How to Create Your Travel Bucket List

Do you have a bucket list? You know, your wish list of things you want to do before you “kick the bucket.” What about a bucket list of places you want to travel to? If you’re like me, those two lists often overlap.

As my older (by eight years) husband often reminds me, he is in the “4th Quarter” of his life, so we are determined to make the most of the time we have left together. If that sounds serious and urgent, it is! Who knows how much time each of us has, so why wait to do all the things and see all the places you’ve dream of exploring and experiencing?

It sounds trite, but time passes quickly. If you are not intentional about making lists and prioritizing the items on it, you may miss out. That’s what we discovered about a decade ago. Once our girls graduated college and became more independent, we had more freedom (and funds) to begin traveling more.

Six months before my 50th birthday, I declared I wanted to wake up in a different country when I hit the mid-century mark. The destination choice was easy to make. We both have Irish blood running through our veins (although less than we thought post-Ancestry.com test results) and longed to explore the Emerald Isle.

I began my research and planned out a three-week itinerary to drive around the entire Island, starting in Northern Ireland and finishing in the Republic of Ireland (with a weekend trip to Scotland halfway through to see our daughter who was attending the University of Edinburgh at the time). I will write about that trip in a future post. For this post, I wanted to focus on how this trip kicked off our desire to travel to other places we’ve been dreaming about.

Before our plane left the Dublin Airport runway heading for home, we began making a list of places we want to go. By the time we touched down on the U.S. runway, we had our Travel Bucket List fine-tuned and prioritized, with target dates for each destination.

Before I lose you, I want to emphasize it did NOT take the entire flight to make our Bucket List! It only took us about an hour to put the list together. We spent the rest of the time excitedly discussing destinations and dreaming of future travels.

Making a travel bucket list doesn’t have to be overwhelming or detailed (to start with). If you don’t have one, what are you waiting for? The younger you are, the longer the list can be and the more time you will have to check off the items.

Remember that Bucket Lists are ultimately wish lists, so feel free to dream big because you never know what might happen. Better to have a list to check off than just hoping you can do something “someday” or, worse, lamenting you didn’t do something when you had the chance.

Being intentional about creating a list and plotting out potential timeframes has allowed us to check off several items from our Travel Bucket List in the last eight years, including visiting 12 countries and 22 states in America

Tips for Making a Travel Bucket List

1. Start by writing down every place you want to visit without thinking about the order, logistics or money involved. (You can whittle it down later.) If you are doing this step as a couple, make separate lists you can later compare, discuss and prioritize together.

2. Review your list and divide them into three categories: high priority (must see/do/visit), medium priority (would like to see/do/visit) and low priority (would be nice to see/do/visit but it’s OK if I don’t).

3. Prioritize each list. You can prioritize in different ways: most important to least important, affordability (with time to save for more expensive trips), activity level (from most active/physical to least), life stage (family, empty nesters, retirement, seniors), geographical, themes, etc.

4. Look at the list and make notes, such as if there is a specific time of year you want/need to take the trip, time needed (weekend, week, etc.), expense level, or any other information that would help in organizing/planning.

5. Consider combining items in the same general geographic area or with common themes.

6. Get a calendar out and do some short-term and long-term planning. Do you have a milestone birthday/anniversary coming up? See if one of your items can be checked off to commemorate it.

Other tips:

If you travel for business, consider extending your trip to include one of your items. (For example, when I found out I would be going to Toronto for a conference, I looked at a map and saw that Niagara Falls was a short drive away. I then made plans for my husband to join me, and we flew in a week early to stay in and explore Niagara Falls.

Plan to take one local trip, one national trip and one international trip each year. This is a good idea if you think you have limited time to get your travel in. For example, my husband and I figure, God willing, we have a good decade of international traveling years left before mobility might make some travel more challenging.