So with the passing of Summer cameth the end of my striving to tick everything off of my Summer Bucket List.  I mentioned the other day my intention to start a whole new list of fun activities for Autumn (which I’m still in the process of composing).  Before doing that, however, I thought I should make some effort at closure.  So.  The final few things I managed to tick off were:

Go camping.  This I wrote briefly about here.  There were Chinese lanterns, bunting and board games under the stars, if you’ll cast your mind back…

Go on a road trip.  This I combined with camping (above).  Two birds, one stone.  Boom.

Get a pedicure.  Done.  And written about here.

Take a dance class.  Did I tell you guys that I started ceilidh dancing on the regular this Summer?  No?  Well, I did.  And let me tell you that ceilidh dancing, on a Tuesday night, with a bunch of random strangers, is So. Much. Fun.  Really.  For those of you who, like me, are deeply scarred as a result of having to do Scottish country dancing at school and BEING MADE TO HOLD HANDS WITH A BOY, let me assure you that it is totally not as traumatic when you do it as an adult.  It’s also probably one of the best workouts you can have.  While it’s definitely more of a laugh than a dance class proper, I have learned a few new dances since I started, which to my mind totally satisfies the ‘take a dance class’ criteria of the Summer Bucket List.  Agreed?  Yay!

Go to the theatre.  This I did in London at the start of August.  I’d wanted to see Wicked for years, and moreso ever since Rachel wrote about it on her blog.  It was amazing.  It is amazing.  Even if I was so far back into the realm of the cheap seats that I had to use the little binoculars to see.

Make bunting.  Which we hung in our tent when we went camping, obviously.

By the end of August, I’d done 14/25 things on my list.  Other update posts are here and here.  It might not be the most impressive figure (like, say, having done the whole lot), but I did have fun trying, and I did do some stuff that otherwise would never have crossed my mind.  What surprised me about the whole thing was that some of the activities I’d considered the hardest when I initially wrote the list were actually the ones I managed to do, while some of the stuff I thought would be easy wins I didn’t get round to.  So I went camping, but I didn’t find time to watch The Wire.  I ticked off road-tripping and cycling easily enough but I didn’t manage to read Sunset Song or decide on a photo to have made into a canvas.

I pondered for a while the fact that apparently, these days I actually consider it easier to climb a mountain than to sit still long enough to read a book.  But then I realised that perhaps I was just in the wrong season for bunkering down to read or to watch TV.  See, I don’t want to sit at home infront of a DVD box set during the Summer.  Or slave over a hot stove to make a multi-layer, multi-coloured cake, for that matter.  In Summer, I want to climb hills and ride my bike and camp and picnic and drink beer round a barbecue.  Come November, I will happily chain myself to the oven, or wrap myself in blankets to read books or watch films.  It all depends on the season, really, and Summer for me is definitely an outdoorsy kind of affair.  Which is a good lesson for me to have learned, and definite food for thought for the upcoming Autumnal list…

How about you?  How did you get on with your Summer plans?

Image above from here.