The last five+ years we've spent our winters backpacking on the cheap through various Asian countries, concentrating on a few countries each year, packing and unpacking our bags a couple times a week as we ride buses and trains from one inexpensive hotel to the next.

This year, we're off to different continents, different modes of transportation, different levels of elegance, no unpacking/repacking, different everything. We found a simply fabulous deal on a 104-day cruise that visits South America, Antarctica, a score of South Pacific islands, New Zealand, the Galapagos and back through the Panama Canal. It visits all sorts of obscure places that we are unlikely ever to get to any other way. You can see an overview of our itinerary below; here's a day-by-day listing.

The map now shows where we've been so far on the trip. You can click on selected areas (dark blue rectangules) to go directly to the page(s) written about a site. Geek chic, no?

It was quite a challenge preparing for this trip. In Asia, all we needed were a couple changes of informal, lightweight, easily hand-washed clothes. For this trip, we need to be ready – literally – to dress for weather varying from Antarctic cold to equatorial heat, and everything in-between. And, being on the ship, we need formal wear (tux and sparkly dresses) for the Captain's dinners, "smart casual" for other evenings, and adventure wear for our port excursions. Plus a subset of our scuba gear for snorkeling and diving.

Being in one place for so long, we decided we would bring along the level of technology support we were accustomed to at home. Plus, it was a great excuse to upgrade to the next generations of cameras, PCs, etc. and to acquire some entirely new gadgets, like a tiny photo-quality portable printer. If you're interested, here's the whole list.

Traveling to four continents and several dozen countries requires quite the stack of guidebooks. Kathy is very keen on reading about the history, government, and people of the places we visit, so she bought a couple books on most places we're visiting (on half.com, a cheap used-book website) – we've brought 50+ books with us. (If you're curious, here's the reading list – a half dozen of them were read ahead of time and left behind.)

Between the variety of clothes, the technology, and the books, we ended up buying two new huge suitcases and still had a hard time making it all fit. We spent a tense day packing and repacking, trying to stay within the airlines weight allowance – a last minute purchase of huge Wal-Mart suitcase saved the day (and kept us from killing each other – although we did come close, while trying to balance the weight of each bag to meet Delta's baggage limits).

Scott, carrying the only bag he needed for 3 months in Asia	Scott & Kathy's bags for this trip

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