You are forced to step outside of your comfort zone when you travel for adventure. It encourages you to test your limits and places you in new settings. A youthful gap year student bungee jumping off a cliff was the quintessential adventure tourist of the previous millennium. Adventure travel was generally associated with risk back then. No more. The modern adventure tourist is frequently over fifty, extremely busy with a high-stress job, has more money to spare, and opts for meaningful and life-altering experiences over danger when on vacation, which adventure travel provides.
1. Adventure Travel Offers Life Changing Experiences
Adventure travel pushes you outside of your comfort zone. It puts you in unfamiliar situations and challenges you to test your mettle. In the last millenia, the typical adventure traveler was a young gap year kid bungee jumping off cliff. In those days, adventure travel often meant risky. Not anymore. Today’s adventure traveller is often over fifty, super busy with a high stress job, has more disposable income, and when vacationing, instead of seeking risk, instead seeks meaningful and life changing experiences, and finds that adventure travel delivers.
 So instead of bungee jumping, today adventure travel means climbing Macchu Picchu, hiking between medieval villages along the West Highland Way in Scotland or rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Perhaps its biking the gentle path alongside the Danube river from Vienna to Budapest.
 Today, adventure travel combines physical exertion with mixing with the locals and fellow global adventure travelers. You savor unique foods and customs so very different from home. You come home changed and recharged and ready to start planning your next epic adventure –  adventure travel is addicting. Finally, something it’s ok to get addicted to!
 Adventure travel vacations allow you to see your small part in a much larger world and often alters your perspective. You see that other cultures do things differently and their way may be good, too, just different. Adventure travel attracts people from all walks of life so you meet people you might not ordinarily encounter at home, with opinions and experiences vastly different from your own, and may see that their ways are valid as well.  You return home from an adventure travel trip slightly altered from the start:  a new and improved YOU!
2. Offers Personal Growth and Challenges
Even on guided tours, you will be pushed physically and mentally. You find out what you are made of. And you learn that you can do more than you ever thought you could. Late afternoon, you may be tired and your feet hurt, but you still have a couple of miles to go. You manage to pull resources from within and you make it. You strengthen your resilience.  That evening, you relax with a cold one and relive the day’s experience with your fellow adventurers.
And then the next day, you wake raring to get that euphoric feeling again. Your best stories come from overcoming obstacles and getting yourself out of a mess or otherwise problem solving. With adventure travel, you get to test your mettle to see what you are made of.
When you look back on your trips, your fondest memories are usually when you battled and won under the most trying of circumstances. Once you’ve beat the obstacle, you are more alive and more confident. It’s exhilirating!
(The Wall Street Journal had an excellent article on Resilience worth reading)
3. Gives You a Sense of Accomplishment
Adventure travel is not for wimps. Days can be physically challenging. You often deal with rain, cold or wind, which can mean mud and chills. You HAVE to get from one place to the next, so even when you are tired and dirty, you have to forge ahead to the day’s destination. If travelling solo, you develop the mental strength to get there on your own. In a group, you get the support of the others to cheer you to the day’s finish line. At the end of the day, you look back in wonder at what you achieved and you feel bigger inside. Adventure travel is a great confidence builder. You learn that you are capable of far more than you ever dreamt and develop tremendous coping skills as you meet new obstacles and challenges.
4. Helps You to Feel Gratitude and Improve Mindfulness
Active travel adventures often equals SLOW travel. You have time to really SEE and study your surroundings. You mind finally has a chance to quiet down. Adventure travel can be a form of active meditation throughout much of the day. Your heart can burst with the joy of simply being alive. As active travel often can mean roughing it, you learn to appreciate all the little things you take for granted at home (hot water, toilets, hot meals on demand, etc). Plus, you feel pride in your body being able to perform!
5. Enables you to See Inaccessible Landscapes
You often get to see landscapes you couldn’t see unless your body can motor you there: many of the planet’s awe-inspiring landscapes don’t have a road to them, so it’s up to you and your body to get there. And because most people are unable or unwilling to challenge themselves, once you’ve arrived, you rarely fight any crowds.
6. Nature Improves Your Brain
We get distracted and multi-task all day. Which gives us all a bit of attention deficit disorder. When on an adventure trip, you naturally stay in the moment. This allows your brain to rest, and I believe, heal. So consider adventure travel ‘Attention Restoration Therapy’. One study found being in nature helps restore the higher cognitive functions we require in today’s device-driven days. This study found a 50% increase in creativity and problem solving skills after only three days of hiking. Researchers aren’t sure if it was being in nature or being disconnected or a combo, but you get both with adventure travel! There is no doubt in my mind that the slow steady pace of adventure travel helps your brain sort through things so you see things more clearly and helps you to find the solutions to your current dilemmas. In addition, another study found that aerobic activity actually increases your brain’s hippocampus so aids in memory retention. Some doctors are now handing out ‘Park Prescriptions’ to get their patients outside to get these benefits. Studies have also shown that getting out in nature makes us all nicer, too!
7. Improves Your Mental Health and Reduces Stress
Not only does our brain improve, being out in nature improves our mental health and reduces depression and anxiety, [according to Mardie Townsend, PhD, as reported in Psychiatry Advisor.] I can actually FEEL it lower my blood pressure and calming my mind when I am out in the woods. I have also noticed since I started doing adventure travel that I handle stress back at home much better. Today, I let new problems roll off me much better now. And I’m thrilled to find that I’m actually sometimes starting to react with a fabulous, almost disembodied observation of whatever the crisis is rather than getting panicky or upset. This allows me to calmly deal with whatever the problem in a detached manner. I’ve even stopped losing sleep over my problems. Instead, I can spend my time solving the problem instead of stressing over it and worrying about it. What a time saver!
8. Learn New Things
Whether learning new skills to actually DO the adventure, like backpacking, or learning about new cultures or history, adventure travel broadens your mind. Unlike boring history textbooks, when you get to actually SEE where history took place and meet people directly affected by it, history now becomes personal to you so now you’re interested in learning more about the people, culture and history where your adventure travel takes you. For example, Linda’s story about her BNB host’s grandmother who helped the Jews during WWII in our Mont Blanc Adventure, (Episode 7). Not to mention that adventure travel makes learning FUN! Adventure travel both satisfies and encourages your curiousity.  List continues below.
9. More Meaningful Travel
Compared to sit on the beach with a fruity drink or even the large group packaged bus tours where you zoom from one stop to the next to snap a photo, with adventure travel you mix with the locals and engage with the culture of the place you are visiting. Plus, you disburse your spending across villages with the local merchants which better helps the local economy. Because of your interactions with the locals, you return home with a better understanding of the culture which expands your world view.
10. You Get to Relive Your Adventures
Like all travel, adventure travel lets you enjoy your trip before, during and afterwards. Unlike the stuff we buy that is meaningless a short time later, you get to relish your travels forever. Initially you get the thrill when you first discover and/or dream about an adventure. Then you get the fun of figuring out how and when you’re going to do it. Next you have the anticipation and excitement leading up to your adventure. And then –YAY!- you get the joy and sense of accomplishment from actually doing the adventure. And finally, for years to come whether telling your stories or looking at your photos, you get to relive your adventure over and over again. Try that with a fancy pair of shoes
11. You Meet Cool People and Bond Quickly
When you meet people on the trail or in your group, you are self-selected as kindred spirits on the same adventure, so bonding is super quick. Conversations are deeper, quicker. Lifetime friendships are often formed. As popular as adventure travel is, most people still don’t or can’t do it, so you end up formng a bit of a ‘club’.
12. Gives You Great Stories to Tell
You won’t run out of exciting and interesting stories to tell, both at home and with your fellow travelers. We humans have always made connections and formed friendships via storytelling, and your stories are going to be super cool. You’re friends and colleagues will be amazed.
13. You Return Home Healthier & Energized
Have you ever returned home from a vacation exhausted? Unlike traditional vacations, adventure travel makes your stronger physically and mentally. You are unlikely to have put on five pounds – unless it’s muscle! Also, by exercising much of the day on your trip, your metabolism and energy levels explode! When you do adventure travel, you won’t need a vacation from your vacation.
14. A Unique Experience
Most people still do the traditional packaged type tours, so you stand out from the pack when you become an adventure traveler. At the water cooler, which colleague’s vacation will you remember, the one who sipped rum drinks on the beach in the Bahamas, or the one who hiked the epic Tour du Mont Blanc through France, Switzerland and Italy for twelve days? Which colleague will you ask the most questions and care about the answers?
15. Adventure Travel is Fun!
You get to feel like a kid again whether you are scrambling up a boulder in Patagonia or bouncing through Australia’s Tully River rapids on a raft. They’re back: those carefree days of youth are back! Go ahead, stomp in the puddles! Just like the old days, all you have to do is be home by dinner – except this time ‘home’ could be a mountain hut in Sweden as you hike the Kungsleden trail.