Last year around this time I wrote a post called “Rolf’s Top-10 ‘Reverse-Bucket List’ experiences from 2023,” in which I confessed that I’ve near really been one to create “bucket lists” so much as decide, after the fact, that a given experience was extraordinary enough to have retroactively qualified as bucket-list worthy.
Many of these 2023 “reverse bucket list” adventures (such as climbing Mt. Kenya) were straightforward travel experiences; others (like appearing in a London Daily Mail paparazzi photo, or seeing Vagabonding make a cameo on Showtime’s Billions) were delightful surprises, while yet others (like teaching a writing class in Paris or creating new seasons of my Deviate podcast) were time-honored rituals that only qualify as “bucket list” in relation to a much-younger version of what I expected from life.
2024 offered a similar mix of reverse-bucket list travel adventures, time-honored rituals, and delightful surprises (including experiencing the aurora borealis with Kiki, pictured above, in rural Kansas). Here are my top ten:
1) Taking an epic three-month journey through the South Pacific (and Southeast Asia)
2024 saw me take my longest global journey in five years — and my longest ever since meeting Kiki — namely, a three-month sojourn that took us to Fiji and Vanuatu (by way of Australia) in the South Pacific, as well as Bali, Borneo, and Thailand in Southeast Asia. I reported on some of these experiences on the Dispatches section of this website (as well as my Instagram feed) though I’m saving most of the stories and research from this adventure for my next book — the details of which I will announce later in 2025.
2) Screening a film starring (and co-written by) my wife Kiki for our Kansas art community
In last year’s “reverse bucket list” roundup, I noted that “Kiki and a team of more than 20 mostly women collaborators shot a short film about grief, entitled The Game Camera over the course of six intensive days near our home in rural Kansas.” Kiki and I cowrote the story, which is teased in the above trailer (synopsis: “When a grieving woman installs a night vision camera in her mini horse’s corral, the specter of a human intruder on her rural Kansas ranch makes her reconsider her husband’s death”).
Though The Game Camera won’t be available to the general public until it embarks on the film festival circuit later this year, in November of 2024 we held a sneak preview screening of the film at the Salina Art Center in north-central Kansas. And I must say, there was something thrilling about the way our Kansas community turned out, in a way that made our celebration of rural women artists feel downright cosmopolitan.
VIP attendees including Kansas Poet Laureate Traci Brimhall (who moderated the post-screening Q&A with Kiki and her collaborators), Grammy-nominated songwriter Nicolle Galyon (who comes from Kiki’s hometown, and wrote a song for the film), and Oscar-winning screenwriter Kevin Willmott (whose love for Kansas and involvement with the Salina Art Center was a big inspiration for the project).
3) Producing my 85-year-old father’s YouTube series about saving energy
My father George Potts, who turned 85 this year, has been involved with environmental education initiatives for more than 50 years. In January of 2024, he debuted Energy Green Grandpa, a weekly video series that employs a Mister Rogers-style persona to promote strategies for saving energy, saving money, and reducing your carbon footprint. I helped him produce the episodes (and codesign the corresponding blog), and it was fun to see his time-honed teaching skills shine in a 21-century medium like YouTube, which, among other things, earned him a writeup in Kansas Living Magazine.
In April, the Kansas Association for Conservation and Environmental Education presented my dad with the John K. Strickler Award, which honors “lifetime achievement and leadership in conservation and environmental education.” The commendation read: “George Potts is an exceptional example of someone that cares deeply about providing factual, common-sense education concerning wise use of our resources and the care of our natural world. He has extensive experience as a teacher, college professor and concerned citizen, tasking himself with providing high quality, impactful and useful information to his students. This has helped lay the groundwork for creating generations of informed citizens in creating opinions on what all of us can do to sustain our existence on this planet.”
4) Spotting my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There on Auerbach, Saxony’s “Travel Writing Stairs”
It was very cool to see my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There alongside titles by the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Orhan Pamuk, and Marco Polo on the Kerkermeister Pension’s “Travel Writing Stairs” in Auerbach, Saxony. The Kerkermeister Pension is run by my travel friend and former Paris writing student Adam Lee (pictured here at the top of the stairs), whose travel advice features in the “Vagabonding Voices” section of my first book, Vagabonding.
5) Going for long walks in Kansas (and Borneo, and Switzerland) with Kiki
Kiki and I have always shared a love for hiking — a travel approach I’ve explored in multiple venues, including a podcast episode about long-distance walking at home, and a 2024 New York Times travel article entitled “What’s the Best Way to Explore Kenya? Join a Local Hiking Club.”
In 2024, Kiki and I enjoyed long-distance hikes on three continents, including going for a 20-mile Kansas walk on our wedding anniversary, attempting (unsuccessfully) to summit Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu, and ascending Mount Pilatus in the Swiss Alps.
6) Journeying from island to island in a Pacific country with no functioning domestic airline
I’ve long asserted that what is packaged as “adventure travel” — activities like rock climbing, rafting, or paragliding — rarely yields experiences as memorable as the simple act of forgoing a few comforts and traveling within the local economies of countries unlike your own. When Air Vanuatu went out of business shortly before Kiki and I arrived in Vanuatu, the only way to travel beyond the island of Efate (home to Port Vila, the capital) was to journey by sea, just like normal ni-Vanuatu people do. So it was that we boarded an industrial ferry to the island of Malekula alongside a cohort of local folks headed home after spending time in the capital. The overnight journey took us 16 hours, and — since the interior seats proved stifling in the South Pacific humidity — eventually found us camped out on the open deck with a laid-back cohort of Melanesian families, itinerant laborers, and piles of cargo.
If there’s one twist to our taking a 16-hour industrial ferry to Malekula in a country with no functioning airlines, it’s that — if we wanted to leave the country as scheduled after one week on the outlying island — we had take the same 16-hour industrial ferry back to Vanuatu’s capital from Malekula. One idiosyncrasy of these Vanuatu ferries is that cargo gets boarding priority over passengers, which is why, in the video above, you see Kiki lingering with a crowd of ni-Vanuatu as a forklift laden with Malekulan kava root (prized by the nakamals of Port Vila for its potency) rumbles onto the ferry. Because it was raining that night, we camped under a dining shelter on the open-air top level, and fell asleep on the deck alongside a group of fellow passengers.
Though not all that comfortable or enjoyable, this experience allowed us to embrace true “slow travel” — and to take the journey in the same manner that everyday local people did (in what proved to be an immersive and revelatory way).
7) Hosting two one-week travel writing classes in the heart of Paris
To avoid conflict with the 2024 Paris Olympics, my annual travel writing workshops in the French capital took place the first week of September (rather than July or August). I noted last year that my returning writing students have come to feel like family; half of this cohort have attended each year since 2022, and some first attended as early as 2012. It was a pleasure to work with them again, particularly after some of them had achieved publishing success in venues like The Washington Post, The Solas Awards, Arizona Foothills, and hybrid travel-book publishing.
Though my second one-week Paris travel-memoir writing workshop was technically a beginner class, I was impressed by the engagement, chemistry, and lean-in energy of everyone in the cohort. Kiki led a French cheese tasting both weeks, and Zoom guest-speakers included Chloe Cooper-Jones, Sophfronia Scott, Lavinia Spalding, and Matt Kepnes. For 2025 class offerings, check out the Paris Writing Workshops website.
8) Embarking on Season Six of my (not always) travel-themed podcast, Deviate
Last year I embarked on the sixth season of my Deviate podcast — a season which, due to ongoing work on my new book project, will stretch across more than one year, with a monthly (rather than biweekly) schedule. 2024 guests included Tim Ferriss, Andrew McCarthy, and Alastair Humphreys, as well as a from-the-field audio report from my 2023 walk across northern Thailand with the great Kevin Kelly and a host of other literary and tech luminaries.
Perhaps my favorite 2024 episode was entitled “How Rolf Ruined the 1990s,” and it detailed my experience of co-founding and managing “Swizzlefish,” an early ‘90s Oregon grunge-bandwagon band that originated at a college community so conservative and religious that dancing and R-rated movies were not allowed on campus. This episode tells the idiosyncratic story of how Swizzlefish (and its modest retinue of fans) insinuated its way into Portland’s gritty indie music scene — and how our humble claims to fame were (a) getting banned from performing on our own campus, and (b) playing a show at Burnside Avenue’s all-ages X-Ray Cafe alongside a band (Dimbulb) that had opened for a band (Heatmiser) that had opened for a band (Sprinkler) that had opened for Nirvana.
9) Seeing my two favorite Kansas City sports teams make the playoffs in the same year
Back in late 2016, I retired my Vagablogging weblog, which had been going since 2002, and redesigned rolfpotts.com to incorporate more personal blog topics. At the time, I’d hoped some of the new content would include an ongoing series of posts entitled “sports titles I celebrated.” This was one year after the Kansas City Royals had won the World Series, and — flush from the fan-joy of that triumph — I wanted to investigate the emotional resonance of sports fandom over the course of one’s life.
As it happened, I only ever wrote one “sports titles I celebrated” post, in part because I began to investigate fandom themes in my podcast (with episodes recalling topics like the Wichita Wings indoor soccer team), and in part because my favorite sports teams — in particular the Kansas City Chiefs — began to succeed in ways they never had when I was young. I dug into this phenomenon in a 2020 Deviate episode entitled “A personal history of being a lifelong pro-sports fan,” and a 2024 remix entitled “Sports, superstitions, and sacraments” — both of which were pegged to Chiefs Super Bowl appearances.
The Chiefs went on the win the 2024 Super Bowl (their third title in five years) — a fan-thrill that was made sweeter by the fact that the Kansas City Royals also made it into the postseason later in the year. Kiki grew up a Royals fan, and it was fun to visit Kauffman Stadium with her parents and see our team play an ALDS payoff game against the New York Yankees. The Royals lost the game (and the ALDS), but it was fun to see both of my favorite Kansas City sports teams play postseason games in the same year (something that never happened when I was growing up)
10) Traveling back through time (in Southeast Asia)
Part of the joy of returning to Southeast Asia in my 2024 travels was that it allowed me to introduce a personally meaningful part of the world to Kiki (who, for all her Europe travels, had never before been to Asia). This meant taking her to places like Bangkok’s storied Khao San Road backpackers’ ghetto, and the markets of Chinatown — but the most affecting place I revisited with Kiki was The Atlanta Hotel, near Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, where I spent countless nights in the early ’00s, thanks to its cheap rooms, its vintage restaurant with terrific Thai food, and its chill courtyard swimming pool (which, according to local legend, had once been a snake-pit belonging to a failed 1950s anti-venom chemical company).
One of my favorite features of the little hotel was a glass case in the lobby that featured books written by people who had stayed there over the years. Looking at those wide-ranging titles, I resolved to one day see my own book sitting in that display case. When my Random House editor mailed a few advance copies of my first book to Thailand in late 2002, I felt like I had arrived as an author when the management of The Atlanta agreed to display a copy in their lobby display case.
It’s still there — and showing it to Kiki (after a meal of green curry in the hotel’s still excellent restaurant) 22 years later was a real treat. Indeed, sometimes travel has a way of transporting you through time as it circles you back to the far-flung places you called home (back when you had no idea what “home” might one day look like).
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