Two recent TV shows mentioned bucket lists. On Glee and then on NCIS; Tony DiNozzo, shaken by a terrorist attack, became hyperaware of his own mortality and printed out a list that included more prosaic choices: “Date a Bond girl and/or Miss Universe. Develop a catch phrase. This got me wondering: Where did the term bucket list come from? Surely it didn’t originate with the Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman film from 2007 in which, two terminally ill men escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die.”
However, back in 1993, the phrase showed up in a different context: a National Labor Relations Board report indicating agenda items that must be postponed (getting warmer): “The conferees were told that if comments or questions came up concerning bargainable issues or items that required more information, these matters should be placed in a ‘bucket list’ to indicate that they could not be considered at the conference.”
In 2004, the term was used—perhaps for the first time?—in the context of things to do before one kicks the bucket (a phrase in use since at least 1785) in the book Unfair & Unbalanced: The Lunatic Magniloquence of Henry E. Panky, by Patrick M. Carlisle. That work includes the sentences, “So, anyway, a Great Man, in his querulous twilight years, who doesn’t want to go gently into that blacky black night. He wants to cut loose, dance on the razor’s edge, pry the lid off his bucket list!”
All the researchers couldn’t find a Geocaching Bucket list, so I guess you need to start one. Admittedly the ones used for these first caches are rudimentary in nature, but feel free to add your own.