ROCKPORT — Marco Polo beckons. Kit Carson calls. Stanley traipsing through the jungle in search of Livingstone seems promising.

So many adventures, so little time.

Especially for a father of three preschoolers who left his family for two successive summers while he retraced the voyage of Leif Ericson, the Viking explorer considered the first to sail to the New World.

W. Hodding Carter’s account of an admittedly quixotic notion that blossomed into a 1,900-mile journey in a 54-foot replica of a square-rigged Viking cargo ship is detailed in “A Viking Voyage.”

Snorri, the opened-decked wooden vessel built at a Maine boatyard, offered no protection from the elements to Carter and his 11-member crew, who came perilously close to crashing into icebergs and being eaten by polar bears before arriving triumphant in northern Newfoundland.

But the 37-year-old writer, whose previous sailing experience was highlighted by flipping his family’s Sunfish under a barge moored on the Mississippi, says he has no place among the current crop of author-adventurers who push the envelope to showcase their outdoors skills or macho derring-do.

Rather, he sees himself as Everyman, following in the footsteps of the famous, whom he suspects are more like you and me than history might have us believe.

“I think of myself as the average guy who’s decided that he’s just going to make that odd dream work,” says Carter, who has no shortage of odd dreams.

Eight years ago, he and a friend traveled west on a rubber raft, foot and horseback from St. Louis to the Pacific, a trip chronicled in Carter’s first book, “Westward Whoa: In the Wake of Lewis and Clark.”

Also on his resume: paddling a canoe along the route laid out by Thoreau in Maine’s North Woods, pursuing John Wilkes Booth by minivan across northern Virginia and finishing second in the Louisiana Oyster Eating Contest. (He ate 135 oysters in 15 minutes).

His writing, in magazines as well as books, weaves history, travel and adventure, all larded with self-effacing humor.

Carter’s earlier exploits seemed like baby stuff after his 87 days at sea as Leif the Lucky and the advance work that preceded them. He lined up Lands’ End, the Wisconsin mail-order clothier, as sponsor, selected his crew and found a boat builder, Rob Stevens of Phippsburg, who was so intrigued by the project that he became part of the crew.

The initial voyage across the Davis Strait, the big stretch of open water between Greenland and Baffin Island, ended when Snorri’s rudder assembly broke and the Canadian Coast Guard had to be summoned to tow the boat back to Greenland.

“I was down and depressed about it, but I knew this was where we had to fight back and learn from our mistakes,” said Carter, who made a commitment to come back better prepared the following year. “It’s almost like I needed that failure to make things work out right.”

While preparing to resume the voyage, he went along with a suggestion that he buy himself some Viking clothing that would give him a better sense of what it was like to be sailing in Ericson’s shoes 1,000 years earlier.

The custom-made threads were costly, but worth every penny. While other crew members wearing modern foul-weather gear shivered in the cold, wet conditions, Carter was warm as toast surrounded by 30 pounds of wool and leather.

“I looked like a big brown marshmallow,” he recalled. “I’m dancing around like Viking Man. The heat is shooting up my arms.”

The clothing was an eye-opener that helped change his sensibility about the Vikings.

“Maybe they weren’t these tough, brutal, gruesome guys,” he said. “Half of them were wimps like me. They just had the right clothes.”

Despite access to radio, e-mail and instant communication via satellite, Carter also found himself developing a different mindset about the passage of time and the need for patience.

He recalled how the crew’s morale plummeted as Snorri was becalmed for two weeks in northern Labrador.

“We made 100 miles in 12 days, and that was all by rowing,” he said. “It was very humbling, and it put us very much on a par with the Vikings.”

Still, none of the hardships Carter endured equaled the pain of being separated from his wife and children for so long. He decided that on his next adventure, they will travel as a family.

That is why Carter, his wife Lisa, 4-year-old twins Anabel and Eliza, and Helen, 2 1/2, are getting set to spend a year or so on a deserted island, an undertaking loosely patterned on “Swiss Family Robinson.”

After that, Carter might set his sights on something more ambitious. One particularly intriguing possibility: crossing the Alps by elephant, more than 2,000 years after Hannibal accomplished the feat.