I’m about to embark on the biggest year of adventure I’ve ever had with my kids.

This does not mean selling my house, buying a VW transporter off FB marketplace, and heading for the horizon in a rolling home-school experiment under a new Instagram handle called @thebrydonssaidyes.

Instead, I’m committing to a year of local adventures here in the UK.

After spending the best part of 16 years travelling and working overseas, I’ve been reminded just how much of a goldmine these islands are for adventurous-minded folk. So the goal for next year is simple: to experience as much of it as I can with my family, within the very real confines of modern-day fatherhood.

To make that possible—and crucially, achievable—I’ve put a handful of simple tactics in place; practical ways to make adventure happen around work, school, and real life.

This is what I’m doing to turn 2026 into a year we’ll actually remember.

Before you open a calendar, buy any gear, or start googling “is this safe for children?”, sit down with your kids and ask one reckless question: “What should we do together next year?”

Then shut up.

Write everything down, especially the ideas that make you nervous or slightly tired just thinking about them. Engagement levels (and levels of absurdity) will vary depending on age and adventure appetite, so come armed with a few prompts of your own and something visual if it helps get things moving.

Camp in a cave. Swim under a waterfall. Sleep in a treehouse. Catch a monster fish like the one from Planet Earth. Road trip to Narnia. Let it all spill out.

This moment really matters because it flips the dynamic. It stops being about Dad dragging everyone outside and becomes the family conspiring together. Once kids help write the list, they start holding you to it, which is when you know you’re onto something.

Once the ideas are out in the open, give them a physical home.

I’ve bought a massive framed map of the UK as a Christmas present for the kids and it’s going up in the playroom where it will dominate the space entirely. Physical maps, incidentally, are a total novelty to children born in the last twenty years, which makes this far more exciting than it has any right to be.

Over the xmas holidays we’ll cover it in sticky dots like an unhinged crew of cartographers, working through and translating the brainstorm list whilst adding a few extra ideas I’ve been sneakily stockpiling. It doesn’t have to be a whole-country map either, a regional one works just as well depending on your life stage.

We’ll mark places we’ve been and places we want to go in different colours and leave it at that. The map then does the heavy lifting, keeping adventure visible and turning vague ideas into real places. The kids will walk past it daily and remind me what’s coming up, which is exactly the point.

Once the ideas are on the wall and everyone’s suitably excited, open the calendar.

You don’t need to lock in the exact adventure. Weather, energy, and logistics will all have opinions but what matters is protecting the time. If it’s not in the calendar, it’s not real. Good intentions evaporate the moment work runs late or the sofa starts whispering sweet nothings so block adventure time like it’s a wedding you’ve been invited to or a work team-building day you can’t miss.

Buy a calendar and make it impossible to ignore. We’ve got a big one from Printerpix in the kitchen with photos from previous adventures and marker pens splashed all over it. When adventure has a date, it has a fighting chance.

Choose a cadence that works and lock it in. I’m going for one meaty weekend a month, plus a micro-adventure every Wednesday. Once the time is protected, everything else becomes flexible. Changing where you go is easy. Finding the time at the last minute is almost impossible.

Adventure doesn’t need to be epic to be effective. Some of the funnest adventures we’ve had have been down the road: climbing trees, foraging for mushrooms, collecting rubbish on our bikes. If everyone leaves the house and something new or unexpected happens, congratulations: you’re doing it!

Most of the time the real obstacle isn’t weather or time, it’s the imaginary standard we think adventure has to meet. Kids aren’t measuring distance, difficulty, or conditions. They just care that something different is happening and that you’re in it with them.

Small adventures stack, and over time they shift the whole family’s mindset.

There will be certain activities you do, or places you return to, that stick in the memory like porridge to a school jumper. They’re the keepers, worth repeating until they become part of your family folklore.

Luna and I will always jump into cold water if we get the chance, and I do individual campouts with each of the kids every year. At winter solstice there’s always a fire outside (marshmallows non-negotiable, of course).

Your rituals might look different. It could be a ludicrously steep hill you climb every summer, a cabin you book each year with the same friends, or a January tradition that involves goose fat and the North Sea.

These moments are often small, but they matter more than the big one-offs. Kids love them because they can see them coming; parents love them because they don’t require reinvention. Somewhere along the way, adventure becomes the default rather than the exception.

Adventure is significantly easier when someone else is expecting you. You don’t need a large, matching-hoodie collective either. One other parent with kids who move at roughly the same speed is plenty.

A simple WhatsApp crew changes the tone entirely, because it turns “shall we bother?” into “we probably bloody should”, which is often all the motivation required. The social pressure of not wanting to be the one who flakes is a surprisingly powerful force.

It also helps normalise the often shambolic nature of our Dad-efforts. When a mate’s child is losing their shit, yours suddenly looks remarkably well-adjusted. When your plan falls apart in a car park, you’re all in it together, which is oddly calming.

Capturing a few photos is a given, but if you want to level it up create a family journal and hand it over to the kids. Drawings, doodles, misspelt captions. Crusty bits of paper with stories that make very little sense now but will mean everything later. Print photos and stick them in, or better still, get a Polaroid.

None of this is for Instagram. It’s for the future-you who’s forgotten the details but wants to remember how it felt. A year documented this way becomes a time capsule you can hold, leaf through, and laugh at, which beats a perfectly curated camera roll any day of the week.

Things will go wrong. Lean into it. Let the kids help shape it all and rewrite your definition of the “best dad on the planet”. Remember, it’s not about epicness - it’s about turning up, having a go, and staying present when the plan unravels.

Good luck amigo, you got this 👍