An Easy, Cheap Way to Check a Place Off Your Travel Bucket List

Getting up close and personal with an Alaskan glacier is a common bucket list adventure. (Photo: The Open Suitcase LLC)

By Cathy Bennett Kopf/The Open Suitcase

What’s more likely to happen? Completing your bucket list or competing on Dancing With The Stars? I think I can guess.

If you’re like me, you completed the first draft of your bucket list and figured you’d check those trips off quickly. But life keeps putting up road blocks. And unless you’ve got a trust fund and don’t need to work, money and vacation time are in short supply.

Related: 10 Ways to Actually Stick to Your Travel Budget

One solution to these problems is winning the Mega Millions jackpot. I’ve got another way for you to take a bucket list adventure today and all you need is your library card. To help you plan your virtual trip of a lifetime, I consulted with Joy Weese Moll, a librarian who blogs about books, as well as travel.

Boomers and millennials are beginning to panic about their bucket lists. With limited time and money for travel, is it possible to complete a virtual trip of a lifetime at your local library?

Of course! Armchair travel is a long and grand tradition, presumably going back to a time when ramblers shared their adventures beside a campfire in front of a cave dwelling. In modern times, we can make virtual trips using stories, photographs, music, and film from the library.

Tell me more about the resources you can find at the library to create a virtual bucket list adventure.

Look for coffee table books with large-scale photographs, nonfiction books (I especially like books written by journalists or historians), and novels set in that virtual destination. Many libraries have books in multiple formats these days — print, large print, audio, e-book, and e-audio book. Choose your favorite.

Besides books, many libraries have substantial video collections that include documentaries and foreign films. Libraries also provide CDs so your reading can be accompanied by music of the region.

Take a look at the databases and software offered on your library’s website. You can collect magazine articles about your destination, explore interactive and multimedia encyclopedia entries, and maybe even learn a new language.

Related: The Greatest Travel Stories Ever Told

I’ve taken a couple of big, bucket list trips and was overwhelmed. Would a virtual adventure help me develop any skills I could use to ease my planning anxiety?

I can think of three areas where a virtual trip can provide confidence for a real one:

•Packing. The more you know of a place, the better you’re able to make decisions about what to take and what to leave behind. Even fiction can help here. If a character is constantly running in and out of a pharmacy, then I know I don’t have to pack my whole medicine cabinet just in case of a minor medical emergency.

•Place-finding. By reading a book with a map in hand (or on the computer), I familiarize myself with the landscape. My ability to use that map is improved — and, also, my ability to find my way based on the map in my head.

This mustard shop in Ghent, Belgium, was set up like an old-fashioned apothecary. Each jar was filled by hand and then wrapped in decorative paper. (Photo: The Open Suitcase LLC)

•Communicating. Travel, whether virtual or real-life, exposes us to new cultures. The more we understand different cultures, the better we can communicate with others, even across language barriers. French movies, for example, show all the steps of a polite interchange with a Parisian shopkeeper — several steps more than we typically take in the U.S.

I’m ready to go! Can you give me some itineraries for virtual bucket list adventures?

Sure! How about a visit to the Galapagos Islands? You’ll want to read The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin — I promise it’s not as intimidating as it sounds. The Galápagos: Exploring Darwin’s Tapestry by John Hess, a stunning coffee table book with excellent scientific explanations, is a helpful companion to Darwin’s own words. For something a little different, try Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galápagos, where a vacation cruise becomes the apocalyptic event for a new turn in human evolution. Film documentaries on the Galapagos are readily available — check out Galápagos: The Islands That Changed the World, distributed by BBC World.

Related: A Bucket-List Guide to Seeing the Galapagos

The Galapagos Islands are an ideal virtual bucket list trip — so much has been written about them, and photographs are plentiful. (Photo: Jo Piazza)

Alternatively, let’s take an exotic journey along Asia’s Silk Road. Let’s start with a musical soundtrack for this one — Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet by Yo-Yo Ma. Add a classic poem, “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Coleridge. Now let’s put a little realism onto our dream; two books I’d recommend are Marco Polo: The Journey That Changed the World by John Man and On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta by Jen Lin-Liu. Now, we’ve got all the atmosphere of traveling the Silk Road, complete with food!

It seems too easy. No packing. Your vacation days remain intact. And it’s free. Well, almost. You may have to resolve some overdue library fines.

What’s the most inspiring travel book you’ve read?

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