BUCKET LIST

For Summer 2018


  • Learn the Japanese alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana
  • Remember all the officially approved Kanji (this one is ambitious)
  • Understand Shinto
  • Find and read a book about the Fujiwara clan
  • Buy Japanese sweets
  • Take some nice photos of 30th Street Station, Philadelphia and donate them to WikiCommons
  • Take a mural arts tour in Philadelphia
  • Eat French-Canadian sugar pie
  • Buy maple syrup candies
  • Hear enough French Canadian to understand it easily, for example, by going on tours
  • Go in a French Canadian bookshop and see what people are reading

Past bucket list items


This isn't quite a bucket list, but I don't know what to call it.  I was going to write one, but the list of 'places to see' and 'things to do' seemed too banal.   I had no idea which, if any of those things would turn out to be really worthwhile. So this is the list of things which, in retrospect, turned out to be worthwhile, whether I was expecting and planning to do them or not.
  1. Reducing my possessions to 100 things for the trip. It's all I need, and easy to move around
  2. Spending a couple of days in Greenwich, London, instead of trying to visit it from Central London
  3. Crossing the Atlantic by ship on the Queen Mary 2
  4. Joining a Toastmasters club in Philadelphia
  5. Cycling around the Amish farm country in Lancaster County
  6. Searching for and finding horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Estuary
  7. Seeing the Phillies play Cincinnati at an evening baseball game
  8. Crossing the Benjamin Franklin bridge between Philadelphia and Camden on foot
  9. Taking the train all the way across the United States
  10. Downloading Kindle on my laptop and organizing myself a reading program with virtual books
  11. Spending three weeks at Magical Cottage near Joshua Tree National Park
  12. Seeing the San Andreas fault line and the Salton Sea from Key View in Joshua Tree
  13. Watching the full moon rise over the Joshua Tree forest and boulder piles
  14. Having a polarising filter perpetually stuck to the end of my camera
  15. Staying at the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite
  16. The view of Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point
  17. Learning to play golf (well at least having a little bit of a try at it)
  18. Driving Route 20 between Bend in Oregon and West Yellowstone
  19. Hanging out in Rapid City, South Dakota for a few weeks, even though nobody else could understand why

Stuff we didn't get to do that we kind of regret, or stuff we know we want to do

  1. Visiting the statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in New York
  2. Walking up and down the mall in Washington DC, doing all the tourist things
  3. Going up the Delaware towards its source
  4. Driving all round the Salton Sea in California 
  5. Mike wanted to do a Segway tour but he gave up the idea when he saw the price
  6.   Seeing a movie at a drive-in movie theater
  7. Going to a gun range