1. Visit true Paradise Of course, I had to include an item from my own bucket list. What I have wanted to do for years is to spend some time basking on Tahiti’s sunny beaches... This might seem surprising in light of the fact that I lived in Hawaii for a year.

I was born and raised among Colorado’s snow covered peaks and enjoy the magnificent grandeur of mountains marching over the horizon one after the other. However, “Jack Frost nipping at your nose” was not really a central-life pleasure for me. What I enjoy most of all is stretching out in my bathing suit, on a sun-bathed beach, letting the rays of the sun turn my body a golden brown, and allowing my spirit to be lulled by the cries of seagulls whirling above my head.

Of course, where I lived in Hawaii the sense of visiting Paradise was interrupted by the busses, trucks, cars, and motorcycles roaring by on Kealakekua Avenue, by nearby hearty-partying noisy college students, and by families who just got off the plane from Ohio, with bawling babies, fussing teenagers, and who apparently put an outing on a Waikiki Beach into the same category as a trip to Wal-Mart.

I long to visit a paradise that is untrampeled by (other) tourists — a place unmarred by sketch artists, kiosks selling Hawaiian made-in- China hula skirts, ABC Stores on each corner, and all the other commercial enterprises that mar famous tropical four-days-and-threenights- for-only-$399-tourist destinations.

What I wish to do before I die is to lie on a beach, close my eyes, and be able to hear nothing besides the murmur of the waves rolling up the nearby sandy beach with a sweating Mai Tai nearby — possibly with my skimpy bikini folded on the towel beside me. I imagine that I am probably too modest to actually do that, but Caroline, who was born and raised in Europe, tells me that the experience is perfectly enjoyable. (My real problem with that part of the plan is probably not with my modesty, but with my husband, Dino.)

Here is a summary of what some other staff members wrote.

2. Cruise Through The Panama Canal My partner, Don Huntington, said that he wanted to take one of the transition cruises through the Panama Canal — hopefully beginning or ending at San Francisco.

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