Maybe I should make a bucket list

My journaling prompt this morning was to name two things that are still on my bucket list. I… don’t have a bucket list. The first two things that jumped to mind were travel-related: I want to go to Italy to eat, and I want to spend significant time in the British Isles, in London, in the castles of Ireland or Scotland, and along the coast and cliffs, smelling the sea and experiencing the landscape where so much of my favorite literature takes place.

Every idea after those was also travel related. I want to sit in the redwood forests of northern California and look up. I want to explore Harlem, the heart of so much of America’s great art and literature and music and culture, and the birthplace of the American civil rights movement.

And just as I couldn’t pick one place in the British Isles, I don’t want to limit myself just to Italy. It doesn’t have to be Italy! If I have an opportunity to go to anyplace in Europe, I’ll go.

This is obviously more than two things. So I tried reframing the question to this: if I were to die right now, what would I be sad I didn’t get to experience yet? That’s when the redwoods came up. The other thing that came up was that I don’t want to just go to one place in Europe for a week and then come home. I want to spend significant time traveling all over Europe (and the rest of the world if we’re lucky enough to live that long and have the money for it) with my husband. I want to take weeks or months to explore, to take trains, to spend time in whatever places we decide we want to go once we land. It’d be fun to visit friends along the way.

I’m sure if I were to sit down and make an actual bucket list, there’d be a lot of stuff on it, but I think the thing I want most is to spend several weeks taking trains and visiting places and people with my notebook and camera, experiencing the wonders of humans and the beauty we create.