Two decisions of mine, both made relatively early in life, provided means for me to travel a bit over the years, mostly on somebody else’s dollar. The first was my decision to enlist in the Air Force at age nineteen, a wise commitment that sent me zig-zagging through a number of states before being shipped off to Germany for three engaging years, that interval offering ample opportunity for me to poke around Deutschland from top to bottom, and even to spend months of my furloughs nosing through a dozen other countries, all courtesy of Uncle Sam.

My second path to cost-free travel opened widely when I adopted a physiological laboratory as my second home. When engaging in research, I soon discovered, junkets are part of the process, especially those important trips to national and international meetings, all often paid for by grants, or, in special cases, by those who organize a special meeting. This, of course, is not the only trigger that, in normal times, sends hordes of researchers into the skies. Colleagues at a distance often ignite similar sparks. Those folks, being interested in your work and eager to learn of your most recent findings, frequently send invitations for you to lecture in their department, or to demonstrate a certain technique you’ve developed, or possibly to offer value in other ways. The hosts, of course, almost always pick up your travel tab, and usually add a nice honorarium as well.

Such journeys not infrequently involve multiple stops. It’s fairly common for one to hop about while following an uneven route put together with little advanced planning. Here’s a simple example of my own from years ago. Early in 1987, I marked on my calendar the June days I was to be in Kuopio to examine a doctoral student at the university. This obligation prompted me to follow up on a conversation I’d had with an Oxford professor some time earlier.

That professor had introduced himself at a meeting of the American Heart Association in Dallas. While studying a poster of mine, he expressed interest in my data and urged me to notify him the next time I would be crossing the Atlantic, adding that he would be pleased to arrange for me to lecture at his university, providing I could find time for a stop in England. So, after my Kuopio event had been confirmed, I dutifully alerted the man, and he in turn scheduled my lecture for just a few days after my Kuopio obligation.

Not long after these developments, a third option came out of the blue when I was surprised by an invitation to speak at a symposium on catecholamines in Jerusalem, the dates of that symposium conveniently being only days before my Kuopio commitment.  Now, to be candid, I had done little investigation of catecholamines, and those compounds weren’t really a major interest of mine, but the opportunity appealed to me, for I had never been to Jerusalem, or even to the Middle East, historic grounds to be sure. The timing was good, the location appealing, so I sent my acceptance to the symposium’s organizers with considerable zest.

With all in place at last, my fluctuating flight plan was finalized to include stops in Tel Aviv (with bus to Jerusalem), Helsinki (with private plane to Kuopio), and London (with train to Oxford). It proved to be a eventful journey in many ways, but perhaps the most memorable event turned out to be my joust with the doctoral candidate in Kuopio. I’ll relive that incident next, but in the meantime here’s a hint of what’s to come. The person examining a Finnish doctoral student is called the student’s opponent. From the bulk of evidence, that’s exactly what I turned out to be.