Sun Jan 27 Well I’m now aboard the Rotterdam. Last night I spent a quiet evening at the hotel finishing the recovery from the flight and today I’m pretty well adjusted to the time. At least I hope so since I have an 8 a.m. tour tomorrow morning. I spent some time on the balcony last night watching some people play Beach Soccer. Our guide on the shuttle this morning told us that is the big thing here now and they hope to get it into the Olympics someday like they did Beach Volleyball. I then watched a bit of TV which was interesting. Obviously most of the channels were in Portuguese but there were some Movie channels playing in English, a CNN channel in Spanish, and a rather mixed US channel all with subtitles in ... read more

Well tomorrow's the day! I just called the Cab company to make arrangements for getting to the airport tomorrow. Hopefully this one is better than the one I used for last year's Alaska trip (though I probalby won't need air conditioning this time). I have a few last things to get into my stuffed bags (including the survival kit from Lin! and a picture of Jim for my nightstand). Also, need to arrange my purse and probably charge my phone and iPod. I'm sure I must have forgotten something! Other than that I'm ready to go. Tomorrow will be a long day though. Leave here about 9ish for a 12:00 flight to Atlanta then hang around there for about 6 hrs before my ~10 hr flight to Rio. With a 3 hr time difference I get ... read more