ADULTHOOD TENDS to sneak up on you. One minute, you’re an easygoing kid; the next, you’ve got a house, responsibilities, assignments piling up. You still listen to the music of your youth—only now it’s on an oldies station. And more and more you forswear nights on the town in lieu of relaxing in front of the TV with a nice glass of Merlot or Shiraz (as opposed to the ring-top alternative). As David Byrne of Talking Heads put it: “How did I get here?”

I’m an average guy now: refined, hardworking, up-to-date on the topics of the day—a total square, basically. It seems like only yesterday I would drive eight hours to see a band. Or cruise around on a skateboard instead of behind the wheel of a hatchback. But every spring I’m struck by a wave of nostalgia for those carefree days. The first sight of an Easter egg always triggers it—instantly transporting me to a distant September afternoon when my most memorable high school caper was, well, hatched.

“I miss hunting Easter eggs,” said my friend Autumn. Even then, we were becoming nostalgic.

We were in her room making a mix tape (remember those?) and playing Trivial Pursuit. I thought for a moment, and then I agreed. I missed it too.

We lived in a tiny Gold Rush hamlet tucked in the Sierra Nevada Mountains called Nevada City. With a population of less than 3,000 and a downtown district that could be circumnavigated in a brief jog, the only trouble a teenager could get into was what he made.

Autumn was the prettiest girl in town and my best friend, and we spent our restive teenage years doing the things that teenagers do: We hung out at the local diner loading up on caffeine, we collected records and lawn ornaments, and we spent an inordinate amount of time devising “experiments” to test the patience of our fellow Nevada City residents. Some called us practical jokers; others called us worse.

That afternoon we sat in Autumn’s upstairs bedroom, surrounded by a menagerie of lawn ornaments we’d been collecting: weathered garden gnomes, a headless bust of Beethoven and, finally, our favorite, Toad from Wind in the Willows, dressed in a dapper blouse, ascot and waistcoat sitting on a giant egg.

That’s when the fantastic idea occurred. I remembered how, at age eight, I learned the sad truth about the Easter Bunny. It was an abrupt awakening. Easter was the last holiday I could enjoy with the sense of magic only a kid can feel. Looking at the absurd frog-and-egg lawn ornament, and the joyful expression on its face, I decided we should break our routine. I wanted to recapture, if only for a day, the magic I remembered from childhood holidays. And I wanted to share it with everyone else.

“We should hide Easter eggs for the entire town!” I cried. “In the middle of winter. We’ll shock Nevada City.”

We hit every grocery store that afternoon and for weeks afterward, accumulating hundreds of eggs (and almost as many suspicious looks). We also loaded up on white vinegar, food coloring and caffeinated soda. Then we boiled them in batches in Autumn’s family kitchen and stored the cooked trove in her mother’s basement fridge.

Every spare moment for weeks thereafter we locked ourselves away in the bedroom, surrounded by pens, pipe cleaners, glitter, cups and bowls. Our hands were stained with muddled shades of red, green, blue and yellow. The acrid fog of vinegar so permeated the room that when we occasionally left for food, the outside air actually smelled like vanilla marzipan.

We colored the eggs carefully and drew on them furiously. No two were alike. You might think that after days of decorating eggs, we’d become careless about how they looked. On the contrary: We became more obsessive and, I’d say, deranged. After hundreds of hours hunched over uncountable dozens of eggs, breathing dye and vinegar, our sensibilities turned toward the surreal. Some eggs bore simple, almost modernist color squares, while others offered cryptic messages, such as “Happy Holidays” and “Incubate Me!”

It was mid-November when the eggs were finished. Now came the fun part: hiding them for the good citizens of Nevada City to find. We changed out of our dye-stained work tees and into nice clothes—dark colors, of course, the better to remain inconspicuous.

Well after midnight, we snuck around the deserted streets of downtown, laden with backpacks full of eggs. It was a cold, drizzly night. As we hid the eggs we got soaked to the bone, but our adrenaline was pumping. We made sure every business and home in town had at least one egg on its property—some in plain view, others that would take some searching.

When we had finally emptied the last backpack, it was nearly sunrise. We slinked back to Autumn’s house to warm up. Shaking with excitement and devouring cinnamon toast, we counted the seconds until sunrise. Then we raced into town and took a seat on a park bench to await the day’s first pedestrians.

A thirtysomething couple approached holding hands, out for an early stroll. Soon enough, the man stopped, pointed to an egg dyed green and red and perched on a fence post, and said, “Hey, look, an Easter egg.” “No way!” his girlfriend replied. “It’s November!” They walked off chuckling. We strolled through town and watched as business owners arrived at their shops. They’d see one egg nestled in a bush and think it curious, but when they noticed others—atop a fire hydrant, resting on a window sill— they registered stronger reactions: bafflement, usually, followed by fleeting concern and finally the smile that Autumn and I were hoping for. People started to huddle, to theorize, to exchange information, as it gradually became clear that the eggs were indeed everywhere. We overheard salutations of “Happy Easter!”

Just before lunch, we saw something that exceeded our expectations. Standing near the town square, we spied two girls about eight years old skipping down the street dressed in rain slickers. Between them they carried one umbrella, which they were holding upside-down and filling with eggs. It was the moment we had been waiting for: cheerfully incongruous and transformative.

These two girls had no concern for the rain and couldn’t care less that Easter was actually five months away. Colored eggs were for the hunting, they well knew, so that’s what they did.

Autumn and I took a booth at our favorite diner and ordered coffee and pancakes. The restaurant was buzzing with talk of the eggs. We listened and ate, blissful, silent and exhausted. The sheriff came in and sat at his usual stool at the counter.

“Happy Easter, Mike,” a waitress said. “You did notice it’s Easter, right?”

“Yeah,” he snorted, and he turned to look at us with a knowing, weary grimace. “Let’s just hope those eggs get found before they start smellin’.”

And that was it. We’d somehow rekindled our own lost sense of childhood exuberance, and we had done it for others, too. And we’d stayed out of trouble. That was a bonus.

Until the next summer, when we decided it was time for an early Christmas…

California-born JOB BROTHER is slightly allergic to cellophane grass.

HILFE! SCHLUSSEL! HAUSMEISTER! BITTE!

“Help! Key! Superintendent! Please!” Useful German words for when one is trapped in an apartment on the sixth floor of a creaky, late 19th century building in a sleepy working-class neighborhood of Vienna and trying not to panic. (Much better than what I’d practiced at home: “Haben Sie das in schwarz und klein?” or “Do you have that in black and in small?”)

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was freezing the night I arrived in Vienna. When my cab rolled up to my building the driver turned to me. “Are you sure this is the right address?” he asked. It was true the street felt somehow too dark, too quiet. But what did I know? I’d rented the place sight- unseen off Craigslist. The last time I’d booked a place that way I ended up in a windowless apartment in Paris. If you think it’s impossible to be unhappy in Paris, try sleeping in a closet.

It took me several minutes to unload the taxi. I buzzed the intercom and met my lugubrious new roommate, Hilke. “You have more bags with you than clothes that I own,” she said without smiling. I laughed. It’s true, I don’t travel light. In the Madrid airport, a fleet of sleek Europeans wheeling what appeared to be makeup bags that would slide into any overhead had sniffed disapprovingly at my massive duffels. It didn’t bother me; I was staking my claim on the city.

Hilke told me a recent break-up had prompted the reluctant rental of my room; she needed the cash. “He wasn’t experimental enough,” she said sadly, “and that’s very important to me.” I nodded and accepted a cup of chamomile tea. The guy sounded like a real winner, having once left her cooling her heels on a romantic island in Greece where they’d planned to meet for the holidays. It was a lot to share on our first meeting, but I like dishy stories. Then she told me she was famous in certain circles of Vienna for a movie she’d made that sounded not at all suitable for general audiences. I smiled, but I knew we’d slid right by new-girlfriend confidences into a whole other territory. I rued passing up a more expensive apartment with a friendly-sounding translator in a hipper part of town. Too late now. I went to my room.

When I emerged in the morning, Hilke was rushing out the door. “I’m sorry,” she said, as she gathered her things, “you can’t shower now.” There was a man working on the bathroom tiles. She said she would be gone all day; naturally, she had no cell phone.

With that, the only person I really knew in Vienna vanished.

My room, though airy and bright, with large, antique windows, was just off the shower-room, with no external door. I had to walk through the shower to leave—a quirk, needless to say, that went unmentioned in the ad. As in many old buildings in Europe, the toilet was down the corridor.

I closed the large red-felt curtain the roommate had kindly hung for my privacy. When the tileman had gone, I walked through the bathroom to exit and found the door stuck shut. I jiggled the handle. A key fell out the other side.

The door wasn’t stuck; it was locked. I yelled for help, but the man was gone.

I was trapped in my room on the sixth floor of 38-40 Wallensteinstrasse in the 20th district of Vienna. Outside, tram number five rumbled and clicked to a stop, over and over. No one looked up at me as I opened the lovely century-old window, leaned out over the rooftops and sought out my new neighbors, in the street below. “Hello! Hello! Yes!

You down there!” I tried, foolishly, in English. “I’m, um…Hello! I’m stuck!”

No response. I laughed aloud, a little giddy with the ridiculousness of the situation: The last member of my family to live in Vienna had escaped a city teeming with Nazis. Now his granddaughter had returned and couldn’t escape her own bedroom. Plus, she was getting a bit hungry.

Outside my window, the air was crisp and wintry. I eyed the electric tram lines, imagining myself rappelling, Jason Bourne–style, to the street. “Help!” I yelled. Three men who worked at the grocery across the street glanced up at me and continued to load their fruit. I doubled back to the bathroom and, frustrated, kicked the door—hard. Wood splinters peeled off, cracks ran the length of the frame; the lock held.

I returned to my perch at the window, waving my arms frantically down at the street below.

English having failed me, I armed myself with a few choice vocabulary words gleaned from a pocket dictionary. “Bitte hausmeister!” I bellowed confidently. “Hilfe! Hilfe!”

A woman and her child looked up. “Sprechen sie Englisch?” I yelled down to her.

“Nein,” she called back.

But she’d acknowledged me! Suddenly I caught sight of the tileman, my hausmeister, six flights down. He looked up, doffed his cap, and then disappeared back inside.

I rushed back to the bathroom door, where I heard shouting. It was the hausmeister, yelling instructions. The only words I understood were “schlussel” and “strasse”—key and street—and then it dawned on me: He wants me to throw keys to the street! I hustled back to the window and hurled them down.

A few minutes later, he finally freed me, clucking disapprovingly at the splintered door frame. Then, noting my trembling shoulders, he fished out a business card and handed it to me.

KARACINOVIC ZIVOJIN masseur Walleinsteinstrasse 36.7 1200 Wien te. 0699 11 579 795

Then he left, returning moments later holding what looked like an old bottle of sunscreen. “Baby oil,” he explained, smiling. “Massage now.”

“Nein,” I said. “Nein?” he asked. “Nein.” I confirmed, as I pushed him out the door.

The whole ordeal had lasted only an hour and a half. It felt more like a year and a half. Deciding I had to move, I called the friendly-sounding translator. Sadly, her room had been rented.

So I set out wandering through two districts in search of a new place to stay, slowly calming down as I began to acquaint myself with more picturesque parts of Vienna. That evening I attended a cocktail party for my new job. I arrived and grabbed a glass of white wine. Everyone was chatting amiably, in small groups; the lingua franca was German.

A man named Georg asked me how my first day in Vienna had gone, and I let out a sigh. “Frankly?” I replied, “It was terrible!” And I started to tell my story, waving my arms animatedly, sloshing the wine in my glass. “Hilfe! Bitte hausmeister!” I yelled, starting to laugh. And behind him another fellow, a thin man holding a thin, filterless cigarette, interjected, “Sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear your story…Would you mind telling it again?”

So I did. All night long I recounted my dramatic tale of panic and massage oil. The next day, at work, more new acquaintances approached me, laughing, requesting an encore.

For weeks people kept asking. “Sarah, Uli never heard the hausmeister story!” And what began as a nightmare became my entrée into a whole new social circle.

Strangely, I never ended up moving out of dour Hilke’s place.

Partly it was because those duffels were too heavy. Partly it was because Hilke herself soon became a source of endless cocktail party conversation. A few weeks later she curated an exhibit of art so extreme it would have given Hieronymus Bosch the shakes. My workmates left in disgust, and we laughed about it for days. She and I never did become very close.

I did keep the hausmeister’s card, not for the massage but on the off chance I get stuck again. But the truth was I no longer needed it. I had friends to call. In my sheer foreignness, I’d somehow found a home.

SARAH WILDMAN has sworn off roommates but makes an exception for her husband and baby daughter.

I’M WRITING THIS not from my apartment in New York but from my parents’ South Florida living room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Why? Because three days ago I needed to do laundry and wanted to go for a nice, long run on the beach. There were other problems, too. A street lamp outside my window had started to go out. At night, its bulb filled my block with a loud, brain-rattling squeal. Also, I’d run out of dishwashing liquid—not to mention paper towels, bottled water and microwaveable macaroni and cheese—and the dishes had piled up so high that I’d invented a new verb (“ziggurating”) to describe their slow creep toward the ceiling.

Those were all things I didn’t want to deal with. And so, two days later, I showed up in Palm Beach—1,100 miles away—with my duffel bag and a pair of running shoes.

“Martin’s home,” my mom called out. My dad popped his head around the corner, a bit bewildered. “Oh,” he said. “Did he leave?”

I could understand his confusion. It was my second time down here in less than 10 days. But it used to be worse. Much worse. A few years ago, I was traveling so much that my New York friends thought I’d moved back down to Florida, while my Florida friends had no idea where I lived. Truth was, I was living everywhere, yet nowhere. In any given month, I might be paddling down tributaries of the Amazon in a dugout canoe, crashing in a tent outside Pompeii during an especially hot Neapolitan summer, grading papers in the smoky terminals of Malpensa airport, hopping a bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo, or surfing at San Onofre State Beach. In 28 years, I’d lived on three continents and traveled to all the rest (except Antarctica, which is too cold). There was always another suitcase, another ticket, another flight.

I bear the burden of refusing to be grounded, of kicking against permanence. It’s an uphill battle. Especially when travel websites fill my inbox with email after email detailing their last-minute vacation packages. For various reasons—most of them involving said websites, some of them involving laundry—I don’t think I’ve stayed in one place for more than two months. Ever. There was once a popular term that described this passion as the vice that it really is: Wanderlust. I’m bringing it back. In fact, I’ve started capitalizing the “W” to differentiate between innocent postcollege summers spent backpacking around Europe and the full-blown case of Wanderlust that I eventually developed.

I suppose my condition was incubating long before I was born.

My dad joined the Royal Air Force right after medical school. During his five years in Her Majesty’s service, he lived in Germany and Cyprus, slept in abandoned leper colonies and dangled from helicopters above the icy North Sea, before becoming a psychiatrist. My mom played international tennis, volleying from the clay courts of Roland Garros to the soft lawns of Wimbledon. They met on a hotel pool deck in Cape Town and were engaged two weeks later.

For the first few years of their marriage, they traveled. And traveled some more—to Taiwan and Hawaii, to North Carolina to see the Jaws opening run and to New York for cheesecake at Carnegie Deli. But they wanted to start a family, and children meant bottles and diapers and nursery rhymes, not tray tables and baggage carousels and preflight safety announcements. When my mom got pregnant, they decided to kick their Wanderlust à deux—cold turkey.

After less than a month, they relapsed. At three weeks old, I was sitting on my mother’s lap on a flight bound for the Bahamas, soaring high above the world I’d just entered. By the time I was two, I had already flown 116,334 miles. By my 10th birthday, I’d been tear-gassed and infected with parasites. That same year, my dad tried to buy four Coca-Colas at an airport in Zimbabwe. The barman pulled a machine gun on us. Then, for the very reasonable price of $20 a bottle, the barman put down his Kalashnikov and gave us our drinks. With a smile.

Meanwhile, of course, I’d seen the world. And I loved every minute of it. My youthful memories are viewed through the prism of a Boeing 747. I built my childhood fortresses not with sofa cushions but with thin airplane blankets draped over seatbacks. My occasional stomachaches were treated by friendly flight attendants bearing ginger ale. After another young Wanderluster—my sister—joined the family, our pillow fights were largely ineffectual battles, thanks to those small airline pillows. When I started school, my tray table became a collapsible desk. I ate Goldfish crackers in the airport lounge at Heathrow for my afternoon snack. We were a family united by a love of wandering, and I was always along for the flight.

I slowed down a little for high school and college, but after that my condition increased markedly in severity. One Wednesday afternoon, the thought crossed my mind that I’d never been to Machu Picchu. By Friday I was standing outside my friend’s apartment in Cuzco wearing New Balances and an elementary school backpack, convinced that this was all we’d need to conquer the Inca Trail. (I finally acquiesced to my friend’s far more mundane idea of taking the train.)

The advent of travel websites—no more telephone calls, no more travel agents—meant that I could meander the firmament free from third-party interlopers. I upgraded to a new credit card seeking the extra miles, airport lounges, free sodas (the free sodas alone paid for the credit card). I began to spend more time in airports than I did in my own bedroom.

But where to next? What if a family wedding at one end of the globe coincided with a writer’s conference at the other? No problem. My life was in constant motion. From Miami to Los Angeles to Sydney to Cairns I’d go, backtracking from Sydney to Los Angeles to Miami, and then on to Paris and St. Petersburg. That particular odyssey took place in 12 days, after which my first two weeks in Russia were a cacophonous blur. I didn’t know when to eat or sleep. And I couldn’t have been happier. I was a full-blown Wanderluster—with all of its attendant side effects.

Later that year, I was reading John Cheever in a marble bathtub at a hotel in Los Angeles when I realized that there’d been a change. I was living in New York, but it hadn’t quite taken, and a weeklong stay on the West Coast had entered its second month. “When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat,” I read, as I sat in the lukewarm tub. “You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.”

In my case, that wasn’t quite true. Instead of longing for something inside of me, I had been avoiding the search altogether. Adventure had somehow become an escape from life, a way of standing still. While my friends were getting married, having children, paying mortgages, losing jobs—all the sloppy things of life—I had abandoned any sense of permanence in exchange for perpetual motion. For the first time, the travel felt compulsive, involuntary. The joy was missing.

At a wedding in Florida around Valentine’s Day 2007, I had a revelation. Surrounded by old friends and classmates, I stared up at the dark cloudless February sky on one of the coldest nights on record and began to think of the fast-moving clouds as they crept across Cape Town’s Table Mountain, and the dawn casting its orange light through a lace curtain in Rome. I thought of the endless lime green of rice fields after a downpour in southern Japan, the corn fields and wheat fields, Niagara Falls and Iguazu Falls. With Cheever’s words ringing in my head, and with the faces of loved ones before me, I felt that I found what I’d been wandering for. As we talked long into the night after the wedding, I realized that in all my ramblings and peregrinations, I had never been as content as I was at that moment, among people I knew and loved.

Man, I thought, if only I could persuade each and every one of them to come with me to Corfu. It’s absolutely gorgeous in the spring.

MARTIN MARKS divides his time between Palm Beach, Florida, and New York— depending on how much laundry he has.

THERE’S A SAYING IN INDIA that’s often repeated to newcomers: “If you come here without patience, you will learn it. If you come with patience, you will lose it.” I’m about to lose mine in a big way.

I’ve spent the past four hours clutching the steering wheel of a tuk tuk, or auto-rickshaw (“rick” for short), a three-wheeled vehicle of dubious reliability and a maximum speed of 35 mph (downhill). Aaron, one of my oldest friends, is sitting behind me eyeing the road dubiously. “You’re going to have to drop down to first gear again,” he says. And he’s right. The road we’re on is a maddening conspiracy of unpaved sinkholes that threaten to snap our axle.

We’re exhausted and hungry and have been vibrating violently for most of the day. We’ve almost been killed a half-dozen times. And at the moment, as I’m slowly negotiating a ditch, a lorry is on my tail (imagine a giant dump truck painted in vibrant colors and bearing messages, prayers and the eyes of Ganesh emblazoned across its grill). The driver lays on his horn, not so much to ask me to move as to indicate that he is not going to stop, and that if I don’t get out of his way, I’m done for.

The next thing I know, Aaron is dragging me back toward the rickshaw. He looks worried.

“What just happened?” I ask, dazed.

“You flipped. You just started screaming, ‘I can hear you!’ Then you got out of the rick and chased him. I’m pretty sure you were going to try and fight the lorry.” He takes a deep breath. “Do you need me to drive?”

“Yes. Yes, I need you to drive,” I say, calming down. Later, it would become all too clear how truly dangerous such trucks can be, but that lesson is still four days and 600 miles down the road.

At this point, we’ve been in India for 15 days as part of the sixth Rickshaw Run. Each year, a group called the League of Adventurists signs up 60 teams from around the world to race 2,000 miles across the subcontinent. The league is specific about the rules: There are none. If you get arrested- tough. Hurt-nice knowing you. Lost- well, isn’t that what you signed up for?

We started in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the southeast coast. After a few days of prep and a crash course in the intuitive art of Indian driving, we set out. The finish line was to be in Shillong in the hill provinces northeast of Bangladesh. Of the 60 teams, four decided to head inland instead of taking the coastal route: Rick Dangerous, the Midnight Riders, a team comprising an Aussie and a Canadian who couldn’t seem to agree on a name, and The Dehlicious, which was us.

We traveled in a loose pack, losing each other and reuniting at random intervals on the chaotic, often unmarked roads. Most nights we would rendezvous at a hotel and gather for drinks before hitting the sack early and setting out at dawn together. Communicating by cell phone, we helped each other through breakdowns, exhaustion and missed turns.

Our first stop was Gingee, a village of dirt streets filled with small vendors. As we pulled into town in the waning light of our first day, an ancient Chola fort rose above us. It was a heart-stopping sight, but sightseeing wasn’t our goal. We’d come to see the India hidden from the tour buses and hotels designed for Western tourists and weekend Buddhists. We were after complete immersion.

Which is why, later that night, when Garreth of Rick Dangerous suggested grabbing a beer, we didn’t hesitate to follow a stranger down a dark alley to a drab little room lit with flickering fluorescent bulbs. Gingee is for the most part a dry town and the room wasn’t a bar so much as a quiet gathering place. Locals ran off to grab us beers and pints of whiskey from a store farther down the alley. Though they added a reasonable markup, the evening was an unforgettable introduction to the kindness of the Indian people. Our brand new friends crowded around, confused as to what nine confused looking Westerners were doing in their speakeasy and entranced by Garreth’s bright red beard, which he grudgingly let the boldest among them stroke.

Back in the hotel, we filtered water from the tap, struggled to adapt to the nuances of Indian toilets and then wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags and went to sleep.

The next morning we rode out into a countryside bathed in sunlight. Cattle herded by young men grazed in fields that spread out for miles, interrupted only occasionally by a stand of trees or an errant rock formation. The road quickly turned from broken pavement to dirt and carried us farther away from the scattered towns we’d seen in the early morning. Before long, we realized we were completely lost. After regaining our bearings and retracing our steps we headed north, this time on the right road.

We had been warned at the start about driving at night and resolved to make our daily goals before nightfall. This resolution lasted through the first day, after which we were always behind schedule and continued plowing along well past sunset. While driving during the day can be slow due to traffic, it’s fairly simple to accomplish once you master the vehicular pecking order (ricks are above pedestrians, cyclists and motorcycles but below cars, lorries and buses). Night driving is another story, involving a complicated semaphore of honks, flashed headlights and muttered curses.

I let Aaron handle Chittoor on that second night, not yet feeling confident in my driving ability. After two hours, he was an emotional wreck. We decided to stop for the evening a couple hundred miles short of our goal.

The following days were a full immersion in parts of India rarely seen by tourists. As we cruised past sunflower fields that extended to the horizon, locals pulled up alongside us to converse at full speed. “Where are you from?” “Why are you here?” “Where are you going?” We were always treated with kindness and given directions-usually correct ones. At one point we lost a bolt that held our muffler in place, and locals appeared and fashioned a sling from banyan leaves and wire.

By the end of the fourth day of racing we had reached Hyderabad. Our hosts for the evening were Daniel and Shirley, the parents of a friend of Aaron’s who had invited us stay at their home. They had been told about the race, but I doubt anything could have prepared them for nine of the dirtiest, most exhausted and starving people they had ever seen stomping into their apartment. They watched in awe as we decimated the entire menu of a local restaurant (twice), but in a testament to their hospitality, they refused to allow us to contribute to a bill that was large by American standards and astronomical by Indian ones.

After an evening of hot showers, air conditioning and beds with clean linens, it was hard to leave, but we had a schedule to keep and five days to reach Varanasi, one of the major objectives of the trip. When the Midnight Riders’ rickshaw blew a tire just 20 minutes outside of Hyderabad and we made only 70 miles on the day, we knew there’d be some serious traveling ahead of us.

We did what we had to do, taking three-to-four-hour shifts and pushing 12 hours each day. In the mountains we crawled through misty passes and dense forest, the blur of green punctuated here and there by clusters of wildflowers, or the bright reds and yellows worn by women working in vast cotton fields. At night we slept in roadside motels on mattresses riddled with bedbugs or, if the city were large enough, the nicest hotel we could find. We awoke before dawn to pack our gear and hit the road, generally gulping down a few cups of chai for breakfast.

We pulled into Varanasi at dusk, eager to experience one of the world’s holiest cities. For well over a millennium, Hindus have come to Varanasi to cremate their dead on the banks of the Ganges. It is a city in which the fabric of life appears frayed with age, revealing each thread and layer-sometimes to an overwhelming degree. At night, trash fires burn in the streets as cattle mill about aimlessly, eating what they can find. On every corner, women holding screaming infants grabbed at our clothes begging for money. Men approached us reaching out to shake hands-only to keep the hand and provide unsolicited massages, expecting a tip. Children are everywhere, hawking beads and flowers. Inevitably, perhaps, given the city’s history, death permeates everything, at once a spectacle and a business. In the morning, Aaron and I found ourselves standing over a burning body. “We’re just tourists at a funeral,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

It felt strange to leave, as we’d placed so much importance on the city during our planning. One thing we’d already begun to realize, however, is that the places you’re told are sacred aren’t always the ones where you actually feel touched by the divine.

After a brief stop in Bodh Gaya, we headed north, aiming to spend a day in Darjeeling. We were confident now. We knew the ropes, and the days flew. Passing through vast tea fields we drove in silence, lost in our own thoughts as the golden sun set to the west. On a steep mountain road, we paused to stare off into the distance where the highest peaks of the Himalayas are visible, Everest shrouded in fog somewhere among them. In Darjeeling, we found a shrine at the top of the city and a rare moment of silence. In a small town just days from the finish line, a restaurant owner kept his establishment open late and fed us a vegetarian meal of chili paneer, dahl and naan that tops anything I’ve eaten in New York’s most elegant Indian restaurants.

On our last day of driving, passing through a hilly stretch near the finish line in Shillong, we encountered four of the other teams-cheering and yelling to one another like old friends reunited after decades apart. We were almost there.

That’s when, out of nowhere, another lorry appears and nearly kills us all. Barreling down the hill at top speed, it causes two teams to flip their ricks. For a second, it looks as though the trip is ending in tragedy. We sprint down the road toward the crushed ricks, our hearts pounding as the lorry speeds away without a glance from the driver.

Miraculously, no one is injured, but the ricks are crushed. With a little creative demolition we rip the canopies and cracked windshields off the vehicles, and the beleaguered teams putter along in their convertibles for the last 30 miles as we follow close behind.

Aaron and I wind up in 25th place, but so what? The trip was never really about winning. Not only had we raised more than $3,500 for charity, we’d gained something ourselves-though even now it’s hard to say just what. I do know that landing in New York three days later, I would wonder where everyone was, why there wasn’t any noise or color to speak of. I would miss India.

RICHARD KNAPP will be returning to India in the spring. This time, he’ll be traveling by train.

“TO LIGHT A CANDLE, NOT FILL A BUCKET.”

It might sound saccharine to some, but that quote from National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum curator John O’Dell—a reference to his goal of inspiring museumgoers rather than just collecting memorabilia—simply stuns me with its imagery every time I hear it. In fact, those are the words that finally convince my new girlfriend, Bobbi, to make the trip to Cooperstown with me.

It’s a risky move. We’ve only been seeing each other for six weeks, and our new relationship somehow feels even newer than that. A 26-year-old Ph.D. in linguistics, Bobbi is taking a postdoctoral sabbatical from hobnobbing with brainiacs and scholars to date me. She has zero interest in baseball and suspect interest in yours truly, but O’Dell’s line intrigues her, so, on a crisp Thursday, we take a drive to upstate New York.

An early morning departure from Cleveland and six hours on I-90 delivers us deep into a nearly pristine wilderness. The entire landscape is dusted white by a recent snowfall and, for a while, it appears to go on forever. Then, almost at once—Cooperstown.

Sure, it’s a charming little hamlet replete with vintage streetlights, homey storefronts and untouched 1930s quaintness, but that’s not why my heart is aflutter. A solitary thought echoes in my mind. The Hall. The Hall. The Hall. It’s so close. I’m here—truly, finally, actually here—in Cooperstown, baseball’s Vatican City. Ruth. Cobb. DiMaggio. Heroes and villains of the best game there ever was. Legends and magic and Cool Papa Bell.

I can’t wait, can’t sit still. I roll down my window, and even the cold, crisp bite of February tastes sweeter than usual. As Bobbi naps next to me, I actually giggle in anticipation. Two quick left turns, and it stands before me—the Baseball Hall of Fame—a stately structure, three-stories of red brick. My boyhood dreams realized.

“We’re here,” I announce.

Bobbi stirs and drowsily sits up in her seat.

“Is that it?” she asks.

I answer breathlessly and without taking my eyes off the building.

“Yes.”

In the lobby, the first thing I notice is noise. There’s chatter from all directions as queues form and snake across the floor. The lobby is alive with energy, a craving for the experience about to be had. There are maps to grab, tours to choose, tickets to buy. Men in ball caps are making plans, discussing the order of exhibits they want to see. Parents and teachers marshal children. All around, eyes are aglow. Everyone wants to be there—except for the people who don’t.

After purchasing our tickets, Bobbi and I follow a map down a hallway to find a section dedicated to baseball’s origins and Abner Doubleday, the Zeus in baseball’s pantheon. I can feel my heart pounding in my ears as I walk the halls. I tell myself that the experience won’t officially begin until I stop walking and pore over my first exhibit. I am intentionally ignoring the museum displays that I pass. I will return to them later. For the moment, I’m trying to hold off until I find the perfect beginning because, as soon as I begin, the inevitable end is closer. The anticipation is better than a first kiss.

When I can resist no longer, I stop at a glass case mounted on a wall. It is a glimpse into 19th century America. There are historical references to an English game called rounders from which baseball apparently evolved, but that’s not what interests me. I’ve found my perfect beginning. It is captured in a few old photos of a semiprofessional team from 1880s Corinne, Utah.

Looking at black-and-white stills of long-dead men, forever 20 years old and in pinstripes, one immediately senses a game without time. It’s how I always thought of our national pastime: pure, forever, American. There were no steroids, no millionaires. It was just baseball, just the game and its heroes, and, oh, what a game.

I feel an irresistible surge of patriotism as I stare at a 100-year-old bunch of laced leather. It is a rudimentary glove, probably made for a son by a stitching mother and a farming father who killed the cow and treated the hide himself. A ball demonstrating similar craftsmanship rests beside it. I can’t imagine attempting to use such a mitt to catch such a ball, but I love that someone did. That was baseball. From its very beginning, the game was ugly and hard, but good at its core, just like the country that played it.

Unfortunately, that kind of sentiment isn’t readily transferable, and soon Bobbi tells me that she’s taking a cigarette break. Her departure might warrant more attention, except that, the moment before, I’d found Tyrus Raymond Cobb. Ty Cobb. Quite possibly the greatest player of all time. The original Georgia Peach. And the meanest SOB ever to swing a bat.

In various photographs, Ty wears several different faces. He looks almost charming in the photos that capture him promoting Coca-Cola in the soft drink company’s infancy. He is homely handsome on tobacco cards in his Detroit Tigers uniform. But in a few of the photos, you can catch a glimmer of the famous vicious streak he’d shown by shouting racist epithets, attacking fans and cleating fellow ballplayers with the intent to maim.

I walk down another hall, looking for signs of Bobbi. She’s been a good sport simply by making the trip. I want to help her enjoy the experience. But when I find a wing dedicated to the Negro Leagues, I briefly forget I have a girlfriend.

The Monarchs of Kansas City. Chicago’s Brown Bombers. Satchel Paige. Josh Gibson. Cold electricity shoots up my spine as a smile spreads across my face. Yes, it was baseball’s apartheid. Yes, it’s a shameful reminder of my country’s racist past. But it was also glorious. I can almost feel the celebrated and singular carnival atmosphere of black baseball. The Negro Leagues had a unique spirit, a renegade essence and a fierce independence. The joy for the game was the same.

A miniature movie theater with antique drapery draws me inside. I take a seat and soon find myself fighting back tears as I watch black-and-white footage of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby. As the two men integrate the major leagues before my eyes, I can’t stop thinking about how they helped begin to heal a divided country’s wounds.

I spend three hours by myself, discovering and rediscovering my heroes, Yogi Berra and Carlton Fisk and Mickey Mantle, reading about the Chicago Black Sox scandal that almost destroyed baseball and Babe Ruth, who saved it. There are too many stories to put in one article, but there’s a truth that occurs to me in Cooperstown that I think is worth sharing.

Professional baseball has never been pure. Today’s steroids are just the latest bit of hideousness. At times throughout its existence, the sport has been marred by racism, riddled with corruption, governed by greed and played by cheaters. Indeed, baseball is a dirty game. But also a great one.

And it belongs to America. It is the people’s game. We start playing it at age five. And that moment when a young man—or, increasingly, a young woman— stands defiantly at the plate, eyes glinting, fingers gripping a Louisville Slugger, is transcendently, incorruptibly American. It is good versus evil, the one against the many. And when we can no longer swing a bat, we replay that moment in our minds. And that’s why the game has such longevity. Certainly, baseball can get dirty, but we can stand up and brush off the dirt because—once again, like the country that plays it— baseball is capable of righting itself.

I’m staring at a photo of Lou Gehrig as he says goodbye to Yankee Stadium when I decide that there are people who love baseball and people who don’t, and the people who don’t just haven’t looked closely enough. Then I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around. It’s Bobbi.

“I love this place,” I tell her, pulling her close.

“I do too,” she answers earnestly.

In answer to my look of disbelief, Bobbi explains that in our time apart, she discovered and became bewitched by a section devoted to baseball’s influence on the American lexicon.

“I like baseball!” she admits with a note of surprise. “Who’d’ve guessed?”

On the long ride home, Bobbi and I talk about our favorite exhibits. I tell her about baseball’s history and fundamentals. She relates to me a new fascination with baseball’s influence on regional dialects. I explain to her that the designated hitter is fundamentally un-American. She tells me that baseballese has affected her understanding of discourse analysis. She’s a lot smarter than me.

We’re still dating. And I think it’s partially due to a now-shared love of baseball. For John O’Dell, two more candles lit in Cooperstown.

Against all odds, YATES WALKER never made the T-ball Hall of Fame.

I was in tokyo a couple of weeks ago. After clearing customs in Narita, I did what I normally do when I get to Tokyo. I did something really stupid.

It’s become a little ritual of mine, though I mix it up to keep myself guessing.

Sometimes I leave my wallet on an airport chair. Or I buy a ticket for the wrong train, heading away from the city.

This time, I got my exchange rate mixed up and tried to extract $15,000 from several wisely unwilling ATMs.

Luckily I never got the cash, or I’d probably have found a way to leave a fat wad of yen on a chair somewhere.
Later, at dinner, as I was nodding off into a tumbler of Yamazaki whiskey, my friends said what people usually say to me in Tokyo and elsewhere in the world: “You haven’t adjusted yet. Your body is still on New York time. For you it’s yesterday.”

When you travel a lot, you get used to people always reminding you what time it is for you. As if everyone can peer inside your brain and read a little personal clock there that shows all the data about why exactly you’re feeling sluggish, the time of your last meal and which side of the bed you woke up on. And the diagnosis is always the same.

Driving the rental car the wrong way out of the airport? Jet lag! Wandering the streets hungry at 4 a.m.? Jet lag! See, it’s okay. The world understands why you’re lost, cranky, distracted or dyspeptic (or, as happens more often than we’d like to admit, all of the above). Your clock just needs resetting.

And I know the world is basically right. My readings are haywire, my compass is off, night is day. I’m either alert at the wrong time, or not at all. Scientists even have a nifty name for this condition, desynchronosis, which makes it sound like a medical disorder of some kind even if it’s simply a natural response to being suddenly plopped down far from home. We are all governed by circadian rhythm, or a 24-hour cycle that tells us it’s breakfast time in our home continent even though the sun is setting before us now. But I’m not quite ready to attribute the condition entirely to something as banal as my scrambled sense of time.

After all, anybody who’s seen me dance at a wedding knows my rhythm isn’t great under the best of circumstances. And where are these experts when I feel exhausted at home?

How to explain my general habit of working in the middle of the night, eating at the wrong hours and dreaming all day about naps? With 24/7 media overstimulation coming at me from every corner of the planet, do I really need a jet to throw me off my sleep schedule? Trust me, you can forget what day it is even without a passport.

And why do we insist on blaming the flying itself? Sit me upright in an easy chair for 13 hours, replay the Bourne trilogy three times, ply me with gin-and-tonics and let me doze off with my chin tucked into my clavicle…. I’m pretty sure I’d wake up feeling weird without ever leaving my living room.

The main thing, though, is this: Tokyo is really far away from New York. Thousands-and-thousands-of-miles far away. Around-the-bend, other-side-of-the-world far away. And when I get there—when I finally arrive and somehow restlessly fumble my way out of Narita and into that big, overwhelming city—I experience the rush of displacement all over again.

Tokyo is thrillingly, exhaustingly, wonderfully foreign to my everyday 
life. Sure, part of the reason I’m at Tsukiji market at 5 a.m. on my second day there, watching men cut up giant tuna and looking forward to my beer and sushi breakfast, is because my body just won’t let me sleep. But it’s just as true to say I’m awake because I’m so excited to be here. Giant tuna! Homicidal motorized carts speeding everywhere! Beer with breakfast!

I say, enough with the whining: It’s time to give jet lag a second look. Yes, it’s sometimes inconvenient to feel grouchy or lost or incoherent, but that lost feeling is a significant part of travel, a reminder that distance is real, that miles aren’t just something we tally up in our frequent-flier accounts. Sitting at home at the computer, soaking up the news from a TV, it’s easy to believe that the world is small. But it doesn’t feel small when you’re out in it. This, it seems to me, is one of the profound gifts of being alive now: the ability to get up and go everywhere, to experience the world in a kind of rush that previous generations couldn’t have dreamed of. We should savor that rush, take it in the way a dog sticks his head out a car window and feels the wind in his face. A sense of dislocation comes with the territory. Indeed, it’s part of the fun.

I’d go so far as to say that an essential component of my love for Tokyo is the simple fact that I always feel so gloriously messed up and out of my element when I’m there. The world is big, and frankly, it should wear us out to try taking it all in. We should be righteously freaked out by all the traveling we do. We should be dizzy with awe that these big planes deliver us to faraway places, and at the wonders that we find there. And while I’m all for making it to meetings on time and not drooling in public, maybe we shouldn’t try so hard to fix the unfixable nature of living in an exhausting time.

Everyone’s got a cure, of course, a pill, a routine, a bit of trusted quackery that promises to take the edge off, knock you out inflight, get you on your feet when you land, uncramp your muscles, march you through customs, order room service and tuck you in at night (see Time Bandits). Admittedly, I long considered Ambien a trusted friend, until the time I woke up from my slumber on a long flight and, in a zombie state, punched up You’ve Got Mail with unidentifiable subtitles on my personal inflight entertainment system. What kind of friend lets you do that?

Recently I got a press notice about a British juice drink called Mile High. It modestly claims to eliminate “any negative side effects of frequent flying and long haul travel such as fatigue and nausea” through the power of antioxidants. Not having joined the Mile High drink club, I can’t say for sure, but my guess is what causes fatigue isn’t oxidants but lack of sleep.

A scientific journal from the International Society for Computational Biology reported recently on tests to fight jet lag by exposing test patients to “interventional light stimuli.” By the time I got to the end of the article, my eyes were strained and my head was throbbing—not unlike my response to a typical transatlantic red-eye. I wouldn’t be surprised if scientists do someday manage to alter the body’s rhythm with light—I’ve heard the same technique works wonders on egg-laying chickens, to say nothing of marijuana plants—but flashing lights on and off during sales meetings might not be quite what it takes to close a deal. So, no thanks. While science chases a cure, I’ll stick to wandering around gaga before passing out cold and sleeping dreamlessly through the night.

Returning from Japan last month, I was in New York for a couple of days before flying down to Louisville, Kentucky, then over to London and around the north of England, back to New York and on to Denver. To see these cities in these quick flashes in less than a month made me light-headed. I was struck by a kind of geographical dizziness. Staring out the window of a shuttle bus from the Denver airport heading to Boulder, I had strange, dreamy notions. Hey, I didn’t know they had Chuck E. Cheese’s in Yorkshire…I wonder if the big mouse talks with an accent?

Clearly all these time zones had left me more than a little unhinged. But I liked the confusion. It felt like a modern ailment. A little sleepiness, a touch of bewilderment, I realized, even as I nodded off, is nothing more or less than a normal, rational, authentic response to the still-astonishing fact of being flown around the world. To chalk this all up to something as mechanical as the resetting of an invisible clock seemed absurdly reductive, but more than that, it seemed to miss the point of travel altogether. We don’t need a cure for jet lag, I thought, my eyes flickering shut as the bus rumbled onto the Northwest Parkway. We need a nap.

Travel writer Adam Sachs has no idea where he is half the time, but he can usually find out by checking adamsachs.org.

Time Bandits

Can jet lag be “cured”? Probably not, but it seems as though everyone has a trick to mitigate its effects.

Sunshine on your shoulders – Not only can it make you happy, sunshine can theoretically “reset” your body’s clock. It’s as easy as going outside.

Melatonin - Taking small doses 
of this natural 
sleep-inducing hormone may help you fall asleep at the proper time 
(or, depending on what country you’ve flown to, it may get you arrested).

Whetting your whistle – Stay hydrated by drinking plenty 
of water and avoiding caffeine and 
alcohol—which, to some of us, sort 
of defeats the purpose of vacation.

Getting in touch with nature - Some New Age types insist that walking barefoot on the earth or swimming in the ocean can help by “grounding your electromagnetic system.”

True west – It’s claimed that jet lag is less severe on westward-bound trips. (And just imagine all the frequent-flier miles you can get flying from Chicago to New York via Tokyo.)

Viagra - A 2007 Argentine study showed that small doses of the impotence medication helped hamsters recover from simulated jet lag. The effect on their sex lives was not reported.

Light visor – Defy darkness and make Trekkies jealous by donning a geeky, programmable light visor that shines bright light on your face in sync with the daylight pattern of your destination.

Make believe – Some imaginative fliers claim that simply pretending they’re not on a plane lessens the problem.

—Peter Koch

HE DID NOT GO QUIETLY into that good night. Far from it.

My father, Robert Whitehead, was an elegant character, a revered Broadway producer who put on original works by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Harold Pinter, among others. He was also one hell of a guy who worked and played hard until the very end. But he was a flat-out pain in the neck during the months leading up to his death at 86.

“You can’t die on a Saturday,” he liked to say. “Nobody reads the Sunday obituaries.” Conveniently, he held on till Sunday and got himself a full page in The New York Times.

I remember running to the end of the driveway to pick up the paper, then sitting on a rock on our property and reading all about my most crazy and beloved friend.

One of his last requests was that we not hold a memorial service, but rather throw a little party at the old Broadway hangout Sardi’s. “Get some friends together, serve some booze and Savoy sandwiches,” he said. “And make sure there’s a guy playing the damn piano.”

His theater friends took things a bit further than that. First they dimmed all the marquee lights on Broadway in his honor. Then they strong-armed my mom, my brother and me into organizing a huge, star-studded memorial at the Majestic Theater. It was followed, of course, by a party at Sardi’s, with booze and Savoy sandwiches in great supply and, yes, a guy at the piano.

It was all pretty exhausting and particularly hard on my mom, the actress Zoe Caldwell, who soldiered through the festivities, only later succumbing to melancholy. “When he died, I died,” she admitted when it was all done. An over-dramatic proclamation, perhaps, but Mom has won four Tonys for being able to deliver lines like that. It was then that my brother, Charlie, and I decided we needed to shake her out of her funk.

By any means necessary.

We chose a motorcycle road trip through the Southwest not only because Charlie and I both love bikes but because we figured eating desert dust for a few weeks would be the perfect way to put some distance, literally and figuratively, between Mom and the stylish New York life she and Dad had built together. If 2,000 miles of asphalt didn’t do the trick, nothing would.

Did I mention she was 73 and no great fan of motorcycles?

“Well, at least I still have one son,” she’d declared the day I brought home my first Harley, summoning the same unsettling conviction she used while playing Medea back in 1984 (“Death! Death! Death!”). Charlie bought his bike a few weeks later, which meant she had no sons. (My father, who had squired her around town on a Honda 650 on their first night out, just muttered, “My God, don’t you boys get into enough trouble as it is?”)

Eventually, I did manage to coax Mom onto the back of my motorcycle for a quick jaunt around town. But she had yet to face a real dust-eating hell ride replete with rain, breakdowns, bad food, marauding tractor trailers and all the other glories of the road.

“A motorcycle journey,” she exclaimed when we brought up the idea. “That sounds lovely. We must eat at marvelous restaurants and stay at the best hotels.

And I’ll get a massage every day.” She also mentioned something about being surrounded by ristras, the bright red bunches of dried chile peppers that hang everywhere in New Mexico. “They’ll make things awfully jolly, won’t they?”

The choice of New Mexico wasn’t entirely random. Thirty-two years prior to our motorcycle campaign, Dad had briefly transplanted the family to Santa Fe while trying out a little show called A Texas Trilogy, by Preston Jones. Charlie was five, and I was eight. It was Christmas, and all we wanted was to head out into the desert. While visiting Bandelier National Monument, I tumbled from a cliff, ping-ponged off a few ancient Anasazi dwellings and sustained a nice concussion before coming to rest. Not to be upstaged, a short while later Charlie was playing around on some pointy brick structure and tripped, falling head first onto the masonry, leading to a hospital visit and 36 stitches in his forehead.

With that history in mind, we decided to ease Mom in gently this time. We reserved a suite for her at The Bishop’s Lodge, a first-rate Santa Fe adobe palace chock full of every spa amenity you could conjure. We even called ahead and made sure her room was riddled with ristras. With Mom bathed in mud, Charlie and I picked up the bikes.

The rental shop was an old Ford dealership with an expansive, mostly empty showroom. Not a speck of grease, gas or oil anywhere. The rental guy seemed cool enough, if a little twitchy, but the two bikes he had looked as if they might have rocked the scene at Altamont in ’69. One featured a hacked exhaust pipe that spit flames and torched any piece of leg that wasn’t well placed. The other came with no front fender, no turn signals, crooked handlebars and a dicey brake light.

We roared into the hotel parking lot as Mom emerged from her suite wearing dainty sneakers, white linen pants, a red-and-white-striped Venetian gondolier’s top and a wide-brimmed straw hat. It was a stylish look for sure, but not exactly ideal for the task at hand.

“Did you get Mom the riding gear?” I asked Charlie.

“Nope. You?”

He and I quickly obtained second-rate gear at the local army-navy store and gave the good stuff to Mom. Suddenly she resembled a real “prospect,” as outlaw biker gangs refer to aspiring members—leather, denim, chains and all. A set of brass knuckles and she’d be set.

Perhaps it was out of guilt that we decided on one last spa before setting out, in the foothills outside of town.

Ten Thousand Waves is famous for something called watsu, an aquatic form of bodywork that stretches your limbs and is meant to make you feel as if you have re-emerged from the womb. Needless to say it was Mom’s idea. Thankfully, she didn’t overplay the metaphor.

Here’s how watsu works: You’re cradled by a therapist in a hot pool while being gently manipulated. It puts you in a glorious stupor. It’s also a bit homo-erotic, or maybe it just seemed that way because our therapist was chiseled and sporting a Speedo and was clutching me in a vaguely amorous fashion.

It was time to get back on the road.

ON OUR WAY NORTHWEST up to Telluride, we made sure to hit a few of the favor-ites—canyons, mud baths and such. It was Mom’s first full day on a motorcycle and she rode like a true old lady—high praise in biker parlance.

At one point we came across a weathered New Mexico highway worker who refused to believe she was not the legendary artist Georgia O’Keeffe, famous for her ultrafeminine abstractions, even though O’Keeffe had died in 1986 at 98.

“I love your work,” he said as we sat at the five-minute, one-way stop light and our mom, ever the actress, began to morph into the late painter, for whom she’s always had tremendous respect. The man seemed pleased with his star sighting and might have offered her a canvas if he’d had one handy. Just as the whole scene was getting ridiculous, and before Mom confessed to her joke, the light turned green and we were off . (Later, to commemorate the trip, I got a tattoo of an O’Keeffe cow skull. Mom usually winces at my ink, but she loved this one. “It’s so delicate,” she remarked. “I think it has your dad’s eyes.”)

We spent that night at a nice hotel in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where we took in a rodeo. From there it was a skirt through the San Juan National Forest to Durango. Another night, another hotel, another rodeo.

The next evening, I floated the idea of trying out a mechanical bull at a bar. To my surprise, Mom volunteered to be first up. As she climbed aboard, I clasped my hands and gave the operator a please-be-gentle look. He took the hint, and Mom got off unscathed. Charlie too. I wasn’t so lucky. The steer wrangler clearly had it in for me. Within seconds, I’d flown into the western night and landed on my wrist. Lesson learned: Stick to the motorcycle.

In all, it was a fairly smooth ride. That is, until we blasted into a hailstorm during our march toward Gunnison, Colorado, and its astonishing Black Canyon. As the stuff came down in sheets, we huddled together under an outcrop-ping. We were soaked and miserable.

I thought of Dad and what he might make of our supposedly relaxing little adventure. I looked nervously at my mom, wondering how she was holding up. Although she hadn’t actually died when he had, it seemed her idiot sons were now set to finish her off .

But she was smiling. In fact, she seemed electrified, perhaps remembering her single days as a vagabond actress—a “mad gypsy,” as she often put it, of the theater world.

“It’s marvelous,” she said, gazing out over the gray horizon.“Quite biblical.”

Eventually we made it to Telluride, before bolting back to Santa Fe and our twitchy little rental pal.

Mom emerged from the ride more invigorated and stronger than ever. In fact, I now worry that she might steal off with one of my motorcycles someday.

“How amazing!” our newly minted road hog proclaimed after her final dismount. “Your dad never would have taken me on a trip like this.”

That’s not entirely true. But he didn’t. Instead he took her everywhere else. Bust out the booze and Savoy sandwiches. And for heaven’s sake, someone cue the damn piano player.

SAM WHITEHEAD lives and writes in New York, where he labors arduously to conceal his status as a “theater scion.”

AS ORIGINALLY PLANNED, our midwinter Mexican vacation was supposed to be a sedate, even sophisticated affair: nesting in a sun-dappled house in historic San Miguel de Allende, strolling the cobbled lanes, sipping coffee on the square next to the apricot-colored 17th century Parroquia and snagging cool art treasures made of pressed tin. After a few days of colonial elegance, though, our kids were utterly bored, and even I was longing for a Pacific beach—seven hours away by car. So before sunrise on a morning halfway through our vacation, we piled ourselves into a rental car and drove off vaguely westward. The highway took us across the high, dry plateau 6,000 feet above sea level, and then slowly downward into the green fields of Michoacán, Mexico’s breadbasket. By eight o’ clock, we were in the midst of a giant marshland populated by hundreds of thousands of migratory birds wintering in the south. Through the car windows, we bore witness to a primordial scene out of the Garden of Eden, myriad bird species eating breakfast and a few fishing boats setting out for the day with the so-called butterfly nets that the Aztecs used.

This pastoral vision ended abruptly at a diesel-scented industrial wasteland, the exurbs of a city called Morelia. Our directions advised that this could be the last place to gas up the car before tackling the 200 miles or so to the beach.

Pulling into a Pemex station with a mini-mart attached, my eyes were drawn immediately to a critter curled up against the curb where we parked. At first glance, it looked like a dead rat. Rather than keep this observation to myself, I blurted out something to the effect of, “Oh no, what is that?” and before I could say “Heel!” our children were out the back door of the sedan and poking their toes at the poor creature—which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a puppy with dull, sleepy eyes and a coat of dingy fur so worn away by malnutrition and skin disease as to suggest, perhaps, some Mexican hairless in its bloodlines.

My five-year-old daughter, Lulu, an animal lover who has made pets of potato bugs and weevils, was already caressing the filthy creature, which was now up and bobbing about in a friendly, if dazed, manner. My instinct was to ignore it, and I quickly shooed the kids away. I have learned a few lessons about picking up strays, and I generally try to avoid it, but a few minutes later, as I noticed it ambling across the parking lot straight toward three lanes of morning rush hour beltway traffic, my canine-loving instincts took over. I knew if I let the animal walk out into traffic, its demise was going to haunt me for days. While my husband was inside the mini-mart, oblivious, choosing between the sugared donuts and the jalapeño chips, I grabbed our two-liter bottle of purified drinking water, a towel and a container of rosemary and thyme hotel shampoo. With the kids helping, we held the wriggling pup in place while rivulets of perfumed black water ran off its belly and onto the parking lot surface. A brief discussion with the gas station attendant, whose expression as we washed the dog indicated he considered us escapees from a lunatic asylum, confirmed the obvious: The puppy was an unwanted stray who wouldn’t be missed.

By the time my husband stepped out of the store, the dog was wrapped in a towel, nestled on the backseat of the car between Felix, nine, and his sister, all three of them beaming. Instantly conceding defeat, he merely wondered: “What do we do with him now?” I assured him that one of the rich, dog-loving, expatriate Americans who populate San Miguel would welcome our little friend.

For the next few hours, we drove southwestward, passing into a scorched desert. When we opened the windows, the air that entered the car was like something from a blast furnace. Our stowaway barely moved. His eyes remained closed, and we began to wonder if he’d even survive the journey to the beach. To divert ourselves, we thought up names for him. “I want to call him Chili,” Lulu announced. Felix agreed. And so, while his dry nose, scrofulous skin and dull little eyes didn’t bode well for Chili’s longevity, he now had a name.

We finally reached the Pacific coast, rumbling up a dirt road leading to a collection of hotels along the sand—the surf town of Troncones. The sight of the heaving waves and the sensation of the cool breeze was a relief after our drive through hell’s basin, but now we had a fresh worry: Would Chili be welcome at the villa?

We tried to sneak him across the lawn, but the feel of the grass apparently was a new sensation for him, and he kept migrating back to the parking lot to nestle on the cement by the wheel of our car. It reminded me of a book I read to the kids when they were tiny, Are You My Mother?, about a lost baby bird who decides a steam shovel might be its mom. A bit of sausage was enough to coax Chili away from his asphalt bed and onto the porch, where the villa’s proprietors only winked at him. Then, after scarfing down slabs of the food, our withered little canine became a frisky puppy before our eyes.

We took a walk on the beach, our frolicking pup tearing up the sand alongside with his white-tipped tail held high, all of us in a state of glee. Beachgoers approached wherever we went, cooing over Chili, “What a cute puppy!” As his gas station misery receded, we started to imagine the unthinkable: This mangy, wormy little mutt might actually have to come back to New York with us.

Through the beach grapevine, we heard that an American hotelier nearby sported an ASPCA sign on the wall of her establishment and probably could direct us to a local vet—which seemed like an urgent need, given that the children were by now handling the sickly critter nonstop. In short order, we were at the office of a friendly vet in the beach town of Ixtapa, who hoisted our Chili onto the metal table to take some skin scrapings. He found no evidence of contagious mange (a certain bar to north-of-the-border travel for Mexican canines, apparently), and after dosing him with worm medicine, administering his first puppy shot and loading us with antifungal and insecticide shampoos, he sent us on our way.

Back in San Miguel a few days later, we serendipitously walked into a dog festival in a city park. It was put on by an organization called “Save a Mexican Mutt.” The group is run by dog-loving Americans who round up, vaccinate and find homes for some of the thousands of Mexican strays that prowl alleys and garbage heaps south of the border (driving them up into Texas and New Mexico by the dozen). Here we met our angel, a woman named Kelly Karger, who gave us a dog carrier and directed us to another vet, who provided us with more papers that would ensure—we were promised— Chili’s entry into the United States.

A week after we found him in the Pemex gutter, Chili arrived at security at the Mexico City airport, accompanied by an airline representative and a $125 ticket. We had been warned that if the Mexican authorities didn’t like the look of our dog or his papers, they might throw him into an airport kennel, the dreaded zoologico sanctuario, a prospect that— imagining the children’s likely reactions in an airport with a plane to catch—made my blood run cold. But the Mexican security forces waved him through, albeit after lengthy, inscrutable, nerve-wracking walkie-talkie consultations in Spanish with an absent superior.

Before takeoff, the children had already pulled Chili out of his carrier and onto their laps. A flight attendant approached, and for a moment I thought we were doomed again. But rather than admonish us to lock him up, she fell to her knees in the aisle and showered our little stray with caresses. “Who is this little baby?” she repeated. “I have one like you at home!”

The final hurdle awaited at Newark airport. Approaching the special aisle for travelers with “live animals or plant products,” my heart raced like a drug smuggler’s. A uniformed USDA inspector checked Chili’s papers and waved us through without so much as a glance inside the doggie bag. As we passed, one of the inspectors called out, “What kind of dog is it, anyway?” Ahh, just a Mexican mutt, we mumbled.

And so, our Chili became a naturalized American citizen. When I told this saga to a Dutch friend who travels between Amsterdam and New York four or five times a year, she was outraged at how much easier it was for a dog to get past U.S. Customs than it is for a bona fide member of the European Union.

A month into his unlikely American citizenship, Señor Pancho Chili de Pemex has taken to the New York lifestyle with panache. The elevator, the dog run, the leash, the crowded sidewalks, even the subway—nothing seems to befuddle him for long. Crucially, he apprehended house-training within days, although if the temperature is below 60 degrees, he prefers to do his business as close to the building as possible.

When our Spanish-speaking friends greet him with a hearty “¡Como Estas, Chili!” we think we see a glint of recognition in his bright little eyes. We hope to keep him bilingual.

The author of Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land, NINA BURLEIGH wholeheartedly agrees with that great American philosopher, Snoopy, that “Happiness is a warm puppy.”

AS A SOUTHERN GIRL, I’ve always loved the boiled peanut, a true down-home delicacy. But when I moved to New York City after college, the love became a solitary one. In fact, I was a laughingstock of Yankee gourmands. Now, to all those snobby Northern naysayers, a message: Jimmy Carter has my back.

I can pull this card because I recently spent a sunny afternoon knocking back cold ones with our 39th president at the Steinhatchee Landing Resort, a cluster of upscale cottages tucked beneath Florida’s panhandle. Jimmy was there for his annual family reunion, and my parents and I were enjoying an overnight getaway. When Dean Fowler, the owner, asked us if we wanted to meet his old friends the Carters, we jumped at the chance.

What topic did Jimmy and I cover out there by the pool? Boiled peanuts, thank you very much. Or, as we hicks like to call them, country caviar. And for a relocated Southerner long obsessed with ushering the salty regional delicacy into the greater culinary landscape, this was more than serendipity. As everyone knows, Carter has farmed peanuts in Plains, Georgia, all his life. So this was a cluster of stars forming a perfect, nut-shaped constellation: The boiled peanut’s moment had arrived.

If you’re not from the Southeast — the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi or North Florida — you may have no idea what a boiled peanut is. They trace at least back to the Civil War, when they were rationed out to Confederate soldiers who sang about their beloved “goober peas” in folk songs. The recipe is simple enough: Raw green peanuts are thrown into a pressure cooker and boiled in salty brine. The mushy little pockets are then bagged and sold at roadside shacks or scooped into Styrofoam cups from slowcookers at convenience stores. Connoisseurs pop the entire thing in their mouths, shell included, and suck.

When I first brought a bag of boiled peanuts north and served them to my friends, they weren’t received with the fervor I expected. “That’s just nasty,” said a friend from Connecticut, openly horrified at the soggy mound I’d dumped on a bar napkin. Sadly, it was a sentiment I’d hear repeated by many acquaintances over the years. In fact, of all the New Yorkers I tried them on, only a French transplant from Provence approved. Surely that’s a sign of the boiled peanut’s subtle sophistication.

Despite the resounding rejection of my beloved nuts, I briefly toyed with the idea of marketing them up North as a way of importing an endearing Southern tradition. It would have been a noble thing to do — honorable, even — but ill-fated. I was fresh out of college and wanted to come off as polished, in-the-know, urbane. Selling hillbilly nuts at the Union Square greenmarket did not seem urbane.

And then I met Jimmy.

IN 1929, an ambitious little boy named James Earl Carter Jr. also thought he could turn a buck hawking boiled peanuts except — unlike yours truly — little Jimmy didn’t just talk a big game with his layabout friends in dank Brooklyn bars; he actually made it happen.

“I started out when I was five years old, going out to my father’s field and pulling peanuts up out of the ground,” he began, as I sat with his wife, Rosalynn, and Dean. Nearby, Hugo — Amy Carter’s nine-year-old son — swung on a playground swing as a few Secret Service agents discreetly loitered nearby.

Every day, Jimmy explained, he would divvy up his freshly boiled peanuts (and here, he drew the word “boiled” out to the properly Southern-fried “baaald”) into 20 half-pound paper bags and hit the railroad tracks of Plains, ducking in and out of stores and selling his bags at five cents apiece.

“I made a dollar a day,” he said, eyeing me keenly, as if he had not yet decided whether I understood the relative heft of that kind of cash landing in the palm of a five-year-old 80 years ago. “That’s when a grown man was getting a dollar a day for working sixteen hours in the field.”

As I absorbed this, a sort of shame crept over me. How could I have thought I was too cool to sell boiled peanuts? Jimmy hadn’t figured selling goober peas would sully his image. He had made it happen, pocketed the dough, probably bought his friends a round of taffy or whatever kids ate in 1929 — and then gone on to become Leader of the Free World.

But while Jimmy eased my mind about the classiness of the product, he didn’t address my concerns over nationwide resistance. I was halfway through asking him if he thought Yankees would break down and join the fan club when he gave his head a single, resolute shake, “No.”

In Rosalynn’s opinion, the problem was that too many tourists were getting what Jimmy calls “artificial peanuts” that had been boiled to death by lazy roadside vendors. “The dried ones,” she said softly, her beautiful Southern lilt stretching out like caramel, “where they soak them overnight and then boil them forever.”

“People who love boiled peanuts wouldn’t think of eating those,” Jimmy sniffed. “It turns people against them.”

So how do you boil a peanut that Jimmy Carter would love? Well, it helps to own a peanut farm. When the season hits, he boils them fresh off the vine for 30 minutes. If they aren’t salty enough, he lets them soak a bit longer. Afterward, he freezes them in half-pound plastic baggies (a concession to technology) with “a tiny bit of saltwater to keep them moist,” he said. “So then when you get ready to eat them you just put them in a pot and heat them until they get hot — and they taste just like fresh.”

If, say, you don’t own a peanut farm, is there a brand he recommends? “No,” he blurted out before he could help himself, and the table erupted in laughter. Then his face softened into a mischievous grin.

“There are some good brands,” he allowed, “but I can’t think of them right now.”

Later, Dean leaned in. “Hardy Farms is pretty good,” he whispered. “You can get them at the local Publix.”

I SPENT MY toddler years squeezed into my mother’s shopping cart at Publix, combing the grocery aisles while my three older siblings were in school. When I got bigger, I rode on the back of the cart, hopping off to score a free cookie at the bakery; as a teenager I shuffled behind her, feigning boredom. I’ve always loved grocery stores.

While we never went hungry, we had the kind of modest, six-man household where requests for fussy snacks fell on deaf ears. I learned this early on, when I developed a craving for Pringles. (“Rich man chips,” my mother said.) Children are adaptable, though, and so I refocused my energies on boiled peanuts — an affordable snack just a bike ride away at the local 8 Till Late.

Now when I go home to Jacksonville for the holidays, I find the refrigerator lovingly stuffed with boiled peanuts — and before I return to New York I stock up, double-bagging them so they don’t leak, and stacking them neatly in my suitcase. During short visits, my mom and I keep our eyes peeled for roadside stands on the way to the airport. When we see one, we shout, eliciting a groan from my father as he swerves to make a U-turn.

It’s absurd — and yet, anyone who’s ever been homesick for their childhood comfort food knows there are no limits to how far they’ll go to find it.

The last thing Jimmy Carter said to me by the pool at Steinhatchee makes me think he might agree. As I shook his hand, I stumbled over one of those seemingly inane statements one makes when they realize they’ve burned an hour of an American president’s time discussing snack food. “This has been the greatest honor of my life, to sit here and talk boiled peanuts with you, sir.”

But before I could get the last word out, he waved his hand in the air dismissively.

“Boiled peanuts,” he said, looking me square in the eye and affecting a perfect mix of sincerity and irony, “is an honorable discussion.”

CINDY PRICE frequently writes about food and travel for The New York Times and the American Michelin guides. She can often be found hovering near bourbon, tacos and, of course, boiled peanuts.

IT WAS ALMOST 10PM when I took a seat in the nearly empty train car in a desolate port city near Rome, bound for the capital. As the train began creeping out of the station, I could barely keep my eyes open, a side effect of the whirlwind nature of my trip. Or more precisely, the perfectly flawlessly executed whirlwind nature of my trip.

Only two weeks prior, I’d decided to treat my then- girlfriend, Kerry, to a brief getaway to Naples. The challenge? She was in the middle of a three-month cruise around the world and virtually unreachable by phone or email — except in emergency situations, like if she needed an update on her cat. So planning fell entirely to me.

Happily, I love to plan. I’m meticulous — painstaking even. I hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment as if plotting a bank heist. Travel books were thumbed through, timetables consulted, maps pored over. After a few days, I devised the perfect plan. Knowing that Kerry’s ship would be docking for a few days in Civitavecchia, 50 miles northwest of Rome, I concluded that it would be best to meet her at customs. From there, first-class train tickets would whisk us south to Naples and the five-star hotel and the many Fodor’s-recommended restaurants I’d be ponying up for. All she had to do was show up.

And she did. And the whole thing went off without a hitch. Kerry had a lovely time, if I do say so myself. I’d just come from seeing her safely back to her boat and had managed to board the train back to Rome with 10 minutes to spare. Mission accomplished, or just about.

I just had to return to Rome to collect the suitcase I’d stowed at the rail terminal, check into the hotel I’d prepaid for and wake up early the next morning for a quick viewing of the Colosseum before taking a taxi to the airport for my flight back to New York. Despite having visited Italy twice before, I’d never spent any time in the Eternal City, and I was grateful to have even a few hours to see the sights. Doing so would require energy, but I’d planned for that, too. As the train lurched out of the station in Civitavecchia and began its 90-minute crawl, I closed my eyes and began to doze off, right on schedule.

I awoke roughly 40 minutes later. Glancing out the window, I expected to see the sprawl and twinkling lights of the Roman suburbs I’d noticed on the way out. Instead, three thoughts came to mind in rapid succession: (1) We’re really moving! (2) It’s crazy dark outside. (3) Uh-oh.

Time to hunt down the conductor. A bearded, officious man in a blue hat flashed me a puzzled smile as I stumbled up the aisle, trying — without success — to appear calm. I scraped together a sad remnant of what little Italian I remembered from college. I’d briefly studied the language in the hopes of using it to seduce an Isabella Rossellini type or order a pasta dish more authentic than Chef Boyardee, not to engage in panicked conversation with transit workers.

“Dove andiamo?” I asked.

The conductor replied, in broken English, that our train was headed north, to Livorno, two hours farther on. I felt my whole body slouch in defeat. Livorno! He made one of those politely bureaucratic shrugs that universally indicate “You’re screwed” and beckoned me into his office compartment, where he sat down and began flipping through a massive tome containing what I assumed to be every train timetable on the planet. After a short time he looked up at me.

“Is no good,” said the conductor. “What’s no good?” I asked.

“You.” He punched his index finger at the timetable. “You is no good.”

He went on to explain haltingly that while, sure, I had blundered by boarding the wrong train, the actual problem was much more severe. At virtually any other time of day, I could have disembarked at the next station, waited a short time, and then caught a train heading back to Rome — a mere inconvenience. But there were no more Rome-bound trains at this time of night; service wouldn’t resume until the next morning.

Translation: I would not be spending the night in Rome.

The smugness I’d been reveling in just an hour before had given way to extreme anxiety — and a dawning realization that perhaps the reason I’m such a careful planner is a simple fear of losing control. Improv isn’t my strong suit. The conductor instructed me to get off at the next stop, a place called Orbetello, where the first train tomorrow would be departing around 5:30am, reaching my intended destination some two hours later.

Once this information had sunk in, it didn’t seem so bad, actually. Sure, I’d be squandering the $150 I’d fronted for a room in Rome, but I’d still have sufficient time to hit the Colosseum before setting off for the airport.

And it was still early enough now to get a decent night’s sleep at a hotel in Orbetello. I could feel myself starting to replan. It would all be fine. I shook the conductor’s hand and hurried back to my seat to grab my backpack.

A few minutes later, around 11, I stepped off the train in Orbetello, a small, coastal Tuscan town. No one exited with me. Nice, I thought, I’ll have first dibs on the taxi line. But as I strode down the platform toward the exit, I noticed something odd about the small train depot. It had no employees. Nor waiting passengers. I was entirely alone.

I hotfooted it toward the exit, anxious to hail a cab and put my blunder behind me. A blast of cold air smacked me in the face as I opened the door, which slammed shut with a theatrically loud clang. Its echo heightened the sense of isolation I felt when I realized that there were no cabs waiting outside. I spied a café and a general store across the street, both shut for the night. Nothing stirred.

I sat back down in the empty waiting area — the lights buzzing torturously above — trying to think. Instinctively, I reached in my jacket pocket for my day planner, then scanned the pages of information — all of it useless.

Near the station’s shuttered ticket window, I found a map, which informed me that while this was indeed the train station servicing Orbetello, the town proper and its population of roughly 15,000 souls lay some three miles to the west. Aha, I thought, civilization. My spirits rose further when I found an information guide on the wall above a pay phone listing the numbers of two local taxi operators. Pay dirt! This wasn’t so bad after all. I even had a few lire. I dialed the numbers triumphantly… and neither service answered.

Fine. I quickly plotted a walking route into Orbetello. Three miles would take me roughly one hour. Surely there’d be a place to stay in town or, at the very least, a late-night café or bar to sit in while I passed the time.

And so, I resolved to walk. Now, I am well aware of the safety maxims stating that you should never leave the car if you get caught in a blizzard or lose sight of the trail if you’re in the woods. But I’ve never read any primers on what not to do if you get stranded in Middle of Nowhere, Italy. Given the relative misfortunes I’d already suffered that night, you’d think that I would have had the good sense to stay put. And it was true that no one knew where I was — not even Kerry. It might take days for someone to notice that I’d gone missing.

I’m man enough to admit to being freaked out as I set out from the station along a country lane illuminated only by moonlight. I had to check frequently behind me to see if anyone — deranged butcher, headless horseman — was following. About 10 minutes in, my footsteps the only sounds other than the whipping December wind, I passed a seemingly deserted two-story villa standing alone in a field. It struck me as both hauntingly beautiful and hauntingly haunting. I imagined I’d stumbled into one of those tourist- in-danger exploitation flicks and would soon be forced to make a terrible choice between sawing off my own foot or staying chained in a room and forced to watch Roberto Benigni movies on an endless loop. I quickened my pace.

A little while later, the road rose up an embankment to join a larger thoroughfare, the fancy kind with street lamps and everything. A car whizzed by. Soon I reached a residential neighborhood of cozy, dwelled-in rowhouses. And then I saw it: Orbetello! Like the Scarecrow finally entering Oz (if I only had a brain), I let out a whoop as I walked through the majestic stone entry gate that I would later discover is part of an ancient wall that rings the city.

Now for the easy part…

Well, not really. Not at half past 12 on a frigid Sunday night. But as I wearily trudged down narrow, silent streets hoping to chance upon someone who could point me toward a hotel, I realized that it didn’t much matter what happened at this point. Merely being in such an unlikely town at such an unlikely time was reward enough for my troubles. Isn’t the chance to get out of our comfort zones the whole reason we travel in the first place? Interestingly, while the details of even my most idyllic travel experiences — including my three days with Kerry — have blurred somewhat, my recollections of this ordeal remain ineffably vivid. So vivid, in fact, that I’ve come to regard the whole misadventure as the happiest of accidents. Indeed, ever since, whenever I’ve planned a trip, I’ve planned it just a little less thoroughly — leaving a few details unresolved, a few areas unmapped.

At nearly one in the morning, I found a café, open for another hour, where I drank two cups of the best coffee I’ve ever had. A friendly English-speaking barista let me in on a dark secret about Orbetello that I wished the train conductor had mentioned: Business booms only in the summer months, when vacationers descend on the place to sun themselves at the adjacent Tyrrhenian Sea. She gave me a number of a nearby hotel that was sure to have a vacancy and I thanked her for her help.

But instead of calling, I went outside and sat on a bench near the gate. After spending a half hour admiring the city wall — constructed, as it happens, more than 500 years before the Colosseum — I decided that my adventure would end here. As the sun peeked over the horizon, I strolled back to the station, where just before six, I boarded a train bound, finally, for home.

John Sellers is the author of The Old Man and the Swamp, a memoir to be published next year by Simon & Schuster.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS COFFEE. Although his name is lost to history, it’s safe to say whoever came up with the idea of mixing caffeine and work was a bona fide management genius. Stick a pot of Maxwell House in the break room and watch as your employees come in earlier, stay later and work faster. The best part is, they think you’re doing them a favor. Cheap. Devious. Brilliant.

Somewhere, things got complicated. Casual Fridays. Company cars. Country club memberships. 401(k) matching. “Team-building” retreats in Vail or Puerto Rico. Cut to the late ’90s, when a convergence of imaginative brains and limitless venture capital in Silicon Valley gave birth to the Cult of the Perk. Hoping to lure the brightest young programmers out of M.I.T. or Stanford to come work for you? Don’t even bother unless you can offer Herman Miller Aeron chairs, courtside season tickets, on-site massage therapy, a 24-hour smoothie bar and Segways upon which to zip around your feng shui–ed campus. For starters.

How fitting, then, that it was Google, the Oprah Winfrey of employee perks, that signalled the beginning of the end. In October 2008, the internet giant announced cutbacks on a range of lifestyle-enhancing niceties, including its legendary cafeteria offerings. Earlier in the year, Google raised the price of its daycare program, reportedly causing some employees to burst into tears.

Since we all know Google is the smartest, most forward-thinking company around — it’s finally been confirmed with the publication of a new book titled What Would Google Do? — that must mean slashing perks is the prudent thing to do in this unforgiving economic environment, right? Not necessarily, says Nancy Rothbard, an associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

As head counts plummet, she says, “companies need to be thinking about how to make remaining workers more productive.”

In some fields, perks are just that: extras, fringe benefits — pleasant but disposable. But in others, they really are central to employee satisfaction and motivation, says Ross Siegel, CEO of Jobulous, an online career- information resource. When you take away perks for those workers, “you’re just chopping away at the basic pieces of morale that attracted people to those industries in the first place,” he says. “You don’t become an investment banker at Goldman Sachs if there’s a chance you’re going to have to sleep in a fleabag motel when you travel for work.”

In fact, although companies in every sector are busy trimming perks, those with the best reputations are the ones doing it most cautiously. Lee Clifford, who oversees Fortune magazine’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, says the firms that rank at the top of her survey are careful not to discard too many of the frills that got them there. “If they offer something, they generally try to keep it, even in a bad year,” she says.

Still, rare is the company that can resist the pressure to cut some corners. The good news is there’s never been a better time to play the good boss. With perk inflation in check, there are plenty of simple — and low-cost — ways to keep the underlings, um, perky.

1. POUR SOME SUGAR ON THEM

Or chips. Or M&M’s. While the days of on-site sushi chefs are probably behind us, keeping a kitchenette stocked with free snacks remains a relatively cheap way to earn employee gratitude. And there’s a bonus: It keeps people from vanishing every time they need a sugar rush. At Bloomberg L.P., a New York– based business-information provider, the munchies are part of the culture — as is the unspoken expectation that you will remain chained to your desk all day.

2. IF YOU LOVE THEM, SET THEM FREE

After money, there’s nothing people value more than time away from the office, whether that means extra vacation days or working from home. The latter is an option that more and more companies are extending to their workers, says Clifford, who’s seen the number of firms on her list that offer telecommuting quadruple over the past decade. “It’s something they can offer that doesn’t cost anything,” she says. Those employers who want to give people a break while keeping them on- site can emulate No. 23 on the Fortune list, the Nevada-based online shoe retailer Zappos.com, which provides an austere nap room for the weary. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh “really feels that at a time like this, if employees aren’t focused, they aren’t going to do a good job at work,” says Clifford.

Even those firms that can offer only unpaid time off can spin it as a perk if they’re smart. Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times, recently gave its employees the option of “buying” extra vacation days or taking extended leave at 30 percent pay. The upshot: Pearson slimmed its payroll without looking evil. “They got to have their cake and eat it, too,” says Peter Himler, founder and principal of media consultancy Flatiron Communications.

3. CLIP COUPONS

There are two ways to put money in your workers’ pockets: Take it out of yours, or help them save their own. Wegmans, a grocery store chain that’s perennially on Fortune’s list, gave out 10 percent food discounts at holiday time last year. Outfits like Chicago-based PerkSpot match up vendors offering discounts — on everything from restaurants to cell phone providers — with companies looking to beef up benefit packages. PerkSpot CEO Chris Hill says discount programs “soften the blow on employees” when other perks have to be sacrificed.

4. JUMP AROUND

No doubt you have a little stress to burn off; chances are your employees do too. Why not encourage them to do it on the basketball court or softball field? At Rodale, a health and fitness publisher based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, daily group exercise is built into the schedule. David Willey, the senior vice president and editor of Runner’s World, says it’s a big part of what attracts people to work there. “At the stroke of noon, you look out your window and you see a group of cyclists going off one way and a group of runners going another,” he says. “It makes the job and life a lot more fun.”

But you don’t have to be a workout nut to enjoy a quick game break. “If you’re a startup in Silicon Alley without a foosball table or a ping-pong table in your office, it’s looked on as a little strange,” says Jobulous’s Siegel. Games like these are especially effective at energizing young workers, according to Cam Marston, author of Motivating the “What’s In It For Me?” Workforce. “Millennials get very excited about that sort of thing,” he says.

5. GIVE THEM A PAT ON THE BACK

Whatever competitive energy isn’t spent running can be harnessed to benefit both company and employer. Clifford has seen a trend of more companies, from The Container Store to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, holding contests with incentives to spur sales or recruitment. “It’s one not terribly expensive way to get people motivated,” she says.

Even less expensive: simple recognition, whether it’s a quick email or a high five. “It’s not tickets to the playoffs, but at least the guy feels appreciated,” Siegel says.

In the end, says Marston, employers who do the best job of explaining why cuts are necessary will wind up with the happiest workers. “Perks are wonderful fringe benefits, but they’re icing on the cake,” he says. “The cake has got to be made up of challenging work and a stimulating environment.”

And it never hurts to have a little free coffee around to wash it down.

Jeff Bercovici is a writer for Condé Nast Portfolio, where he has long agitated for a nap room.

IN 1990, WHEN I WAS 13, my dad’s company transferred him to its office in Brussels, Belgium.
My parents were thrilled about the move, partly because they saw it as a great opportunity to raise their four daughters overseas and introduce us to the world in all its cultural complexity. They thought living abroad might teach us something about life that our suburban existence in Louisville, Kentucky, never could. And they were right—though not in quite the way they’d hoped.

For instance, during our first year abroad, my sister Mary and I took a train to Vienna, Austria, to compete in a swim championship with our new school. When we arrived, our coach gave us three hours to explore the city before meeting up with our host families. Groups of excited kids ran off to check out the churches, giggle at boys and buy postcards of the Alps. Not Mary and me. We had something a bit more appetizing in mind. Looking around the grand central square, we simultaneously spotted the only thing in this beautiful baroque city that held the slightest allure: a candy shop. I grabbed my sister by the hand and we ran for it, scattering pigeons along the way.

It was like stepping into a miniature Willy Wonka factory. Everywhere I looked were bins brimming with multicolored gummies of all shapes and species, boxes of chocolate truffles, crates of Kinder Eggs, and— joy of joys!—an entire corner devoted to black licorice of every variety, including my very favorite kind: a super-salty concoction called salmiakki, which I’d seen only once, on a trip to Helsinki, Finland, the year before.

I placed every Austrian schilling I had on the counter and walked out with a huge cone-shaped bag full of licorice, chocolates, gummies and oversize Toblerone bars. (Back then, Toblerones were the ultimate “I’ve been traveling through the Alps!” souvenir; now a smaller, demystified version is discounted at nearly every big-box store in America.)

While my classmates tromped through the tourist sites, my sister and I sat on a bench outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral, where Mozart was married. (But who cared about Mozart? Was he sweet and edible? Nope.) We ate rhapsodically, our young bloodstreams humming with a dangerous concentration of cane sugar and cacao.

Vienna, we concluded, was awesome.

MY NAME IS GILLIAN, and I am an international candy freak. I have been for as long as I can remember. While most tourists like to experience a city by seeing the sights, eating the signature native dishes or meeting the locals, I go straight for the confections. Every town I visit, in every state, district and province in every country, I make a beeline for the sweet stuff. I’m living proof that it’s possible (though perhaps not recommended) to view the world through lollipop lenses.

As for the cultural stuff that my parents hoped would transform me, like Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina, into a worldly sophisticate, I was always fairly indifferent. During our seven years in Brussels, we visited Germany, Switzerland, France, Holland, Greece, Austria, England and (all too often) the seemingly pointless country of Luxembourg. We saw castle after castle, trudged through museums large and small, and attended workshops about various local customs, such as how the weavers in Bruges made their lace. Those musty-smelling tapestries and gloomy cathedrals? Ugh.

Nonetheless, we quickly mastered a crucial equation about tourism that made such trips tolerable: Sightseeing means gift shops, and gift shops equal candy. Whether we were sitting through the hellish three hours of Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London or watching my parents snap infinite photos of apses and Annunciations, we could generally count on getting a treat to compensate us for our hardship. On a visit to the Louvre, we bolted for the gift shop and loaded up on Stimorol chewing gum, lemon Tic-Tacs and gummies.

“What did you think of the museum?” Mom asked on the drive home.

“Great!” we exclaimed. “They had the coolest frogs!”

Haribo Gummy Frogs represent the summit of my candy obsession, the item against which all other candies are compared. (Once spotted mainly in France and Germany, these lovable amphibians have now, like Toblerone, colonized the States) They are probably also the main culprit in my tooth decay. Every year we lived abroad, we made a summer trip to the States, where our dentist lay in wait with his whirring drill. At last count, I have nearly as many fillings as I have teeth.

We also roamed beyond Europe— broadening our sweets horizon to include even more inscrutable confections. My dad often did business in Africa, so during school breaks we went with him on work trips to places like Egypt, Zimbabwe and Kenya. I’ll never forget visiting the pyramids, but what I remember most clearly about Egypt is the mysterious Arabic scrawl on the M&Ms bags I found in a dusty market in Cairo. I can still practically taste the Chiclets I bought in little packets from kids who swarmed us on the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe, and the intriguing Chupa Chup flavor, chocovanilla, that I spotted in a gas station in Kenya.

When I was 14, we moved to Tokyo and spent a month living out of a hotel, which meant ready access to a gift shop. Tokyo added a whole new twist to my sweets obsession. To start with, Japan is the world capital of strange candy. My sisters and I puzzled over the selections for hours. Was that Sweet Tart–like object a steering wheel or a space ship? A horse or race car? Japanese confectioners are fond of hilarious marketing schemes and seem to possess questionable transliteration skills, so it was often hard to know exactly what we were getting. But who could resist a package proclaiming “Happy Good Choco Fun!” with a koala on the wrapper? Some local flavors (sour plum, for instance, and milk) were too odd even for me. Among my favorites: creamy Chelsea toffees, grape Hi-chews, green tea, cola, lychee and melon gummies, and a sugarcane hard candy that tasted exactly like hardened Karo’s corn syrup.

I’m a grown woman now, and though I can easily purchase all the candy I could choke down, my tastes, thankfully, have matured. I’ve come to learn that we live in a world of consequences—Type 2 diabetes, for instance, and candy-induced obesity, and my own mouthful of vintage fillings that sparkle like tiny metal bonbons when I open wide. My obsessions these days lean toward snowboarding and mountain biking. Occasionally, I’ll indulge my old habits at home or work, but now mostly I’m only tempted when traveling—the cravings perhaps triggered as much by nostalgia as appetite.

Early last summer, my boyfriend and I went to a wedding in a quaint seaside town in Somerset, England. When he suggested we have tea, I spied a candy shop and, almost by reflex, cried, “Scones can wait!” Within minutes, I was dipping a black licorice stick into a tube of tangy sherbet powder and licking the end. In a Proustian flash, I was transported back to a class trip to London when I was a girl, licking the same sherbet powder off the same black licorice stick. Sweet!

I’m often teased about my habit, but I don’t mind. Shopping for local sweets still somehow brings me a more intimate understanding of a foreign place than anything else. There’s something deeply primal about a nation’s confections. They offer clues about the psychology of a place, its particular notions of pleasure and joy and fun. More important, perhaps, is the way such simple indulgences transcend politics and borders. Sweets are universal. Come to think of it, some candy diplomacy might be just the balm for the various conflicts bedeviling the world these days. Anyway, just something to chew on…

A contributor to Rolling Stone, Maxim and Details, Gillian Telling currently owes her dentist $4,000.

TWO YEARS AGO, I HAD THE PERFECT life. As a London-based freelance journalist, I was sent on a variety of international assignments. In one year, I traveled around southern Africa with Bono, underwent astronaut training with Richard Branson, and sat wide-eyed in the stern of an America’s Cup boat as yachtsmen were swept overboard and masts snapped around me. Okay, so my salary was irregular and I had zero job security, but my life was exciting, spontaneous and fun.

Then we had a baby. And everything changed. Bethan, my partner, has a full-time job, so together we decided that once her maternity leave was up it made sense for me to curtail my foreign exploits and do the lion’s share of the childcare. Almost overnight, editors crossed me off their “will pack bags at a moment’s notice” list.

These days, the longest trip I ever take is to the local café. My luggage has gathered dust, my passport sits dolefully in a drawer and my world has shrunk to a mile’s radius around our house. Having once been flown to LA to interview Hollywood celebrities, I now go for entire days talking to no adults except the staff at Ava’s daycare and the occasional supermarket check-out worker. The edgiest my life gets is trying out an adventurous pasta recipe from Annabel Karmel’s Baby and Toddler Meal Planner.

I should stress that I haven’t entirely given up work. On the three days of the week when Ava is in preschool, I have the luxury (and it really does feel like a luxury, in a way that it never quite did before) of a 9-5 working day. But because I work from home, the majority of domestic chores—shopping, cooking, cleaning—also fall to me.

I’m not alone. I know at least three other men who have scaled down their careers—temporarily, they are always eager to point out—in favor of bringing up small children. If your wife earns more than you and has greater job security, it makes sense, especially in these turbulent times, to reverse the traditional roles. And with the looming specter of widespread job losses in 2009, I expect I’ll be one of a growing band of disconsolate, unshaven men pushing swings on weekday mornings.

I’m not complaining about my new life. Actually, maybe I am. But I know full well that I can’t expect any sympathy—neither from men, who probably view me as a cautionary tale, nor women, who can be forgiven for enjoying seeing the tables turned. And yet adjusting to my role as a domestic drudge has been a challenge. I’ve always thought of myself as a progressive, modern male—a fellow traveller in the march toward gender equality. And yet as much as I try to convince myself that being a stay-at-home dad is a worthy occupation for a man, I can’t help but feel like my masculinity is under attack. I can’t help feeling… well, like a housewife.

The other day, for example, I sulked for half an hour when Bethan arrived home at 10 p.m. I’d spent hours preparing a complicated vegetarian moussaka and she’d ended up working late and eating at her desk. Recently, during a minor dispute about doing the dishes, I caught myself uttering the words: “You don’t even notice half the things I do around the house!” It’s only a matter of time before I start a knitting circle.

Although Ava, who recently turned two, is a delight, and I recognize that the time we spend together is a privilege, I have to confess that I haven’t always enjoyed parenting (at least, not the way I enjoy, say, traveling around South Africa, staying in luxury hotels). The biggest challenge for me has been adjusting to the long stretches of forced inactivity. Most of us go through life wishing there were more hours in the day. I now know that parents of small children instead spend large chunks of the day wishing time away. Only two hours until dinnertime, you find yourself thinking, then bath time, then bedtime stories, then a well-deserved glass of Shiraz for Daddy.

For someone whose life was goal-orientated, the frustration of ending the day with an untouched to-do list was maddening at first. I would set myself a minor task (“Today I will pay the phone bill!”) and fail to achieve it. In talking to friends, I’ve found that men feel this frustration more keenly. Out at the playground, it’s always fathers you see attempting to read newspapers or squinting at their laptops. Initially a lot of men think they can slot parenthood into their normal life like a rather time-consuming and expensive hobby. We soon learn otherwise.

The worst example was a friend of mine who thought he could simultaneously play a competitive, 90-minute game of Sunday League soccer and baby-sit his infant.

“Are you nuts?” we inquired when he arrived in the locker room pushing his three-month-old daughter in a stroller.

“It’ll be fine,” he shrugged. “She’ll sleep.”

How wrong he was. From the moment the whistle blew, the infant wailed, forcing her hapless dad repeatedly to sprint to the sideline and make goo goo noises—and severely hampering our offensive game. He wound up bailing at half-time to take his squalling cheerleader home for a nap.

Perhaps all this explains why I was more excited about Ava’s first day of preschool than she was. The moment I dropped her off, I was overcome with an incredible sense of freedom, like a sailor on furlough. I even went to the gym! But arriving at 5 p.m. to pick her up, I could hear the familiar sound of her wails a block away from the school. “How long has she been crying?” I asked. “Oh, not long,” replied one of the daycare workers, looking uncomfortable. “Perhaps you should have come a little earlier.”

One might expect for all my efforts that Ava and I would be deeply bonded. No such luck. Apparently absence really does make the heart grow fonder. Last night, for example, I spent 40 minutes rocking her to sleep, 30 of which were spent listening to her bellow, “No! Not you. Go away. I want mommy!”

Friends with older children insist this is just a phase. “In a few weeks she’ll be a total daddy’s girl, you watch,” one father of three said comfortingly. “Your time will come.” He later admitted that in the case of his daughter the phase had lasted six years.

The amateur psychologist in me has run through the possible reasons for this rejection. Since I’m the one who takes her to day care, in her mind I’m the bad cop. And when I pick her up in the evening I’m generally too busy making dinner to play hide-and-seek, whereas when Bethan gets home it’s all fun and games. And since she feels so guilty about being away from Ava, the word “No” never passes her lips. Once again, I’m the bad cop.

Of course, it would be much easier for fathers to embrace a larger share of parenting if childcare didn’t still feel like a female dominated occupation. Even though I live in a bohemian neighborhood where the sight of a man wearing a BabyBjörn is routine, there are still times when I feel like I’ve gatecrashed a bachelorette party.

The other day in the park I was surprised to bump into a group of Ava’s friends and their mothers attending a birthday party. The hostess looked embarrassed. “We wanted to invite Ava,” she mumbled. “But we didn’t have your number.” It suddenly occurred to me that while I’d had my head buried in the sports pages, the moms had all become friends! Their children got together for regular playdates, and they had a network of people to call if a last-minute childcare crisis came up. I felt like I had let Ava down just by being too male.

Sometimes this awkward distance turns into hostility. Last week at the playground, I had the rare pleasure of bumping into another father I know. As our kids played on the slide, we chatted animatedly for a few minutes. By the swings, I noticed a well-dressed woman in her sixties staring at us intently. Finally she strode over and jabbed an accusatory finger in our direction: “The playground is for children!” she hissed. “Not for grown men to shoot the breeze.”

I pointed to my daughter, who at that moment was digging in the sand box. “You know, men can be parents too,” I told her with a forced grin. “Look it up.”

Though the woman was apologetic, her comment stung. I’d given up my career, put aside my masculine pride and bucked social convention—all to take care of a dyspeptic, if adorable, little creature who didn’t especially appreciate my efforts—and here I was being treated like a common criminal. It struck me then that this full-time daddy track wasn’t such a bright idea after all.

The turning point happened a few months ago, when Ava came down with a cold and wound up staying home from daycare. Under normal circumstances, a day of baby-wrangling would be broken up with a walk to the playground or the grocery store, and a much-needed cappuccino. But a howling thunderstorm and Ava’s Vesuvian nose meant I was trapped in a small flat with a crotchety toddler for the forseeable future.

Having already driven both parents to the brink of insanity by waking up hourly from 2 a.m. onward, Ava now proceeded to wail inconsolably all morning long.

She didn’t want to play with her toys, she didn’t want to eat (making the point by knocking her breakfast off the table with an imperious swipe) and she refused to be put to sleep, or play, or do anything but hang onto my neck.

At 10:30 a.m. I looked at the clock and felt crushed by the weight of the hours to go before Bethan would be home. It was one of the longest, hardest days I’ve ever experienced. Then, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, something unexpected happened. I lay down on the sofa and Ava fell asleep on my chest. This Hallmark image was something I’d assumed would be a regular part of fatherhood, but up to that point it had never happened, not once. She wound up sleeping for an hour and a half. We both did.

That night, I told Bethan how frustrating I’d found the day. “I achieved nothing!” I proclaimed.

“Yes you did,” she responded. “You achieved looking after our sick daughter.”

I nodded. “She fell asleep on my chest, you know,” I said, turning off the light. And though I knew we’d probably be woken up in a couple of hours, I went to sleep smiling.