What’s on your bucket list?

A COVID-19 vaccine now sounds like it might be only months away. Dramatic improvements in the treatment of COVID patients has also resulted in fewer deaths. With theses two tidbits of good news, we decided almost one year after our last trip, to book our first travel plans post pandemic. Even then, the trip is still scheduled for over 10 months away in September 2021.

Like so many others, our travel plans have, for the first time in our lives, become a question of IF and not WHEN. For many of us over 70, travel is also a question of how much time we think we have left to travel? How long will we remain healthy enough to enjoy the journey(s).

One of the books on my bookshelf is called “1000 places to see before you die”(Patricia Shultz). I am grateful to look back and see that my travel life has been one of many blessings. I have had the privilege to see dozens if not hundreds of the places listed. Yet even with my many experiences there are many more oceans to cross, many more places to go, and many more cultures to see.

Still, if I could see as many as a dozen places a year, and could live and travel for another 10 years, the chances of me being able to see EVERYTHING is highly unlikely. Given the circumstances, the chances that I would even want to go to some places is highly unlikely. For some of us, the political and human rights beliefs in some countries is now a turn off and even a danger. For some of us the poverty, that we once might have been able to ignore, is no longer something we can ignore. The pain of others seems to hit us differently – more personally. For some of us the distance, or the mode of transportation, is now a barrier to mobility. Old backs do not appreciate cramped plane seats. Old bladders do not appreciate buses with no washrooms. Old joints do not appreciate springless trucks on bumpy off-road historic sites. Cruise ship tenders can pose balance problems.

I am generally speaking a very positive person. Never very good at math and even less good at looking at things in any kind of negative way, even in my sixties, I was naïve about how quickly life’s circumstances can change. I had always resisted the idea of a bucket list. I denied for the most part, that there was a possibility that I might not be able to do anything/everything I wanted. It was just a question of when I got around to it! Now, in my seventies, and under the “COVID cloud”, I am, for the first time, writing my travel bucket list. And I am surprised at how short it is!

With age (and aging bodies) plus geopolitical issues plus COVID-19, there is also a reality that, even if we had all the money it would take to see the remaining list of the world’s most wonderful places, time and circumstances may have taken its toll and some of the places may have to come off my list.

With my limitations in mind, I now find myself creating a bucket list of things to do – while I still can. The list is not as big as it once was. The list is much more prioritized toward the destinations I would like to see as soon as travel is considered prudent and safe again. To many of the people I know, trips to see family that we haven’t seen in over a year is their first order of priority. To many others, it is a trip back to their warmer southern second winter community.

We all still live with a small bit of fear that the travel postponements caused by COVID, which were once thought to last six months have now turned into a wait of more than a year. Should the second or even the third wave of COVID happen, who knows when we might travel.

And so, today, despite not knowing when we will get back to our winter home, and despite not yet knowing when we will see our kids, we booked priority number three of our bucket list. The trip is scheduled for September 2021. Like so many others, if the trip has to be delayed, we can get a future travel credit but not our money back. Looks like, as with many others, like it or not, we have become the interest free money lenders to the airlines and cruise ship companies.

Reality has set in – travel is likely to be flagged with a question mark at least for the foreseeable future. But when it happens again, the question on many of our minds is – To paraphrase a well-known credit card company

“What’s on your bucket list”?