Ready for adventure? Expand your horizons from home

(BPT) - Spending more time at home can be a great opportunity to find new avenues for expanding your horizons and learning more about the world — and beyond. Fortunately, there are plenty of enjoyable ways that you can explore different regions, cultures and even time periods from the comfort and safety of your own home.

Here are just a few ideas for fun and entertaining exploration:

Virtual travel

If you’ve been suffering from wanderlust over the past several months, it’s now possible to armchair travel to almost any location in the world, thanks to the internet. Hundreds of virtual tours of exciting and exotic foreign cities, colorful regions on every continent, fascinating historical sites and world-class museums are out there for you to discover. Choose some of your favorite countries or continents and let yourself experience the many wonders of the world — with no passport required!

Here are just a few examples:

• Scale the heights of the majestic Himalayas
• Feast your eyes on Peru's Machu Picchu
• Explore the archaeological wonders of the Egyptian Pyramids
• Lose yourself in the mists of China's Yellow Mountains
• Dive into Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Immersive gaming

Through state-of-the-art visuals that transport you back in time as well as across the sea, new games like Port Royale 4 by Kalypso Media let you set sail with 17th-century galleons from Spain, England, France and the Netherlands toward the Caribbean islands. In Port Royale 4, you take control of a colony as a young, ambitious governor, eager to learn what it takes to manage and grow your settlement into a bustling city.

In this visually stunning game, you can hone your strategic skills, navigating detailed sea maps to avoid stormy weather or outwit pirates, then challenging privateers or fleets from other nations as you engage in hair-raising naval battles. You also learn how to develop production chains connecting multiple Caribbean islands and create complex trade routes as you earn more fame to help unlock town buildings, ships and more. In this game, you can take on four extensive single-player campaigns with a choice of four types of characters — Explorer, Merchant, Buccaneer and Pirate — each providing its own advantages and disadvantages as you follow each nation on its path to supremacy.

Check out all the entertaining and engaging game titles available at Kalypsomedia.com.

Discover outer space

This planet not enough? Check out these space-related websites to take you out of this world:

• The International Space Station website lets you spend time on the space station as well as getting a live view of the Earth from way up there.
• Keep up on the news about the latest rocket launches and space exploration, then immerse yourself in missions from Apollo 11 to the Mars Rover on NASA.gov.
• Visit Stellarium.org, which allows you to view a realistic night sky just as you might be able to see using a telescope — but with guidance to understand what stars and planets you're seeing.
• Enjoy amazing views of outer space courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope at Hubblesite.org.

Then you can expand on what you learn about outer space online by investing in a home telescope, allowing you to view nearby stellar or planetary phenomena from your backyard.

Don't let staying at home limit your horizons. There's plenty to explore and enjoy now, from right where you are.