You’re never too old to achieve your dreams-or even break records. A 104-year-old woman named Dorothy Hoffner is such an example. She has just become the oldest person to skydive (跳伞), and she had the time of her life doing it. After touching ground following her jump with a US instructor, she proudly said, “Age is just a number.”

Hoffner took to the skies of Northern Illinois with the help of Skydive Chicago, making her way to the town of Ottawa for the jump. For all the excitement, this wasn’t her first time jumping out of the plane. Hoffner’s first skydiving took place a few years ago, when she was 100. Although back then the instructor helped push them out together, this time she insisted on leading the jump from 13,500 feet up in the air.

A video shared by Skydive Chicago shows Hoffner determinedly advancing towards the plane on her red walker (助行架) before being helped on board. Sitting among her fellow skydivers, she is all smiles as she waits for her turn. Once the door opens, the woman confidently jumps out of the plane head first.

Before Hoffner’s jump, the record for the oldest person to skydive belonged to 103-year-old Linnéa Ingegärd Larsson from Sweden, who set it in May 2022. Now, Skydive Chicago is requesting Guinness World Records to certify Hoffner’s jump as the new record.

As for Hoffner, she seems happy with having achieved this, describing the jump as an amazing experience. “It was wonderful up there. The whole thing was wonderful, and couldn’t have been better,” she says. Now that she has completed this achievement, she is now thinking of her next adventure. Since she is turning 105 in December, she is thinking of celebrating by riding a hot air balloon, saying, “I’ve never been in one of those.”

Working at an investment bank in New York City in the mid-2010s. Anna Sacks was living the life—just not the life she wanted. Sure, she was happy. But she wanted to do something that felt important and was fulfilling on a deeper level.

Sacks packed up her life and moved to Connecticut for three months to participate in Adamah, a Jewish farming program that focuses on sustainable living and growing sustainable food. The Adamah program opened Sacks’s eyes to the damage consumer culture is doing on a local, national, and global level, and the need to find solutions. From then on, she began what she calls “trash (垃圾) walking.”

While walking around her neighborhood, Sacks, 31, picked through rubbish to look for reusable items. Soon, her trash walks expanded to include company rubbish along with residential trash. Surprisingly, she discovered a wide range of really great stuff—like clothing, dinnerware, and food—all of which she documents on Instagram and TikTok.

Under the name The Trash Walker, Sacks quickly gained popularity for her educational, funny, and surprising videos that highlight the problems with consumerism and share information about how to live a more sustainable life. “The root issue is overproduction, which leads to overconsumption, which leads to a large amount of waste,” she says. Sacks’s videos have gone viral many times, causing shockwaves through the industries she calls out.

Trash walking has given Sacks a nearly endless supply and she shares much of her “treasure” with others. She tries giving them informally to family, friends, or individuals she knows may need a specific item. Then she takes the remaining items to free stores so other New Yorkers can benefit from her treasure-hunting.

Sacks’s main focus is simply getting people to pay attention to how many unnecessary things they buy and then throw away. “Once you become aware of the way you consume, you can see ways you improve,” she says.

I wanted a change of pace, a break from routine. The past few years found me working long hours at my marketing job while my husband, Steven, put in equally full days as a physics tutor. We were both burned out from the constant boredom.

Vacation experiences at first glance seem a little difficult for us. How do you find comfort in an ever-changing environment? And I, someone who enjoys more planned fun, had to adapt.

But I was surprised at how easily I was able to adapt to a new mode of operation, a more relaxed version of myself who wasn’t worried where we’d park and sleep each night. The fact that we both became so accustomed to sleeping in the back of a cargo van is another surprise we experienced on this journey. The van was our main transportation and, with a full-size bed in the back, it also provided us with a bit of comfort that made us continue. At first, every sound outside was foreign, and we both took longer to fall-and stay-asleep. But, after a couple of weeks into van life, we let the sounds fade into soft background music.

Over the course of our seven- month trip, one of our big goals was to come away from each park with one spectacular image. That shared goal placed us on the same team: It brought us together, even more than before, gave us more to talk about, and encouraged us to motivate each other along the way.

By this point, you’re probably wondering how we paid for all of this, or maybe you’re assuming we come from wealthy backgrounds. The truth is, we actually managed this entire adventure on a middle-class budget. Steven did part-time remote work about 10 hours per week for his employer from the road. I ended up finding some temporary jobs through the trip. We also continued our photography business, setting up an online shop to sell our landscapes.

We only visited some parks in the 48 states. And the experience would still be worth every penny. It is really a chance to lose and find ourselves in our nation’s park lands.