Tough Life in Belize
My sister is so fascinated by the word octogenarian that this last June she gave me a trip to Belize for my 80th birthday. She went along, of course, to a resort where she and her daughter had stayed a couple of years ago. She had an ulterior motive: there had been this hunky bartender and she wanted to see if he was still there. He wasn’t.
But there were others.
If you have ever met my sister, this makes perfect sense.
Too, in May my travel agent, whom I nominate for sainthood, sent me on a splendid trip to Iceland, a place I had long wanted to visit.
As we planned the Iceland trip, I casually mentioned that I would like to take a trip around the world before I go into a nursing home. She immediately sent me literature and I discovered I do not want to take a trip around the world; nearly all the ports of call are major cities and I have no interest in cities. “I can fix that,” she said.
And so, to cap my eightieth year, I will circumnavigate South America on a cruise aboard Cunard’s Queen Victoria, fly home briefly to gather up my tax info and take the mess to my preparer, then fly to Johannesburg, travel up through the middle of Africa, proceed east to Sydney, Australia, and from there take a cruise up through Oceania to Hawaii and San Francisco. A colleague calls my journey Darwinesque. I hope so.
Social media and I have never been good friends, but kith and kin all insist I must blog about my adventures. Very well. Although my travels will take me where millions have gone before, I will tell you of my experiences. May we both enjoy the romp.
I leave for South America 19 January. So as preparation for the serious business of recording my travels, allow me to recap in blog form the sojourns to Iceland and Belize. They taught me important lessons about traveling when you are no longer young and spry. At all.