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What I Actually Do During the Downtime Between Big Adventures

One of the strange things about building your life around adventure travel is that people only ever see the exciting parts. They see Everest, the North Pole, rowing across the Atlantic, some ridiculous border crossing in Africa, or me standing somewhere that took three flights, two buses and a questionable local fixer to reach. What they don’t see is how much downtime comes with all of that. Adventure travel involves a surprising amount of sitting around in airports, hotels, cars and border posts waiting for the next interesting thing to happen.

Over the years I’ve become pretty good at filling those gaps. Sometimes I’ll work on the blog, sometimes I’ll watch football, train, find a decent bar, call home or just waste an hour online like everyone else. There are endless ways to kill time now, whether that’s YouTube, Netflix, podcasts, games or checking things like BetUS casino bonuses if that happens to be your sort of entertainment. The reality is that adventure travel isn’t a permanent adrenaline rush, and anyone who spends enough time on the road eventually develops their own routine for the quieter hours.

When I first left Ireland, I definitely didn’t understand that. I had this romantic idea that travel meant waking up every morning somewhere new and immediately having another life-changing experience. To be fair, there have been periods of my life where it genuinely felt a little like that, especially when I was backpacking through countries I knew almost nothing about and every day seemed to produce another completely ridiculous story. But there were also plenty of days when absolutely nothing happened, and after years of travelling I’ve realised those days are just as much a part of the experience.

Expedition Life Involves a Lot of Waiting

Some of the longest waits happen on the biggest adventures. High-altitude mountaineering is the perfect example because people imagine climbing Everest means putting your crampons on and marching towards the summit every morning. In reality, you climb, acclimatise, come back down, recover, check the forecast and wait. Then the weather changes, the mountain gets dangerous, everyone sits around again and eventually you get a tiny window where suddenly everything happens at once.

Polar expeditions, ocean crossings and trips through remote countries often follow exactly the same rhythm. Learning to deal with that downtime is actually a useful skill because if you constantly need stimulation, difficult expeditions can drive you mad. Flights get cancelled, roads close, permits don’t arrive, officials disappear for lunch and boats apparently operate on schedules known only to God. You can either spend the whole time getting angry or accept that waiting is part of travelling somewhere genuinely difficult.

I Still Work Almost Every Day

A lot of my downtime is still work, which is probably less exciting than people imagine. OneStep4Ward started as a tiny travel blog when I was broke, and the reason I’ve managed to keep travelling for so many years is that I can run most of my work from a laptop. Airports become offices, hotel rooms become offices and sometimes the back seat of a car becomes an office if the road isn’t too bad.

If I’ve got three hours before a flight, I’ll usually answer emails, work on trips, edit something for the blog or deal with whatever problem has appeared while I’ve been travelling. It’s not particularly glamorous, but it means I can disappear off on another ridiculous trip without coming home to hundreds of unanswered messages. That trade-off has always been worth it to me.

Airport Lounges Have Become Part of My Travel Routine

Airport lounges have become ridiculously important to me. Twenty-year-old backpacker Johnny would probably laugh at the idea because back then I was happy sleeping on airport floors and choosing food based entirely on which sandwich was cheapest. These days, if I have a six or seven-hour connection, give me fast Wi-Fi, somewhere comfortable to sit, a shower, food and preferably a decent glass of red wine and I’m sorted.

Some lounges are brilliant and some are embarrassingly bad, but even a mediocre one normally beats sitting beside a departure gate for half the day. If I can get a couple of hours of work done, shower, eat and recharge everything before a long-haul flight, that completely changes how the rest of the journey feels. When you travel as much as I do, those small improvements start to matter.

Sometimes I Just Do Absolutely Nothing

I’ve also got much better at doing absolutely nothing when I need to. When I was younger, arriving in a new city meant I felt obliged to go exploring immediately because otherwise I was somehow wasting the opportunity. Every meal had to be interesting, every day needed sightseeing and every spare hour had to become another story.

That approach is fine when you travel for two weeks a year, but when you spend huge chunks of your life moving between countries, it becomes exhausting. Sometimes I’ll arrive somewhere, order food, watch something stupid, scroll through my phone and go to bed, and I no longer feel remotely guilty about it. You simply can’t treat every single travel day like the first day of your annual holiday.

Training While Travelling Keeps Me Sane

Training fills a lot of the other gaps. I’m usually preparing for something, whether that’s an ultramarathon, a mountain, a long-distance cycle, some stupid endurance challenge I agreed to months earlier or simply trying to stay reasonably fit between trips. That means one of the first things I check when I book a hotel is whether it has a gym, and if it doesn’t I’ll normally try to run outside.

Running while travelling is actually one of my favourite ways to see a city because you cover far more ground than walking and end up wandering through neighbourhoods you would probably never deliberately visit. That has occasionally gone wrong, obviously, and I’ve run into places where I realised fairly quickly that I probably shouldn’t have been. But most of the time it works brilliantly, especially early in the morning when a city is just waking up.

Long Journeys Become Part of the Adventure

Long travel days are another thing I’ve weirdly learned to enjoy. I still don’t love twenty hours on a horrible bus with no toilet, but trains, flights and road journeys create this forced period where nobody expects much from you. You can read, listen to podcasts, watch films, plan the next trip or just stare out the window for a few hours.

In normal life we’re constantly trying to fill every second, so occasionally being trapped on a train across China with nowhere else to go can feel surprisingly relaxing. Some of my best travel memories aren’t even from the destination itself, but from bizarre overnight trains, long road trips, ferry crossings and journeys through landscapes I would otherwise never have seen.

The Boring Bits Make the Big Moments Better

The boring parts also make the good parts feel better. Instagram can turn a three-week expedition into a 30-second video containing a summit, a helicopter, a sunset and a few dramatic shots, while conveniently deleting the missed flights, bad food, paperwork, stomach problems and eight hours spent waiting for somebody to find the permit. But that messy stuff is what makes adventure travel feel real.

Standing somewhere extraordinary means more when getting there was genuinely difficult. Finally reaching a summit means more after weeks of waiting and acclimatising. Arriving in some remote village means more when the road there was an adventure in itself. If every trip was completely smooth, comfortable and predictable, I’m not sure I’d still find it anywhere near as interesting.

Adventure Travel Isn’t a Constant Highlight Reel

That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned after travelling for so long. You can’t separate the adventure from all the inconvenience surrounding it because they’re part of the same experience. The delays, the terrible roads, the airport lounges, the emails, the training sessions and the random evenings doing absolutely nothing are all part of the lifestyle.

Then eventually the weather clears, the border opens, the permit arrives or someone tells you it’s time to move, and suddenly the next adventure begins. That’s the part everyone sees, but all the waiting around beforehand is part of the story too.