Getting my two kids excited about hiking is not always easy.

The answer is a mystery. A mystery roughly on par with what lies behind Claudia Winkleman’s fringe.

Some days they’re game; other days, they collapse on the driveway like fainting goats because their sock feels “too scratchy.”

But I’ve learned something over there years: you’ve got to outwit them.

If you want them to love the outdoors, you’ve got to make it fun and imaginative. Or so wonderfully deranged that they forget they’re being tricked into a walk.

So, a few weeks back, under heavy morning protest from my six-year-old and a growing sense of paternal despair, I decided to get creative.

How could I get her excited about walking in the woods?

Easy.

I’d turn it into a unicorn.

I’m yet to meet a young girl who doesn’t go utterly berserk at the mere mention of the word unicorn, and mine is no exception. She can spot glitter from three postcodes away.

After breakfast, I slid into my home office, fired up Komoot and started plotting.

I downloaded a simple unicorn-head outline from Google, zoomed in on a patch of local woodland, and began tracing the same shape by dropping waypoints like a deranged cartographer on high grade sherbet.

Within minutes I had a majestic, slightly lopsided beast galloping across Gloucestershire in pixelated glory.

We packed a picnic, a flask of hot chocolate and a few custard creams for morale, then set off to bring our digital doodle to life.

We followed a well-marked trail for two minutes before veering violently left into a wall of bracken that looked perfectly innocent on satellite view.

“Are you sure this is the way, Daddy?”

“Absolutely,” I lied, as she climbed onto my shoulders and we stomped through the undergrowth like a two-storey ogre.

We used the phone as our compass, tracing the unicorn’s neck and jawline while spotting mushrooms that looked like props from Alice in Wonderland. Chanterelles, puffballs, even perfect red-and-white fly agarics (nature’s version of a warning label).

We stopped for lunch in the unicorn’s mouth, where we chomped on cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. Hot chocolates were poured and she insisted we toast “to the magic horse that lives in the woods.”

Then came the moment we’d all been waiting for: the horn. We sprinted up it, screaming “TO THE TIP!” before pulling an aggressive 180° and pegging it all the way back down, laughing so hard we nearly made two forest pizzas beneath the giant oaks.

We slipped down ditches, hurdled logs, clambered up trees, spotted wild boar tracks, and argued passionately about whether unicorns eat crisps. Two hours later, sweaty and triumphant, we re-emerged exactly where we’d started with the completed unicorn head now etched forever into our GPS history.

On the drive home, we debated what to map next. Her shortlist: a dragon, a cat, or a “massive biscuit.”

I glanced at her pink leopard wellies swinging off the seat and thought, maybe adventure really is just drawing with your feet.

Adventure doesn’t need Everest. It needs imagination, a few rogue GPS dots and the promise of biscuits.

You’re not just walking, you’re storyboarding childhood and bending reality for a small human who thinks unicorns eat crisps. You’re proving that adventure isn’t a postcode, it’s a perspective.

Give them that, and even a soggy woodland turns into the Magic Kingdom.

Next week, we ride again. Dragon or biscuit, we’ll see what the map says.