Though people have been dreaming up “Bucket Lists” to help focus their travel and life goals for as long as the concept has existed, I have never consciously created one. Granted, I’ve had no shortage of year-to-year travel- and life-goals, but my “bucket list” experiences have typically been realized after the fact.
For example, I didn’t set out to be invited to an event at the White House, but I’ll confess that participating in an Obama-era travel-media summit in December of 2014 was a bucket-list-grade thrill. Similarly, I never had specific ambitions to lecture at Ivy League institutions – though the semester-long writing classes I taught at Penn and Yale back in the 2010s were as indelible as any life-goals I might have dreamed up for a bucket list. And, perhaps most idiosyncratically, I never expected to have a literary cameo as a friend of the protagonist in a supernatural romance novel, though pages 250-251 of Crystal Jordan’s 2011 book Prowl the Night, unexpectedly afforded me just that opportunity.
Since the topic of “reverse-bucket lists” came up on the Thailand-based “Walk and Talk” I joined last December (see item #4 below), I’ve decided to sum up my top 2023 experiences in reverse-bucket list terms. Some of the items (such as teaching my writing classes in Paris) aren’t new to my life — though since they’re all experiences that would have surprised and pleased much younger version of myself, I’ll list them here (in no particular order) using a reverse-bucket framework.
1) Seeing Vagabonding make a second cameo on Showtime’s Billions
When folks started messaging me in late October to say that Vagabonding had appeared on the Showtime series Billions, I assumed it was a rerun of the Season 6 episode “Burn Rate,” when Eva Victor’s character showed my book to a coworker in her office while she was fantasizing about a long-term journey. As it happens, Vagabonding made a second Billions appearance, this time in a Season 7 episode called “Axe Global“, when Victor’s boss (played by Asia Kate Dillon) finds a copy of the book wedged in the couch shortly after Victor has left their office to embark on a vagabonding trip to Morocco.
Elsewhere in my literary world, my fifth book The Vagabond’s Way, was the subject of a monthly online book club throughout 2023. I remixed many of these Zoom discussions into Deviate podcast episodes, including “The best age to travel is whatever age you are now” (e214); “How travelers create quests and find community” (e217); “Travel can return you to a kind of childhood” (e223); “Travelers experience more when they slow down and ask lots of questions” (e226); “Seek places where your very presence makes you interesting” (e231); and “The best journeys explore mindscapes as well as landscapes” (e233).
2) Summiting Africa’s second-highest mountain amid a Kenya sojourn
Though I grew up somewhat familiar with Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, I didn’t know much about Africa’s second-highest peak until Kiki and I began to research a summer journey to Kenya. We wound up climbing Mount Kenya’s Lenana summit (which at 16,400′ is the highest mountain Kiki and I have ever climbed) over the course of three days in August, taking the Chogoria route from the southeast.
Mountaineering was just one aspect of our three week Kenya sojourn, which also took us through the Samburu regions north of Archer’s Post, out to the “singing wells” of the Ndoto Hills, on a Land Cruiser safari in and around Shaba National Reserve, and on a remarkable day-trek through the waterfall studded landscape of Kahunira with Lets Drift, a Kenyan hiking club.
3) Co-writing a film starring (and co-produced by) my wife Kiki
In June, Kiki and a team of more than 20 mostly women collaborators shot a short film entitled The Game Camera over the course of six intensive days near our home in rural Kansas. I helped Kiki co-write the script, which explores the ways that grief can blur into something resembling mental illness. Kansas-born Bree Elrod (best known for the 2021 film Red Rocket) costarred alongside Kiki.
The working log-line for The Game Camera was: “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.” Now in post-production, we hope to take it out onto the international film-festival circuit later in 2024.
4) Crossing northern Thailand on foot as part of a “Walk and Talk”
In December I had the honor of participating in a seven-day, 100-kilometer “Walk and Talk” across northern Thailand. Organized by futurist Kevin Kelly and writer-photographer Craig Mod, a “Walk and Talk” mixes long-distance hiking during the day with an in-depth, one-topic-per-night “Jeffersonian conversation” over dinner each evening.
Our ten hand-picked participants, strangers to each other at the outset, took turns introducing philosophical topics to discuss. Overnight luggage was forwarded during the day, which meant we hiked carrying only day packs. This allowed everyone to focus on conversing, enjoying the “side-by-side intimacy” of the shared trek as each day played out. It made for a unique and engaging week, and I hope to replicate my own such event(s) in the future.
5) Hosting an onstage Q&A with actor and author Andrew McCarthy
In the 1980s I used to go to Wichita’s Towne West Mall to see Andrew McCarthy movies like Pretty in Pink and Weekend at Bernie’s. Then, in the 2010s, I began to spot Andrew’s first book near my own in the travel section of bookstores, and see his byline in the same travel magazines (publications like National Geographic Traveler and Afar) that I’ve written for over the years. Thus, it felt like a full-circle moment to share the stage with Andrew at Wichita’s Crown Uptown Theatre last May, discussing his Camino de Santiago memoir, Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain.
Other notable author events in 2023 included speaking to study abroad students at Oregon’s George Fox University in February, having an onstage conversation with Pulitzer finalist (and fellow Kansas Notable Book award winner) Chloe Cooper Jones at the Kansas Book Festival in September, and giving a keynote at a YPO Colorado event in November.
6) Being the subject of a London Daily Mail paparazzi photo
A photo of Kiki and I landed in the gossip pages of the Daily Mail last September, not because we’re recognizably famous, but because we attended a London-based wedding that featured a number of English movie and TV celebrities. Perhaps wanting to cover all their paparazzi bases, the above picture was included (sans caption) in an online photo roundup later that same day.
As it turned out, this was one of the few photos we have of ourselves from that day, since — out of respect for the groom and bride (Kiki’s dear friend, and former drama-school roommate) — we were asked not to brandish our own cameras at the ceremony or reception. In keeping with that request I won’t mention the wedding’s participants or locations here, though I will say we felt lucky to be a part of such a beautiful day.
7) Hosting three one-week travel writing classes in the heart of Paris
I’ve been teaching an assortment travel-memoir writing classes in Paris since my first guest-lecturer stint at the American Academy in 2002 — but it feels like I finally hit my stride with the independent one-week Travel Memoir Workshops I’ve been hosting in the First Arrondissement since COVID travel restrictions lifted in 2022.
2023 included three different groups of fun, talented, creatively generous student writers in July and August, including a cohort of returning travel-memoir students who have come to feel like family. I’ll be offering two different September sessions in 2024; more information online at the Paris Writing Workshops website.
8) Completing a fifth season of my travel-adjacent podcast, Deviate
In the six years since I first launched Deviate, my podcast has been a great platform to explore issues — things like dinosaurs, mixtapes, and Satanic Backward Masking — that I don’t typically cover as an author and travel writer.
Season Six was unusual in that it featured a disproportionate number of travel-themed issues, in tandem with the 2022 debut of The Vagabond’s Way. Popular episodes included “Integrating love of travel & love of home” with philosopher Chloe Cooper Jones; “The Mystical High Church of Luck: Decoding Las Vegas” with Ari Shaffir; and “Travel contracts your possessions and expands your life” with Eric Weiner.
9) Seeing my childhood favorite NFL team win another Super Bowl
I have, over the years, occasionally written about sports, but — with the exception of my 2012 Sports Illustrated feature about the murder of a small-college football player in Kansas — I typically write about sports in the context of my own sports fandom. This includes podcast episodes about my childhood love of the Wichita Wings indoor soccer team, and my lifelong-NFL-obsessive joy at the Kansas City Chiefs’ 2020 Super Bowl LIV appearance.
It was thanks to that Super Bowl podcast episode that a Vagabonding fan who works for the Chiefs offered me tickets to a regular season game against the Los Angeles Chargers (see photo above). Thus, it was especially satisfying to see that same 2022-23 Chiefs team go on win Super Bowl LVII against the Philadelphia Eagles in February.
10) Feeling the seasons from my own corner of rural Kansas
2023 marked my 25th year of working as a travel writer, as my first paid article (an essay about Las Vegas) appeared in Salon back in 1998. Yet in a quarter century of writing about places around the world, I retain a stubborn affection for my own corner of Kansas, the place where I inevitably return from my various far-flung travels each year.
And indeed, amid all of my reverse-bucket list accomplishments in 2023, some of my most satisfying experiences happened in my own back yard. This included going on regular long-distance walks (wandering as many as 20 miles at a time) on the dirt roads near where I live; regularly visiting my parents in McPherson County and Kiki’s parents in Rice County; gathering nearly a dozen friends to help carry out a controlled burn of our north pasture in March; celebrating Mother’s Day by spotting baby bison at Maxwell Wildlife Refuge; celebrating Midsummer in and around our barn with an extended group of friends; and celebrating New Year’s Eve with a house-to-house “progressive dinner” with neighbors and family.
Here’s hoping 2024 offers up a few reverse-bucket list moments of its own!
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