Blog postings should be short and frequent, but the Internet connection on the ship is spotty, so this is the first chance I've had to write. The trip is going splendidly. Rio is, as the guidebook says, "Manhattan with bikinis." Some 45 miles of beaches, including enathe ones you have heard of, Ipanema and Copacabana. Jack and I bypassed Buenos Aires, choosing to fly three hours west to Iguazu Falls, one of the seven wonders of the natural world. It was quite a schlep, with Jack having to transfer from the ship to a bus to a plane to a bus to an open air train, From the train stop I pushed him about a mile and half on a metal bridge over the river and to the view immediately above the falls. (A couple of other tourists spelled me, so I didn't do it all. In any case it was fun to push. I get so little exercise on board.) "Poor Niagara," Eleanor Roosevelt is reputed to have said on seeing Iguazu. Instead of one sheet of water, Iguazu has a couple of hundred individual cataracts. Yesterday we were in Montevideo, a dingy city compared to modern B.A. and Rio. I don't know the history, but someone said a dictator bled it dry fairly recently. Now that we have done the basic tourism, the serious part of the adventure begins. We're due at Puerto Marin tomorrow and will see seals and penguins galore.

I'll write when I can.

It's a little more than 24 hours before we head to the airport, and I am crunching through the last items on my punch list. The list has changed over the last year, and I’ve gone from dropping lofty goals (“learn Portuguese”) to dropping mundane ones to concentrating on what has to be done now, today, in the next hours. “Read The Uttermost Part of the Earth,” all 538 pages, got erased from the list in December, though it is billed as the classic work on Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego. Instead I concentrated on learning to spell “Ushuaia,” and may have that down. Last weekend we had to drop any hope of cracking the list of friends we wanted to get together with before we left and the possibility of seeing any of the new movies that are out for Oscar season. Sorry Bob and Nancy. The trip at hand is all there is, and the lists for that have spawned lists and new lists like penguins in a rookery. By yesterday there was a new item, “What can still be turned over to Josh?” and my whole being was centered on finding insect repellant with greater than 30 percent DEET somewhere in Columbus, where for some reason bug-related stuff is off the store shelves. Thank goodness I am now pretty much down to “charge batteries,” though of course these days that is a list in itself: iPod, Kindle, laptop, camera batteries, and, most important, Jack’s scooter.

If writing is simply putting down sentences and paragraphs where you or you and others can read them, blogging is writing. I think of myself as a writer, so why not hop into the twenty-first century? The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so it remains to be seen how much posting/writing I actually do. The title "Diversions and Voyages" should handle anything. Voyages are intentional, planned, direct and linear. Diversions are the byways and often as important and entertaining. Either can be mental or physical, internal or external.

I'll start with a voyage, an intercontinental one.

A project I have managed to envision and plan will begin its fulfillment this Friday. Two years ago I swore I would never spend all of January and February in Columbus, Ohio, again. To Jack's amazement, because he knows that the sea, whether on tall ships, canoes or passenger behemoths, is not my preferred milieu, I googled cruises to the southern hemisphere. If I can get through all my punch lists and if we clear security we will be on a plane to Rio de Janeiro in four days en route to a rendezvous with Holland America's ms Veendam to become two of her 1,350 passengers bound south around Cape Horn and back up the Pacific coast to Santiago. We arrive home in time for Groundhog Day, when there will be six weeks of winter left.