Free things to do outside, today, almost anywhere

The free infrastructure nobody uses

Towns are full of things paid for, built and maintained for anyone to use, and most residents have never touched them.

1. The free book box A public shelf or box of books on a street corner or in a park. Take one, leave one, and read the first page on the nearest bench.
2. The bulletin board A public board with papers pinned to it. Read every one. You'll find out about a choir, a lost cat and a zoning notice in two minutes.
3. The drinking fountain A public drinking fountain or bottle filler. Fill a bottle. It's the same water as the tap at home, and it's there for exactly this.
4. The outdoor gym A set of pull-up bars or fixed exercise machines in a park, open to anyone. Use one for two minutes. Nobody will look.
5. The bench with a dedication Benches with small brass plates for people who liked that spot. Sit on one and find out why they liked it.
6. The public clock A clock on a building or post. Check whether it's right. Many aren't, which is its own small pleasure.
7. The bike repair stand A public pump and tool stand. Pump your tires even if they don't need it.

Things that are old

Age is free to look at and gets more interesting the closer you stand.

1. A piece of the old town wall Many older towns have a surviving fragment, often with a modern building leaning on it. Find it and put your hand on it.
2. A plaque you've never read An inscribed plaque on a building or stone. Read it all the way through, then look up what it's talking about on the bench afterward.
3. The oldest tree you can find Somewhere near you stands a tree older than every building around it. Parks, churchyards and old estates are the places to look.
4. A ruin, from outside The remains of a fallen building. Stay on the public side of any fence; what you can see from the path is the point.
5. A survey marker A small metal disc or carved mark in the ground or a wall, placed by surveyors generations ago. Once you know what they look like, they're everywhere.

Things that move

Watching something happen is free, and oddly hard to stop doing.

1. A low dam Water going over the edge of a weir or a small dam. Stand on the bridge above it for five minutes.
2. A railroad crossing Wait for a train, from behind the barrier. Count the cars. Nobody has done this since they were nine, and it's exactly as good.
3. A dock with boats Walk to the end of a public dock or pier and watch what's tied up and what's moving.
4. A fountain, on or off A running fountain is the obvious choice. A fountain that's been switched off for the season is the better photograph.
5. A streetcar rail in the road If your town has or had streetcars, follow the rails on foot along the sidewalk for half a mile and see where they lead or where they stop.

Nature that got in without a ticket

You don't need a national park. Most towns have more wild in them than their residents notice.

1. A wild corner A patch of a park or roadside left deliberately unmowed. Count how many different plants you can see in one square yard.
2. A hollow tree A tree with a cavity you could put your arm in. Don't, but look.
3. An insect hotel or nest box Someone put it up on purpose. Find out whether anything moved in.
4. A marked tree A tree with a number or paint mark on its trunk. Somebody is keeping track of it; now you are too.
5. A footbridge over water Cross it, stand in the middle, look upstream for a minute and downstream for a minute.

A free afternoon, planned

If you want a whole free afternoon with a shape: start at the public clock, check your watch against it, and pick a destination you've never visited within an hour's walk. On the way, read one plaque and one bulletin board, fill your bottle at a drinking fountain, and find one thing that's older than everything around it. At the destination, sit on the dedicated bench if there is one. Come back by a different route and pass through the oldest streets in town. That's about three miles and three hours, and the total cost is whatever your shoes were already worth.

One more idea for the purist: get through the whole day without a single purchase. Not as a hardship, as a game. The outdoors makes it surprisingly easy.

More free destinations than you'll ever use

RLQuest leans on the same idea. The app is free to download for iPhone and Android, and the quests it hands you each morning, three to ten from a library of more than 2,700, are almost all free to do: walk a distance, photograph something mostly red, be outside at a certain hour, reach a part of town you've never set foot in. Some lead to real places, castles, lighthouses, viewpoints, ruins and old city gates, more than 1.5 million of them across Europe and North America, drawn from OpenStreetMap, which is itself free and made by volunteers. A Premium subscription adds more quests per day.

Every walk fills in a hexagon map of where you've been. The map, like the town, costs nothing to explore.