Most people considering an expedition one day have the same question: is this really for me. You do not answer that question by thinking about it longer. You answer it by going for three days.
You do not have to go far for that. About three hours' drive from Brussels lies an area that works surprisingly well as training ground: the French Ardennes. This article is about what that terrain is, and what three days there can and, honestly, cannot deliver.
The terrain: a deeply incised valley
The French Ardennes are the southern continuation of the same massif that runs through Belgium, but the landscape there is different. The Meuse has cut through the ancient rock here and left a deep, strongly meandering valley behind, with steep wooded flanks rising several hundred metres above the water.
That produces three things you will not find in Flanders.
Elevation that counts. Not mountains, but flanks that take you two hundred metres up in one go. With a full pack you notice that immediately.
Unbroken forest. Large stretches of beech and oak woodland with no roads through them. You can walk for hours without seeing a building, and on weekdays you barely meet anyone.
Water. The river and its tributaries make packrafting possible as a genuine part of a route, rather than a separate activity alongside it.
What you learn in three days
Three days is short. But it is long enough for the things you only learn by doing.
- Navigating without a phone. Map, compass, and the discovery that you read landforms far worse than you thought. This is the part most people get the most out of, because it fails immediately when you get it wrong.
- Packrafting. Taking a boat of a few kilos out of your pack, inflating it, and using a stretch of river as your route. The first time that feels improbable. After an hour it is simply a way of making progress.
- Bushcraft. Making fire when the wood is wet, filtering water, pitching a tarp that survives the night. Basic skills you fall back on at every destination that follows.
And alongside that, something that appears on no programme: you notice how you react when you are tired and the plan does not hold. That is usually the most useful information of the weekend.
What three days cannot do
Here we have to be honest, because this is where short formats are often oversold.
Three days do not take you to the point a real expedition takes you. What a long expedition does only happens once the novelty has gone: somewhere around day five or six, when your body has adapted and your head stops calculating. You do not reach that moment in a weekend.
Nor are you ever truly cut off. There is signal, there is a road a few kilometres away, and you know you will be home on Sunday. That changes how you experience it, however rough the terrain is.
What three days do give you is an honest answer to the question you started with. Afterwards you know whether you seek out the feeling of sleeping outside, discomfort and self reliance, or not. That is exactly what this format is for.
Why April
Early April in the Ardennes is the moment the forest opens up but is still bare enough to navigate by what you can see. The rivers run high with winter water, which makes packrafting more interesting. And it is cold enough to take your kit seriously without the nights being genuinely harsh.
What it asks of you
The Untamed Adventure Weekend is rated Explore (2 out of 5), the lowest level at which we sleep outside. You need no experience and no particular fitness. Anyone who can walk for a day with a pack can do this.
What you do need is the willingness not to take the comfortable option for three days. That is the only real barrier to entry.
Practical
The Untamed Adventure Weekend runs from 9 to 11 April 2027 and lasts three days: navigation, packrafting and bushcraft in the French Ardennes. Guiding, group equipment and the packrafts are included.
Want to know where you can go next: which expedition suits you sets the destinations side by side on terrain and intensity. And the packing list for an expedition goes into detail on what has to come along.