A colleague recently turned me on to the Twitter account for Alastair Humphreys, a British adventurer whose four-year around-the-world bike trip is just a single bullet point on his expedition-filled résumé. Despite living a life most would deem clinically insane, he champions a concept that he calls the microadventure, which is just what it sounds like: a mini, midweek adventure that doesn’t cost much, and can be accomplished on a typical weeknight. Some examples of a microadventure that Humphreys touts in his new book Microadventures: Local Discoveries for Great Escapes are sleeping on a hill, cooking a meal over a fire, swimming in a river (there’s one I can do!).

As a marine journalist I read—on a daily basis—about boaters doing some extraordinary things. In fact, at this moment I have e-mail threads going with a couple who are cruising their Nordhavn 40 through the Pacific Northwest, a blogger aboard…