In 1983, when a friend at a party mentioned she had just returned from a bike trip in Europe — “the best trip of my life” — Tim Leland and his wife Julie (Stockwell) Hatfield, BA ’62, were intrigued. Two weeks later they signed on for a guided bicycle trip to Bordeaux. So began a 30-year biking odyssey that took these two Boston Globe writers to eight countries on 12 different tours. The Globe travel section chronicled their experiences each time they went. This funny, beautifully descriptive book — based on those articles — captures everything unique about the joys of traveling on two wheels in foreign lands: the fragrances, the tastes, the sights, the sounds. You will fall in love, as they did, with the idea of slow travel down tiny vineyard lanes, far removed from the air-conditioned tour buses that keep you away from the real thing.

Hatfield was a fashion editor, lifestyle writer, and society writer for The Boston Globe before “retiring” to become a freelance travel writer for a variety of publications, including the Globe. Leland is a retired former managing editor and assistant to the publisher of The Boston Globe. During a distinguished 35-year career at the newspaper, he covered the first NASA space shots at Cape Canaveral, served as its State House bureau chief covering state and local politics, and founded the Globe’s long-running full-time investigative team known as “Spotlight.”