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To the right are pictured (slightly reduced) Magellan’s “retriever tags.” You place your itinerary in the pouch and, with the furnished strap, attach it to the handle on your luggage.

I can personally attest to how useful these are. A few years ago, my luggage went astray between Vienna and Venice. For three days. Fortunately, as I often do, I had packed spare underwear, sox and a shirt in my carry-on.

The trip was on a ship (that had same-day laundry) in the Adriatic. (Croatia is great!) One day, because I’d written each stop of the ship on a sheet...

When people ask me about the scariest situation I’ve ever been in, I think back to a taxi ride I took to the Moscow airport in the early ’90s. A no-neck guy who looked like a classic Russian mafia thug picked me up in a beat-up old car and drove for an hour down puddle-filled alleys and past derelict apartment buildings. All I could think about were those movie scenes where the good guy is taken down to the riverbank to be shot. Instead, the no-neck pulled up to the airport, shook my hand and said, “Have a good fly.”

Many Americans are wired to assume that taxi drivers in other...

With its membership in the European Union, many things are changing in Portugal.

Day after day, the roads there were messing up my itinerary. I’d arrive in town hours before I thought I would. I remember a time when there were absolutely no freeways in Portugal. Now the country has plenty. They build them so fast, even my Michelin map was missing new ones.

There were other signs that Portugal is well into its EU upgrade. In the past, open fish stalls lined the streets; now they’ve been moved into “more hygienic” covered shops. Widows no longer wear...