I belong to two book clubs, the Wine and Women Book Club and The Remainders. W&W is aptly named, because drinking wine at our dinner meetings outranks reading; we have actually given up selecting a book altogether. But The Remainders, who meet at the downtown Anderson boutique, bistro and bookstore Ooh La Lolly, are serious readers. We come there one Friday a month to eat Lolly’s leftovers (hence our name) and talk about a book.

Last month we had a treat, as the author of our book, Helen Sablan, joined us for our meeting. We all had read “Devotedly Dixie: Travel Journals of Two Helens” and pumped Helen for details of the fascinating journeys described in its pages.

First, she explained the title. “Dixie” was the nickname of Helen’s great-aunt and godmother, Helen Ricks, and she usually signed her letters “Devotedly Dixie.” Ms. Ricks died in 1979, but it was almost two decades later that Helen Sablan came across her hardbound travel journal while sorting through the books and papers of another deceased relative. What she discovered was Helen Ricks’ account of her five-week voyage on a freighter in 1938 to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Curacao, Venezuela, Suriname and Trinidad.

Ricks, a single lady, apparently handwrote the journal, then had it typed and bound, with black and white photographs pasted to the pages. She had departed from New Orleans on Dec. 20, 1938 on a freighter bound for South America to pick up a load of bauxite. Her journal was full of descriptions of the tropical ports, shopping for linens and souvenirs, and the meals, games of charades and parties with the 11 passengers and the Norwegian crew.

In Haiti a woman tried to sell her a chicken, and she found Port au Prince fascinating: “Such color and squalor, such beauty and filth I never saw altogether.” She cried as they pulled out of the port. In Trinidad, she photographed the tomb of Christopher Columbus. In Dutch Guiana, the group took a trip up the Suriname River into the jungle, visiting villages of Bush Negroes who wore scant clothing and spoke in a dialect called “talkee talkee.”

After Helen Sablan read the journal, she became intrigued with the idea of retracing her aunt’s steps. An avid traveler since her teens, she arranged her trip during the same time of year exactly 60 years after her aunt’s. Instead of traveling by freighter, which would have taken a month or more, she flew from port to port. And unlike Helen Ricks, she traveled alone.

Considering the political upheaval and inherent dangers in some of these places, the first question our group asked Helen was if she had felt it took a lot of courage. “I didn’t feel brave,” she said, and in the book she told of only one time when her safety felt threatened. She arranged to be greeted at each airport — though the greeting service didn’t always work — and had hotel reservations at each place, though they didn’t always have a reservation waiting for her when she arrived.

In each port, she tried to find places her aunt had described, usually without much success. But her journal echoes Helen Ricks in places, such as what she wrote about Haiti: “The poverty and squalid conditions are dreadful, yet the schoolchildren walking home from school looked beautiful in their freshly pressed uniforms.”

Helen Sablan said she would not want to return to Haiti, but she would go back “in a second” to Suriname. Like Helen Ricks, she was able to visit Bush Negro villages, though she reached them by a dusty overland route rather than by water. She concluded that little had changed, as many of the women were bare-breasted, and the children ran around naked. “I don’t think the people of these villages see many white people,” she wrote. “Several very young children cried when they saw me.”

Helen says she thinks of herself as a traveler rather than a tourist, and enjoys traveling with a purpose. (A lot of the women in The Remainders fit that description, too, and we all laughed when someone asked, “What’s the worst toilet you saw?”) Besides publishing the travel journals for her family’s enjoyment, Helen said she wanted to encourage others to be adventurous in their travel choices. In her introduction she writes, “I have heard many times from my friends, ‘If anyone can do it, Helen can.’ But I want people to know that ‘If Helen can do it, anyone can.’ ”

“Devotedly Dixie” is available through iUniverse.com. Maybe it will inspire you to take a trip off the beaten path.

Bibliophile Kathryn Smith reviews books regularly for the Independent-Mail.