WE ARE SCARED TO DEATH OF GETTING SUCKED UNDER a big tow, but at the same time, it is exhilarating. Fighting our way across the dark river beneath a black sky feels like paddling through the night itself.

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

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

SCOTT SANDERSON IS A VETERAN WHITE-WATER KAYAKER who has logged four first descents on Mekong River tributaries and tackled the Class IV rapids that form as the river tumbles from the Tibetan plateau. But it wasn’t until he embarked on a laid-back, outfitted float through Laos that Sanderson beheld the Mekong’s most sacred rites.

“We pulled into a village and the headman invited us to join a funeral ceremony,” says Sanderson, 47, a technical writer from Oaklyn, New Jersey. “It was a big party – like a wake. Everywhere we went on the river it seemed they were either giving birth or burying someone. You really got a feeling for the ebb and flow of life.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES into our 2 ½-hour ferry ride up Lake Chelan to Stehekin, my 16-year-old son, James, is already asking, “Where the heck is this place?” He and his 18-year-old brother, Sam, are slouched in their seats, iPods in place, totally unimpressed by the ravishing scenery.

We’re here because I have casually plotted to kidnap my family and plop them at the end of the road in Stehekin, Washington – one of the most spectacularly isolated communities in the United States – where, selfishly, I can have them all to myself.