Eager for adventure, we pedaled confidently out of Copenhagen. On Geoff’s bike, a clear plastic rainproof holder displayed a detailed map; on my bike, an identical holder showed written instructions. And yet at our first intersection leaving town, lengthy deliberations began.....

I didn’t want to go to China. Honestly, my assumptions about the place scared me. Our reason for going to China in July, the hottest month of the year, was functional. Recently retired, with the health, wealth, and time to travel, my husband and I were taking a three-month, around-the-world trip beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The train started in Beijing and ended in Moscow. Being in Beijing and not at least peeking at this Communist super-power seemed like a waste.

Istanbul’s Sultan Hamam Turkish bath may look like a mosque from the outside, but inside awaited a simple pleasure that all babies love and most adults have forgotten. My husband, Geoff, and I were separated into areas for men and women. We were then bathed by a personal assistant in loose traditional clothing. After being washed and rinsed with a stream of water, we laid on a slab of warm marble under a beautiful white-marble dome while our assistants scrubbed us with fragrant, oily bubbles....

Biking through Moscow on a nearly six-hour tour, our Russian guide, Ivan, relayed to my husband and me this theory for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of McDonald’s. On the day McDonald’s opened its first restaurant, 30,000 meals were served. Muscovites braved the January cold to stand in a line that wrapped around Pushkin Square three times. In 1990 the Russians sank their teeth into an American hamburgers, and in 1991 they dropped communism for capitalism.....