Reviews: 100 Family Adventures by the Meek Family

We’re an outdoors family and as such, when we were offered the chance to review a book written by a like-minded family called 100 Family Adventures, we jumped at the opportunity.

100 Family Adventures is a book for the whole family, by a whole family. It’s divided up into different sections like Woodland, By the Sea, and Exploring, with a number of different activities or “adventures” in each. Some of them require a bit of pre-planning, some a lot of pre-planning and others you can just jump headlong into.

Each Adventure is set out in the same way with a description, some practical tips and tricks, input from Amy (one of the kids) and a joke from Ella (the other daughter). They’re easy to follow and there are some great ideas for enhancing a trip out or actually basing a trip on altogether.

The majority of the adventures give enough detail for you to get on with doing something fun outside but what would have been helpful is a glossary of legal rights- for example, with floating down a river, what happens if you don’t have right of access to the river bank where you get out? What about making camp-fires on the beach? Lots of places we go to in North Norfolk seem to explicitly forbid fires, and the same goes for sleeping on the beach overnight. These activities look fun but I’d be a little bit nervous about getting in to trouble doing them without a lot of effort to find out what I was and wasn’t allowed to do first.

The vast majority of the adventures though do look great fun, and we can probably tick off almost half of them already, which shows the Meeks are in tune with our way of thinking (or vice versa if you’d prefer). I think the one thing I’ve taken from the book is I need to be more adventurous with my outdoor cooking. We have a good camping stove and a selection of pots, so it’s something we can easily do.

It’s also good to be reminded that a day out doesn’t have to be expensive and the best resource we have to play with is the great outdoors. It’s good to be able to get the kids away from the TV and the iPads, and a book like this is a valuable addition to our library of stuff to do.

100 Family Adventures is out on 5th March at a recommended retail price of £14.99.