Item #7
“We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
-Hilaire Belloc
If you can’t recall, the very first post I uploaded onto this blog discussed the difficulty I found in talking about one of my passions. I thought none of my passions could ever be of any significance for me to write about for sixteen straight weeks. However, seven weeks have passed and I now find the task much more manageable and actually quite enjoyable too. When I began this blog I assumed I would only be exploring the details of the items on my bucket list. But since then, I have come to discover that I am also exploring parts of myself and my personality that I don’t normally get to. In the two months I have been doing this, I have noticed that a majority of my bucket list items, if not all, involve traveling out of the country. Although I have only posted the first couple items so far and I still have quite a bit more to go, it still makes me wonder if there is a deeper meaning behind so many of them not involving the United States. Ironically, my seventh item on my bucket list does involve traveling within the United States.
A couple years ago when I traveled to San Diego, California for the summer, my family and I went to the famous San Diego Zoo. Despite me having been to both California and the San Diego Zoo before, I realized that since I was older I was able to doing more activities than I was the first time I went. One of these activities that I was exposed to was zip lining. Up until that point, I was the only one in my whole family that hadn’t gone zip lining before. So to be able to finally zip line and over a zoo of all places was really exciting for me. While we were going through training, our instructor mentioned at one point that the place that we would be zip lining over, which was the La Jolla Indian Reservation, was the second longest zip line in the United States, the first being in Alaska. Ever since, I have wanted to zip line the first longest zip line in the United States, making that the seventh item on my bucket list.
Located in Hoonah, Alaska, the Icy Strait Point Zipline stands as the longest zip line in the United States at 5,495 feet long. Although Icy Strait Point is mainly a tourist stop for cruise passengers, according to their website anyone is welcomed to embark on “the adventure of a lifetime.” The minute and a half ride is fairly inexpensive costing only around $120 dollars per person. This is not including any add ons such as pictures or video, which could add to the overall price of the trip. Since I don’t live in or even remotely near Alaska, the only possible way to travel there is flight. Unfortunately, upon further research, I found out that since the city of Hoonah, Alaska is very small I would have to take a connecting flight, requiring me to pay for two separate flights. A typical flight from Philadelphia to Juneau, Alaska is about $640 dollars, while a flight from Juneau to Hoonah is only about $81 dollars. Thus, making the price of the two flights along with the price of the zip line trip a total of $841 dollars.