I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t…

I’m quite bad at most things.

I don’t make my bed every morning – or wash my sheets regularly (shhh, don’t tell my boyfriend 😬.

I’m no good at keeping track of everything on my to do list.

I can’t draw one bit.

And I’m really bad at getting out of my patterns of everyday life.

If left to my own devices, I’d spend the rest of my life going from the barn to the gym to MegaBed, a giant stack of mattresses in my cuddle/movie room.

So I always appreciate when someone or something gets me out of my rut.

Enter… The Adventure Challenge, couples edition.

I plowed home from the barn last night and threw the door open to my boyfriend’s house and said “Hi, set aside an hour because we’re doing SOMETHING.”

“What are we doing?”

“I don’t know!!!!” I clapped my hands in mysterious glee.

“What do you mean you don’t know??” he asked with a degree of skepticism as he tossed a flaming hot pan of Szechuan stir fry with his hunky forearms.

“Well, I’ve got this book. And you pick a mystery and scratch it off and it gives us a date to do. Grab a quarter, come over here!”

We grabbed our dinner and sat down, flipping through the pages until we settled on a challenge called Couples Booty (okay but not like that booty 🍑- there’s a whole other book for fun and games like that).

As we scuffed out the square and the date revealed itself, we saw that our adventure for the evening was to make a time capsule of sorts. A box to fill with mementos, photos, ticket stubs, and the menu we stole from that really fancy restaurant.

So we set to work decorating the outside of an old box that housed his psoas releaser, drawing on each side of the box a memory or a place that was special to us. Poorly, I might add. I can’t draw, remember??

As I took a little meta view of the situation, I realized that this tiny little scratch off date allowed us to…

1. Break out of our same pattern of eating dinner at 9:30pm and talking about our day until we pass out.
2. Share a kaleidoscope of memories about trips we’d taken, stupid moments we shared, and the bad jokes that made him make that face in half our photos.
3. Do a little daydreaming about our future trips. After all, we only decorated 2 sides of the box and had very little to fill it with. So clearly, adventure is calling!

This adventure was easy to do in very little time with few supplies and yet it unlocked a host of future tripping (the good kind) and daydreaming (is it still daydreaming if it happens at night??).

I’m excited to add to our time capsule and to experience more dates in the book!

Molly Pearson

P.S. Want to get your hands on one of these fun books? You can check out the full collection here and get 20% off when you use the discount code CI20. There’s options for couples, families, kids, even solo adventures!