your back!

6) To refer once again to the sacred texts (i.e the classic fantasy adventures I grew up with) all the odd bits and pieces of an adventure in one book are usually strung together into one cohesive arc. There’s a narrative thread that bind all the little adventures together into one big adventure, and that thing is usually a goal. Dorothy wanted to get home, so she went to the Emerald City, Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves. wanted to reclaim the dwarves’ lost home, Alice wanted to find the White Rabbit, so she through Wonderland. All these adventurers had a goal. I think all adventures need a goal, to maintain that sense of movement (rather than the relaxation of a vacation). An adventure needs something to desire, something to win, something to escape from, somewhere to get to, in order to push you through all the shifts in the landscape and through all the cast of interesting people; in order to propel you onward in your hero’s journey. 

7) And last of all, I think an adventure needs a genuine challenge.  Once again, in my own view, an adventure isn’t supposed to be relaxing. It’s supposed to be bracing.  It isn’t supposed to be static.  You’ve gotta keep on moving.  And what better way to keep moving than to be fighting for your life against terrible odds?  That’s what makes the hero’s journey a proper journey: the notion of overcoming something. The notion of not knowing whether you will make it out the same against your challenge…or even make it out alive. But you’ve got to try because your goal is worth it.  That’s what makes a hero.  A challenge in a true adventure, in my opinion, needs to be unpredictable.  It needs to be something unfamiliar that takes some work to access. It needs to defy your expectations.  And above all, it needs to pose an actual threat (not necessarily against your life, maybe against something else) that brings out all the best in you to overcome it.  When you’ve overcome your challenge to reach your goal, with a little help from your allies, through an unfamiliar, shifting landscape, peopled with peculiar sorts, congratulations: you’ve gone on a bona fide adventure.

Now, as I said before, this is just my personal list of what turns a trip into an adventure.  I’m sure everyone, based on their own backgrounds and their own particular flavour of wanderlust, would come up with different lists if they tried.  But I think my biggest takeaway from this thought experiment is that there is something that sets an adventure apart from other trips, vacations, or transportations.  Something about an adventure should be thrilling in a way that nothing else can.

I know the picture I’ve painted of my idea of a true adventure may seem outrageous, fantastical even.  Some of the elements of my sort of adventure may seem like they can only take place in a fantasy world; that it is impossible to go on this kind of adventure on our poky old planet earth.

To that, I say: “what utter nonsense!”  This world is more full of wondrous things, of unexplored corners, of strange creatures, of peculiar people than ever dreamed of in your philosophy.  We live an incredible planet, and the most astonishing things are only outside your door….

And as for me?  Well, I’d say, in all my travels, I’ve only been on one true adventure.  It was after I moved to Alaska. I’ll tell you all about it in the next article.

Image at top: I’M GOING ON AN ADVENTURE!! Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) leaves his quiet life and runs out the door to go on an adventure in The Hobbit. Image courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures (2012)