When Bucket Lists Become Tuesdays
What happens when extraordinary starts feeling ordinary.
I can still remember almost everything about my first international trip.
Not just the places, but the details that probably shouldn’t matter after all these years. The Delta L-1011 from Cincinnati to London Gatwick. At the time, flying Delta across the Atlantic felt impossibly exotic. From London we connected onto British Airways for Leningrad (yes, it was still called Leningrad then) and somewhere during that journey I realized the world was so much bigger than I’d ever imagined.
Everything about that trip seemed extraordinary. The airports felt exotic. The food was unusual. Street signs were in different languages. Even simple errands like boarding a tram carried a sense of adventure because I had no idea how they were supposed to work. Finding money meant searching for a bank or exchange office to exchange travelers checks. Nobody had smartphones, translation apps, or GPS. Getting a little lost wasn’t poor planning; it was simply part of traveling…and a real risk…which for a first-time international traveler was slightly terrifying.
What I remember most isn’t any single landmark I saw. It’s the feeling that every hour held the possibility of something I’d never experienced before.
Today, almost all of those things have become second nature.
Landing in another country rarely raises my pulse. If I need cash, there’s usually an ATM a few steps away. If I can’t read a sign or a menu, my phone can translate it in seconds. Hotels, train schedules, restaurant recommendations, even obscure visa rules now live in my pocket. Increasingly, people are asking AI to build detailed itineraries before they’ve even booked their plane tickets.
Travel has never been easier. Wonder, however, still takes work.
It’s tempting to conclude that technology has somehow stolen the magic. Certainly, some of the uncertainty has disappeared. But the more I think about it, the less I believe technology is the real story…the bigger change has been me.
The first passport stamp is unforgettable because you’ve never had one before. The first overnight flight feels magical because you’ve never watched the sun rise over the Atlantic. The first country where nobody speaks your language leaves an impression that stays with you for decades.
Eventually, if you’re fortunate enough to keep traveling like I’ve been able to, those experiences stop being firsts. They don’t become less remarkable, they simply become familiar. Somewhere along the way, bucket-list moments quietly turn into Tuesdays.
That realization hit me recently while looking back through photos from my recent trip to South America. In the span of about twenty-four hours, I flew into Brazil, crossed by taxi into Colombia, hired a private boat into Peru, then wandered back into Brazil that evening for a caipirinha before flying onwards into Colombia the next morning.
Objectively, that’s a ridiculous sentence. Yet while I was living it, it felt completely normal to me. Not because those places had become ordinary, but because I'd slowly become accustomed to living experiences that once would have sounded impossible to me.
Maybe that’s why I’ve found myself gravitating toward strange little milk-run flights lately. Tiny airplanes hopping between airports that almost nobody has heard of. Remote regions that will never appear on a “Top 10 Places to Visit” list. Places I probably wouldn’t have considered twenty years ago because I was too busy chasing first the thrill of an international trip…then new countries…then every country.
I wondered whether I was simply moving the goalposts. Had I become so spoiled by travel that I needed increasingly obscure experiences just to feel excited again?
I’m not so sure.
The more I’ve reflected on it, the more I think what I’ve been chasing isn’t obscure aircraft or forgotten airports at all.
I’m chasing the ability to see the world the way I once did. Not because I knew less, but because everything was new.
That feeling I had stepping onto that L-1011 all those years ago. The sense that I didn’t know exactly what the day would bring. That almost every experience had the potential to surprise me.
Children don’t stand in front of a waterfall wondering whether it’s one of the ten best in the world. They don’t compare today’s sunset to the last fifty sunsets they’ve seen.
They simply look.
Somewhere along the way, many of us stop looking quite that way. Experience gives us perspective. The challenge is not letting it cost us our sense of wonder.
Sometimes that means choosing the tiny airport over the major hub. Sometimes it means wandering down the street that wasn't in the guidebook instead of following the crowds. Sometimes it simply means asking one more question instead of checking one more attraction off the list. None of those things are guaranteed to create a memorable story. But they all make it more likely that I'll actually notice the one that's unfolding around me.
The destination always changes…the feeling doesn’t have to.
I can’t recreate my first international trip. I can’t recreate the first flight that I remember. None of us can. Once you’ve seen the world (or even just a small part of it) you can’t unknow what you know. Experience changes us, and that’s a gift.
But perhaps experience also comes with a quiet responsibility to ourselves. To remember that the things we’ve become accustomed to are still extraordinary. To remember that what has become common through “our eyes” is still magical to someone experiencing it for the first time.
To occasionally put the phone away instead of searching for the perfect experience.
To notice the little things, because those are usually the stories we end up telling years later anyway.
Because the goal was never simply to collect countries…or flights…or passport stamps.
The goal was to become the kind of person who still notices them...who can still look at the world with just enough of a child's eyes to be surprised by it.
Not finding somewhere more exotic. Just remembering to look at the world with the same curiosity that made us fall in love with it in the first place.
