"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." -Yogi

For those visual learners, I've taken the time to make a route on a map!  Normally, I'd just draw the route on that hottie's face on my blog background, but he didn't want to draw attention away from the art which is my words.  Anywho, enjoy, and visualize where I am as you read my blog!

I was going to do it with color-coded lines by month, but, alas, you'll all have to make do!  Click to see it larger

My Baby-Boomer Blog Orientation:
I'm aware that many of my readers will be a little less "tech-savvy," you know who you are, so I'll quickly walk you through how I designed this blog.  On the left, as it says, is a list of the various areas I'll be visiting (in order), which may help you (and me) keep track of where I'm going, am, and have been thus far in the blog.  Below this list, is a fun little app which is essentially a fish tank; if you get a little antsy while reading my amazing adventures and want to do something exciting, you can feed the fish by clicking anywhere in the fish tank, and they'll eat the food too!  Go ahead, try!  On the right hand side, you'll find a link to the Semester at Sea (my program) website, if you'd like to read more about where we're going and what we're doing.  Below that, WILL be an archive of my posts, which isn't up yet b/c there's only one, and what is currently in it's place is the followers section.  This is where you can choose to follow me with your yahoo, google, or whatever account you have or wish to create.  CLICK IT!  It'll make sure you're updated on all my posts and other priceless tidbits I have to say.  If not, you can go ahead and book mark me....DO IT, you know you want toooo!
Almost done, I promise!  Below the followers section is something really cool:  I set up a pre-directed search with all the countries I'm going to and semester at sea, you can click any one of the terms (they'll underline when you move your mouse over them) and it'll pull up articles on the topic, so you can see what's happening in the countries I visit just by going to my blog, hope you like that!  And last but not least, for those of you with specific interests in topics or countries, on the lower right, there's a search tool to search my blog for whatever topic you type and see if I've mentioned it, and next to that is a sharing option for those of you that are facebook or twitter users.  Click on one of those links to share a post of mine on one of those sites!

SO,
Hope this helped and wasn't too complicated and that it'll encourage you all to keep reading, as it's only going to get better (hard to believe, as I realize how great this start was), but I haven't even left the States yet!  Leave comments, send emails, keep in touch and all that stuff!

I may not be able to post again until I reach the Bahamas, because, courteous blogger that I am, I'll only write about the awesome stuff, no boring posts, I promise!
Which is why I'm signing off to avoid boring you with my packing disasters etc.

Be back in the Bahamas!