Of my three categories of post-pandemic hopes and dreams (little everyday things; in-betweeners; and big crazy bucket listing dreams), this is the easiest list to fill. If anything, the challenge is reining it in. Now, I’m not trying to rein it in to a manageable level. This is a bucket list. These ideas are inherently unmanageable – that’s the charm of them. But I could go on for days, spinning fantasies about all of the wild and crazy things I want to do. Most of them are related to travel, and there’s a bit of adventure baked in here and there, and some Practical Adult-Style Life Goals just for good measure. So, to quote the Founding Father who really embodies the spirit of hip-hop, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton: “Le’s go.”

• Visit the most forbidding and remote continent: Antarctica. Do the Polar Plunge in the honest-to-goodness Southern Ocean, hike on the Antarctic Peninsula, and paddle a kayak through shards of sea ice. Bonus points for whales.
• Closer to home, knock off forty-two more high peaks to become an Adirondack 46er.
• Visit all of the National Parks in the U.S. and Canada.
• Hike the Inca Trail.
• Pack raft from Colorado to Utah. (Note to self: see if my brother wants to come; I’ll bet he would.)
• Run a marathon. (Wineglass, if I can get in. And I would love to run Marine Corps someday – my hometown marathon.)
• Go on an African safari, or maybe more than one – because I don’t know if I can squeeze everything I want to do and see into one trip. I want to paddle the Okavango in Botswana, see elephants and lions, sleep under the stars in Zambia, meet mountain gorillas in Rwanda, look out over the Zambezi and Victoria Falls, climb Kilimanjaro, and taste wine in South Africa. So… that’s at least four trips. Or five?
• Thru-hike the Tour de Mont Blanc in France, Switzerland, and Italy, and also the South West Coast Path in England.
• Related: take part in a Mass Trespass.
• Buy my forever house and renovate it to be exactly what I want.
• Take a hiking trip to the Swiss and Austrian Alps. (We’ve already decided: this is the destination the next time we make it to Europe.)
• Stomp on grapes in Tuscany.
• Climb the ladder at my current job. For the first time in ages, I feel like I am just where I want to be, and now all I want to do is learn, grow, and work my way into more responsibility. It feels wonderful to be excited about my career again!
• Dive with sea turtles in Hawaii (after I get that scuba certification I talked about last week…)
• Kayak the Gorges du Verdon. Oh, and sleep in a French chateau!
• Hike the Presidential Traverse in the White Mountains.
• Visit northern Africa – ride a camel in Morocco and take a Nile cruise (and try not to think too much about Agatha Christie).
• See the Japanese Alps ablaze with color in October.
• Swim under a waterfall at Havasupai.
• Write a mystery novel.

Just twenty things! That’s not too many, right? Fortunately I have a willing adventure buddy in Steve; so far he’s been up for pretty much every crazy idea I’ve tossed his way. (He’d balk at climbing the Stairway to Heaven in Austria, so that might be a girlfriends’ getaway. I bet my sister-in-law would go with me.) On a fun note, a couple of these wild and crazy ideas are in the works – albeit in very early stages. Now I’d better toddle off and check my vacation leave balance.

What wild and crazy things do you plan to get up to once we can travel again?