I like the concept of finding adventure where you are, rather than glamorizing big travel adventures. It's better for the environment and more accessible to more people (including people limited on time or money, people with disabilities and responsibilities). As a person with a full-time job, not a ton of disposable income, and a number of physical and health restrictions, I'm unlikely to do a lot of adventure traveling, but I still crave the outdoors and a connection with nature. A lot of the general principles Humphreys suggested made sense to me, including:

- Go somewhere new, be curious when you get there. That's the principle of adventure; the other specifics don't matter.
- Start small, but do start.
- The most delightful parts of your journey will be things you don't expect.  
- The hardest part is getting out the door.
- Though the journey is more important than the destination, drumming up a destination can help with that initial hurdle of getting yourself going. Any excuse will do; the book is full of suggestions such as walking or biking a journey you'd normally take by transit or car; making a circle of a defined radius around your home; touring important landmarks from your/your family's history; visiting the highest peak, oldest tree, or another local landmark in your area; or pointing to a random spot on a map. 

The book straddles an awkward line between how-to and travel book; most of it is essays/travelogue about Humphreys' microadventures in the London area, and then there is a section of light camping advice. For me personally, a bit more variation in the microadventures would have helped drive the point home that this is something anyone could really do. They are meant to be varying challenge levels, but even the easy ones seemed too hard to me. Almost all of them involve sleeping in a random field in a bivvy bag. Although Humphreys stresses that anyone can adapt the spirit of microadventure to their own situation, I found it difficult to generalize from the essays. Unlike Humphreys, I live in a place with harsh weather, little public transit, and no lawful "right to roam." I'm also not fit or outdoorsy. I'm sure he'd have ways around these issues, but I found myself coming away from the essays with more of a feeling of "well good for him" than "I can too!" I understand that travel is antithetical to the idea of a microadventure, but perhaps an anthology of different contributors would have made it easier to see how to adapt the principles to different types of locations and abilities. 

This was a really interesting book and idea. A Microadventure is an adventure close to home. In our post COVID world this is kinda of an interesting thought process. Alastair shares how he started this and different stories about his adventures in the first half of the book. This book is very UK based so a lot of it seems hard to apply in the USA. There are some good general ideas though. I will also say as a mother and primary caregiver of children a lot of these we couldn't do as a family got safety reasons. I did appreciate the back half of the book and things you need for Microadventures. It's more than you think. Overall a good way to spark adventure into every day, but hard to replicate in the USA.

I made the mistake of not reading any reviews before I read the book. But most ideas in this book seem to be variations on “walk to a random spot in nature and sleep there” which is unsafe and/or illegal in lots of countries and for a lot of people. Walking up on a hill at night and sleeping there is not my idea of an easy, safe, low stakes adventure anyone can (or should!!) do.

In the introduction the author kept saying how these ideas were doable for everyone, whether disabled, poor, where ever they might live, but the first few ideas I read were not like that at all.