Dave Seminara

On his 45^th birthday, Quebec native Jean Béliveau went out for a walk. He crossed over Montreal's Jacque Cartier Bridge in Montreal, where he originally dreamed up the idea of escaping his life as a neon sign salesman nine months before, and kept going for 75,554 kilometers through 64 countries. He burned through 54 pairs of shoes but somehow managed to maintain his relationship with his wife, Luce, who stayed at home while Jean spent 11 years walking around the world. But when he returned to Canada, some criticized the walk as a self-indulgent escape from a midlife crisis since it wasn't done for a specific charity.

Seven months after returning home from what is believed to be the world's longest uninterrupted circumnavigation on foot, Béliveau is being courted by publishers who want the rights to his story. We caught up with Jean to find out more about his motivation for taking an 11-year walk, how he pulled it off without losing his wife and what he's up to now.

Why take a walk around the world?

Jean: I owned a small neon sign factory but when Quebec had a terrible ice storm in the winter of 1998, we lost power for weeks. We had to close the factory and then my wife had to move to Montreal for her job. I had a midlife crisis in the meantime. I began to sell neon signs but I wasn't making much money. I said, 'My God, what happened with my life? I'm throwing my life away.'

I felt like I was working just for money and giving my soul away, and for what? I ran over Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal one day and thought, 'I wonder how many days it would take to get to New York. And how many weeks or months or years to get to Mexico, South America, the rest of the world.'

Walking through the harbor area in Kos, a Greek island that is part of the Dodecanese group in the eastern Aegean, it's easy to imagine what a Playboy Playmate might feel like were she to take a stroll through a penitentiary buck naked carrying a sign reading, "Kiss Me!" A bit of exaggeration there, perhaps, but not much. Touts, who aggressively peddle meals, drinks, excursions and God knows what else, have long been a fact of life in the Greek isles and in numerous other touristy locales around the globe, but do they actually help increase business or do they scare away potential customers?

In many ways, May and June are the best months to visit the Greek Islands, because the weather is generally good, the prices are low and the crowds are manageable. But the one downside is that all the touts are in place but the crowds haven't arrived yet, so early birds like myself are outnumbered by peddlers.

Our apartment is about a ten minute walk along the harbor into the center of town but during that 10 minute walk, we generally encounter about 20-30 peddlers accosting us with menus, brochures, excursion offers and "Where are you from" come-on's. One gentleman's mantra is simply "very good, very nice!" But the way he says "verrrrry nicccce," he reminds us of Borat without the smelly gray suit.

One of the most common questions I receive about life in the Foreign Service is: what will my spouse do? With that in mind, I invited my wife, Jennifer, who worked while I served overseas in Macedonia, Trinidad and Hungary, to offer her thoughts on what it's like to be a "trailing spouse."

Jennifer Seminara

I really had no idea what I was getting into when I agreed to be a Foreign Service (FS) spouse. My boyfriend of five years joined the Foreign Service and asked me to marry him right before he left Chicago for his training in Washington. I didn't know where he was headed but a life overseas as a diplomat's wife seemed exciting and I was in.

I was in graduate school at the time, pursuing a master's degree in public health and had grand ideas about working on public health programs in developing countries. At the time, I didn't realize how difficult it is for the "trailing spouse" to have a career.

Being a FS spouse can be a great opportunity to stay home and raise children or pursue hobbies. Housing is covered by the U.S. Government, which makes it much easier to get by on one income, especially when living in a country with a low cost of living. Having a career as a FS spouse, however, is not easy for most.

The words were in Italian but the melody was unmistakable. Unfortunately, I recognized the Italian version of this insidious tune immediately.

Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I'm only falling apart.
There's nothing I can do, a total eclipse of the heart. (Eclissi del cuore)

I was on a bus heading from one small town to another in Puglia, Southern Italy, and it was just the driver and I. Oh to be a bus driver in a small town in Puglia. They have total autonomy to play their own music, chat on their phones and text to their hearts content, so when you step on board, it feels a bit like getting a ride with someone. I was the only passenger on this bus and the driver didn't look up from his mobile phone when I boarded.

The day before we left for Greece, the newspaper headlines made it sound as though the country was about to disintegrate. "Greece on Brink of Collapse," blared the U.K broadsheet The Daily Telegraph in a front page above the fold piece last week, after the International Monetary Fund said that Europe's leaders should prepare for the possibility of Greece leaving the Euro zone.

We've been reading bad news about Greece for many months now, so the most recent news that Greece is about to hold yet another election and may very well leave the Euro zone is just the latest chapter in Greece's economic free fall. Over the last year, protesters have run wild on the streets of Athens, and other Greek cities on several occasions, but why are some tourists avoiding Greece this year?

We spent most of the last month in Italy and I met several people who said that they considered the Greek Isles but decided against it based upon all the bad news coming out of Greece in recent months. A pharmacist in Kefalos named Bill, who gave my family a lift to the island's lovely "Paradise Beach" told us that he has friends around Europe who asked him if there was enough food to eat in Greece.

"It's ridiculous," he said. "They see all the bad news on T.V. and think people are starving here."

I have the opposite take – Greece is still safe, especially the Greek Isles, and with other tourists staying away, now is the time to visit as the crowds are thinner and the prices will probably never be better.

Ryanair, Easy Jet, German Wings and other discount airlines have changed how Europeans travel, but until last week, I'd yet to fly on a budget European airline and had no idea what to expect. After booking a ticket from Bari, Italy, to Kos in Greece several weeks ago on Ryanair, my expectations were very modest based upon a very annoying booking process and a series of warning emails I received about baggage and boarding procedures.

But my interactions with live Ryanair staff were pleasant and the flight itself was smooth sailing. Here are some observations and tips for flying on Ryanair.

Don't use Google Chrome. After clicking through what seemed like a thousand pages offering me everything from rental cars to luggage, I clicked "purchase" but then my browser just spun fruitlessly for hours without confirming my purchase. It was unclear to me if the purchase went through, so I had to call Ryanair, which, like everything else associate with this airline, isn't free. I was told that their site doesn't support Google Chrome and that I should try again with Internet Explorer. I did so and the purchase went through without a hitch.

It's 45 degrees outside with a light rain and 40 mph winds and my wife is sitting in a doorway, huddled by her computer, teeth chattering, using a sketchy Wi-Fi signal a block from the Adriatic Sea in Polignano-A-Mare, Italy. My fingers are already numb from typing in the biting cold for two hours before she assumed command of our makeshift office, located right underneath a modem.

If you have the luxury of disconnecting from work while traveling and all you need to do is send and receive the occasional email, you'll be just fine in Italy. But if you're like us, and have to work while there and need a good, relatively fast Internet connection, you're probably in for some of the same adventures we encountered.

Over the course of a five-week trip, mostly in small to medium sized cities all over Italy, staying in hotels and vacation rental apartments, we spent countless hours trying to make the most of tepid or non-existent connections. In unseasonably chilly Polignano-A-Mare, we realized the only true hotspot we had access to was in the doorway of the reception area for an apartment we rented; in Spoleto we had to sit literally in our windowsill to get a connection; in Parma I had to set up shop right on the front desk of the hotel; and in Lecce, we used an outdoor courtyard behind our apartment. What follows are some of the lessons we learned trying to get online in Italy.

Mark Adams is the author of "Turn Right at Machu Picchu, Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time," his bestselling account of his attempt to retrace Hiram Bingham's groundbreaking 1911 expedition to "discover" Machu Picchu. The book, which is now out in paperback, was a New York Times Bestseller and was named one of the best non-fiction titles of the year by Men's Journal and the Washington Post. Adams gave us the inside story of what motivated him to take this expedition, shared some tips on visiting Machu Picchu and gave us his take on Bingham's legacy.

What inspired you to trace Hiram Bingham's famous Machu Picchu expedition route of 1911?

I was an editor at National Geographic Adventure magazine and working at a place like that, Machu Picchu played the same kind of role there that Tiger Woods might have, pre-scandal at Golf Digest. It's always in your face; you're always thinking about it; you're always trying to come up with new ways to look at Machu Picchu because people love it. They can't get enough of it.

Why is that, do you think?

It has that little element of mystery. Someone once said that you can't take a bad picture of Machu Picchu, and I think it's that iconic shot that's just so alluring that people are really drawn to it. People think, 'That's one of those places I want to see before I die.' It's so far out and it's so exotic and yet, pretty much anyone can do it if they have enough money and time.

We were standing on a train platform in Ancona, Italy, waiting for a train, when my 4-year-old son, Leo, made a surprisingly prescient comment.

"I hope our train's not ritardo," he said, using the Italian word for delayed, which he's heard many times on our trip.

Leo knows only four words in Italian but it occurred to me that two of them- ritardo and chiuso (closed) are two of the dreaded words that travelers in Italy become all too familiar with if they spend enough time in the country. Here are some of the others.

Chiuso. I'll say up front that I'm an Italian-American who is extremely fond of Italy and the Italians but even the most ardent Italy-backer has to admit that the arbitrary and capricious opening hours in museums, shops and restaurants can be maddening. For an American used to supreme convenience, things seem to be chiuso more than they're aperto. One could cite thousands of examples, but here is just one I noticed in Parma: the museum attached to the Church of St. Constantine is open from 9:30 until 11 a.m., and then again from 3:30 to 5 p.m.

As I sit in the cool open-air courtyard of our rented apartment, on a hard-to-find street behind Lecce's Duomo, the sound of carefully spaced church bells punctuates the silence of the mid-day pausa – Italy's siesta. Our American instinct is to get out and "do something" on this warm, sunny day. But our newfound Italian inclination is to laze about, digest lunch, and think about what we'll have for dinner.

When the mood strikes us, we venture back into the web of streets in this sultry city between the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, smack near the butt end of Italy's heel. The streets of Lecce's baroque centro storico were made for walking and the town's well dressed residents are out in force, eating gelato, enjoying glasses of wine in sidewalk enotecas and stopping to greet one another, with an exchange of cheek kisses and a flurry of smiles. Overhead, crazy flocks of blackbirds, called rondini, in these parts, swirl and swoop in wild packs, making a racket and creating an eerie, tropical din I've never before encountered.

On our first passegiata in the city, we notice music and a crowd forming on Via Templari Street and follow our ears to see what's going on. A street-side piano player is leading a group of middle aged Italians in a rousing version of what I later learned is a famous WWI era, Neapolitan love song, "'O Surdato 'Nnamurato" (The Soldier In Love). I'm not accustomed to seeing people set up pianos on the street, and I hadn't seen people have so much fun in a very long time. I assumed it was some sort of special festa we were unaware of, but onlookers quickly disabused me of that notion.

"Nesuna festa," the youngest member of the group told me. There was no festival.
"It's drunk Naples people."