Kim Brown Seely

After a taverna lunch of stuffed grape leaves and tomatoes, lamb, roast potatoes and pitchers of local wine, we down Greek coffees and push off again. Despite full bellies bound in bike shorts, we promptly realize how much we love this. Moving through a country at the pace of a bike ride is a remarkably intimate way to experience it. And what you encounter during an afternoon’s ride, is well, everything. Every single dog barking. Each rooster crowing. The road, rising and falling. The group spreads out, so it is just my husband and me riding through acres of silvery-leaved olive orchards. We pass two leathery Greek ladies – sisters maybe – out for a stroll.

The wind was the distillation of cold itself. It shrieked down the ice-covered basalt cliffs, ripped across the bay, and shredded the rocky spit where I stood with a dozen other red-parka-clad travelers. Moments before, a Zodiac had dropped us off for a rare landing at Antarctica’s Elephant Island. We’d scrambled ashore, thrilled to set foot upon the aptly named Point Wild, the legendary beach where Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition had survived – on penguins and seals – for an unthinkable 137 days.

Expedition cruising takes a turn for the luxe on a journey through Melanesia.

In Italy’s boot heel, a coastal escape that’s long on allure and short on crowds.

In this storied Himalayan kingdom, travelers find serpentine roads, ancient Buddhist traditions, crimson robed monks, and, yes, rack of lamb with arugula for dinner.

On board a vintage sailing yacht, a Mediterranean voyage through Greece and Turkey turns back time - and turns heads.

Nothing really prepares you for your first day in the Great Bear Rainforest. It’s one of the planet’s last great expanses of coastal temperate rain forest, a place where you can still find salmon, wolves, eagles, grizzlies, and even the rare Kermode — or spirit — bear.

A trip up or down the Yangtze means you see the economic tsunami that is China floating by.

A private villa in Umbria, a Roman shopping spree, and the crucial element: friends who make the most of it all. No one checked e-mail. Everyone slept in, steeped in sensuous well-being and dolce far niente.

Charles weighed 400 pounds, stood nearly six feet when fully upright, and was 100 percent alpha male. His massive black head was luxuriantly hairy, and our eyes met daringly as he reclined in a bamboo thicket as big as a Barcalounger.

Three generations take to the Colorado River for an awe-inspiring trip through the Grand Canyon.