Jill Thomas is a rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who believes life takes her where she needs to go, no matter the roundabout path.
Yesterday while rambling I pondered things to add to my Reverse Bucket List. Items on this list are things I never want to do again or ambitions I am ready to give up on. As I get older, I find incrementally abandoning ambition to be calming.
Here are some things my husband, who I call Stormy, and I have added to our reverse bucket list in the last couple of years.
First was fancy restaurants. Our favorite meals are in hole-in-the-walls, mom-and-pops, gas stations that sell fried chicken in rural Louisiana, 24-hour French Quarter diners, back alley cafes, BBQ shacks, Asian night market stalls, and taco Mexican market stalls. Plus expensive meals make Stormy grumpy.
Another thing on the list is beer and cider flights. When visiting a brewery or cidery, we prefer to make a choice rather than overwhelming my tastebuds with immediately forgotten flavors while accidentally getting plastered with misleading portion sizes.
One of our most crucial reverse bucket list items are safaris. Stormy and I define safaris as getting in motorized transportation with a bunch of people we've never met to chase wild animals.
The elephant safari in Sri Lanka was our first experience. Looking at my pictures, you would think we enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime experience of elephants joyfully galavanting in the wilds. In reality, these particular elephants spend their days surrounded by a flotilla of jeeps chock-o-block full of gawking humans.
However, the safari that sealed the deal was when Stormy and I went to Crystal River, Florida because I wanted to swim with the manatees. There are natural springs in Central Florida, where the water temperatures remain stable at 75 degrees year-round. The manatees hang out in these springs during the winter while the Gulf of Mexico is too cold for their liking.
Stormy suspected this adventure would not meet my expectations, but I was persistent, so we went. He went with me but didn’t get in the water. The tour was the same price for the two of us, whether or not he swam.
When we arrived, the guides handed each of us a damp wetsuit and told us we needed to wear them for buoyancy. If you're chubby like me, you know ill-fitting wetsuits equal anxiety. Squeezing my body into the suit was strenuous, and there was simply no graceful way to do so.
When we loaded onto the boat, our guide announced that the Gulf Waters had warmed, and most of the manatees had left the day before. However, we paid for this experience, so our guide eagerly scanned the water to find at least one manatee who was too old to migrate.
We puttered through the brackish waters until she spotted a manatee resting in a shallow bay beside a local subdivision dock. She told us to hop in and swim gently while avoiding walking on the bottom, so our movements didn’t cloud the water with silt. So you know, swimming gently in shallow water is more complicated than it sounds.
Twelve of us hopped out of the boat, kicking up a tonne of silt, despite our best efforts. Then we tried unsuccessfully to swim gently.
I'd decided to go it alone and paddled about 50 feet from the group, and, low and behold; I found the manatee. I couldn’t see it through the silt, but I could feel it. Earlier, we watched a mandatory instructional video that explained that manatees are slow-moving, cannot get out of our way, and are sensitive to touch. We were admonished to be very careful not to touch the manatees.
However, despite my best efforts, I touched this manatee. A lot. I tried to swim gently away but repeatedly and accidentally kept touching it. Finally, I tried to stand up to walk away, but I slipped and fell and was horrified to find myself sitting on the manatee.
All this bashing about definitely didn’t add to my wetsuit allure. Stormy had the time of his life watching this all unfold from the boat precisely as he suspected it would.
My antics attracted attention, and our quick-witted guide knew I’d found the manatee. Gentle swimming was universally abandoned, and a dozen humans started running in the water toward the manatee and me. I returned to the boat and watched as each person took a turn, with the guide's help, getting up close and personal with that poor animal.
Four additional tour boats noticed the commotion and realized we’d found a manatee queued up behind us to take their turn.
I felt awful. So no more safaris for me.
P.S. Yesterday, while I was rambling, I added Skydiving to my reverse bucket list because I will never jump out of a plane if I don’t have to. Letting go of this unrealistic ambition feels like a relief.
P.P.S. Rambling is the perfect time to ponder ambitions you are ready to let go of.
P.P.P.S. Serendipitous wildlife encounters, earned with long, quiet rambles, are the best trail magic.
READ MORE > JT's Tales From The Trail, Rambler Cafe Blog
Leave a comment