by Jay Brunhouse (First of three parts)

Eighteen days before departure, I received a brief e-mail with 22 lengthy, separate attachments from Lernidee Tours in Berlin. I was staggered.

The package, when downloaded and printed, presented me with 29 glorious pages to study. All were in English except for the sample Russian visa application, which was in German.

I savored the sample Chinese entry form, the Mongolian entry and exit forms, the Russian entry and exit forms as...

You are well above the timberline far north, running along the stark, clear-aired, snow-pocked edge of Norway’s Hardanger Plateau. Any speck of color seems to be out of place. Just before your train stops at Myrdal, you look to your right and see the browns and greens of the mountain walls of a grand canyon of a rift. You gasp at the sight many hundreds of feet down the temperate Flåm Valley.

At Myrdal Station, dominated by a mountain with icy whiskers of frozen waterfalls, you don...

by Jay Brunhouse

On May 9, 2009, I started to follow the Red Brick Road in Rostock, on Germany’s Baltic seacoast, which I reached by an easy 2½-hour Regional Express train ride from the deep subterranean north-south tracks of Berlin’s new Hauptbahnhof.

The Red Brick Road took me through cities that hark back to the Middle Ages, with towering Brick Gothic structures confirming the prosperity of the cities. I visited three UNESCO World Heritage Sites and admired majestic Brick...