Confession. I used to have a note in my phone titled "Places Before I Die." Machu Picchu. The Uyuni salt flats. The Atacama at dawn. Every trip I'd tick one box and add three more. The list grew faster than my passport ever could.
Then I just... stopped.
I started asking a different question. Not where I haven't been, but what I actually want to feel.
Like standing in the middle of Oktoberfest with a litre of beer and a thousand strangers singing in unison. I didn't plan that. It happened, and it was one of the best nights of my life. Or crouching in the Arctic Circle, nose to nose with a reindeer, both of us clearly confused about the situation. Places on a list. Moments that just happened to have an address. Very different things.
So I deleted the note. No regrets.
The problem with lists
A bucket list is anxiety with better marketing. It turns places into trophies and trips into productivity tasks. You arrive somewhere having already decided what the highlight will be, which means everything else becomes filler. The slow Tuesday. The wrong turn. The cancelled flight that became an unplanned extra night in a city you didn't expect to love.
The best travel I've done has been the unscheduled kind. I'm a data person. I love a good plan. But the plan has to be loose enough to let the place actually surprise you.
What I do instead
I pick a rough region, book the first and last nights, leave the middle open. I say yes to the thing that sounds slightly inconvenient. I eat where there's no English menu, sometimes regret it, sometimes discover my new favourite thing. I stay an extra day when a place earns it.
The passport stamps still add up. I'm absolutely still collecting them. I just stopped making a spreadsheet about it. And somehow, that means I'm paying more attention to each one.
Currently based in Frankfurt. Mentally already somewhere else. As always.