The Scholar Ship is a fascinating new concept in higher education. It is literally a floating university that operates out of a vintage, two hundred meter luxury liner, the MV Oceanic II. In this book, I have assembled a series of email dispatches that I sent to friends as my family and I pursued a round-the-world itinerary during spring 2008. In many ways the messages are impressionistic and fragmentary. Yet, in spite of its flaws, email happens to be an outstanding medium for capturing events and ideas in "real time." Although I could have edited the following messages extensively, in their present rough-hewn form, I think the dispatches preserve the overall flavor of the Spring 2008 TSS journey better than extensively-edited versions might. If you enjoy reading these "dispatches from the edge" half as much as we enjoyed living the experiences, then you are surely in for a fun ride.