Bucket List update

~ MaryG

What are your top 10 travel destinations?

Between 2023 and 2025, I was on a real run with my Bucket List. I did all this stuff:

Grand Canyon ✅ 2023

Paris ✅ 2023

Finger Lakes & Hot Air Ballooning ✅ 2024

Outdoor Concert at Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) ✅ 2024

Yellowstone National Park ✅ 2024

Saw the Northern Lights ✅ 2024 & 2025 (right in our own town—we got lucky, twice!)

Key West ✅ 2025

Ireland ✅ 2025 (my 60th birthday trip)

But I haven’t really been anywhere for over a year now. This is due to my husband’s health. His shitty knees took a turn for the worse after our trip to Ireland last summer. He ended up getting two total knee replacements in 2025/26. If you haven’t heard, knee replacements are a real bitch. After that, he got a mysterious set of symptoms that may be partly related to the knees that I hope are finally subsiding. Fingers crossed! He’s back to planning for the future—he’s mapping out a new vegetable garden and signed a contract to purchase solar panels for our home.

I’m hopeful that we can start to travel again soon. I’ve rebooked a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine, which I had to cancel last year due to his knees.

Nowadays, everything I book is cancellable. For decades, I never canceled a single trip, but now that I’m in my sixties, I know that shit can and does happen. I had to cancel my planned weeklong Dance Camp because I got plantar fasciitis in my left heel. Oh well. These things happen.

My calendar is always marked with the last day I can cancel any trip without losing too much money.

Magical moment in Yellowstone National Park, August 2024, shortly before we became grandparents for the first time

26 thoughts on “Bucket List update”

  1. Wow! That was a busy few years.
    We haven’t travelled at all this year due to my bad knee that I’m still waiting to have fixed.
    But please stop saying the surgery is a bitch. I’m nervous enough already.
    🥴
    Enjoy Acadia. Can’t believe I live here and have never been.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Sorry, yeah. Hopefully yours will be easier and only partial. Two full is a lot!
      I went to Acadia as a kid in 1976 – and have been wanting to return forever.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Parking is such an issue we never even wanted to go in the summer. You have to reserve spots months in advance and we’re by the seat of our pants travelers. Never knowing where we’ll be at a certain hour to park.
        😉

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  3. It’s traveling lighter, able to shift! Glad your husband’s doing better, though. Let the adventures (carefully) begin again!

    Liked by 1 person

  5. I like your bucket list. I might be headed out to Austin in early 2027. A friend’s son is doing an internship there and we might tag along to check it out. I hear is a pretty cool town.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I hear that too! I’ve never been anywhere in Texas (besides the airport). Austin is the one spot that calls to me. The South x Southwest Music Festival sounds cool. Maybe you’ll go!

      Liked by 1 person

  9. What a run that was — Yellowstone, Ireland for your 60th, and catching the Northern Lights from your own town twice is the kind of luck most people wait a lifetime for. Sending your husband a good recovery; those knee replacements sound brutal, and it says a lot that he’s already mapping out a vegetable garden and looking ahead. Acadia in the fall will be well worth the wait. And congratulations on becoming grandparents — a whole new kind of adventure ahead.

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  10. I’m pleased that plans for the future are back on the horizon for you 😊. Covid had one true positive after effect – a new era of “ free cancellation”, before that we all relied solely on travel insurance to cover us in case of an emergency! It’s the first option I tick when exploring now 😊

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