Quarter-Century Bucket List

One year, a quarter of a century ago, I was carved out of my mother’s stomach and began my turn at life’s adventure.

When I first learned what a bucket list was, I very much liked the idea. It’s like a to-do list for your life, but instead of the list being filled with menial tasks that you have to write down to make sure you do, it is filled with amazing experiences and adventures that you one day hope to conquer.

Morbid as it may be, I have been aware of the fact that any of us could die at any moment for some time now (that meteor is coming for us whether we know about it ahead of time or not), and although I don’t let thoughts like this stifle my everyday choices and risk taking, I do let it inspire my future adventures and decision-making.

So now, in honor of my successful survival of 9,139 days on this planet, I have written my (non-exhaustive/travel-esque) bucket list:

• Hike the Te Araroa trail (the length of New Zealand) (bonus points for saving Middle Earth)
• Walk as far as I can in one day along the Great Wall and camp out on top (bonus points for befriending a panda)
• Eat an animal that I killed (bonus points if supervised by a rabbi)
• Hike Aconcagua in Patagonia (bonus points for winter summit)
• Visit Machu Pichu (bonus points for discovering new ruins)
• Kayak in Alaska (bonus points if I make it to Mexico)
• Spend a year traveling/working around Australia (bonus points for not being killed by something poisonous)
• Hitchhike across the entire US (bonus points for each motorcycle sidecar)
• Scuba dive with whales, sharks, dolphins, or sea lions (bonus points for riding one)
• Go skydiving (bonus points if from space)
• Go paragliding or hang gliding (bonus points if done in a Superman costume)
• Visit the Great Barrier Reef (bonus points for finding Atlantis)
• Bungee jump (bonus points if done as a secret agent)
• Fly around in a hot air balloon (bonus points for circumnavigating the Earth)
• Dog sledding (bonus points if under the Northern Lights)
• Sail a boat (bonus points if I circumnavigate the globe)
• Go to Antarctica (bonus points for getting naked outside)
• Attend a World Cup Final (bonus points for America)
• Go to the Olympics (bonus points for competing)
• Shake hands with a world leader (bonus points for a high-five)

Now, you may be thinking, “that list is quite unrealistic”, but that’s what bucket lists are supposed to be; you’re not supposed to be able to just go out and check everything off in the course of a week. This is a list for life. Because when you kick the bucket, you don’t want to make a mess for everyone to clean up after (get it!?).

More importantly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone reading this.

Whether this is your first visit to Halfway Anywhere, or if you have been a reader since the Fryer Brazil days, knowing that there is at least one person out there deriving some sort of utility from this mess of words makes it worth all the effort (tear).

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