Snarling gusts kept the ship from docking at Turks & Caicos. Only later did I realize that had we moored as planned, I would have hit my 100th country.

For me, travel has never been about a score chart or checklist, and it wasn't until last summer, when several people asked how many countries I'd seen, that I finally ran a tally. Using the list provided by the Travelers Century Club (www.travelerscenturyclub.org), I rated myself at 99. And then the race was on. In a single 12-month period, I would hit three milestones: 25 years at The Miami Herald, 50 years of age, 100 countries.

Check on items One and Two. That third marker, though, remained just out of grasp.

First came the winds at Turks & Caicos. No matter; I'd rack up four more countries during my December holiday to Asia (Malaysia, Borneo, Sabah, Brunei). But instead of going East, we headed to Mt. Sinai (hospital, that was) for The Husband's heart valve surgery.

Undaunted, we snagged a cheap fare to London in January for a post-surgical holiday. Our plan also called for two days of museum visits in Amsterdam, a city that -- oddly -- I've never seen beyond the airport. But the ''snowstorm of the century'' -- a mere six powdery inches -- stopped London transport from rails to runways, and instead of gazing wistfully at Van Goghs, we sighed deeply over our non-refundable Amsterdam hotel reservations and hoisted another pint at the local pub.

No. 100 would have to wait.

The obstacles seem fitting, somehow. In my life, travel has been as much by happenstance as design, a riot of on-the-fly wanderings, plans gone to hell and serendipitous outcomes. What started mainly as an escape -- from boredom, the restrictive normalcy of growing up in Raleigh, N.C., and the singularity of being solo long after my contemporaries -- became a passion I rate just behind breathing and love and one slim notch ahead of the salty-sweet-crunchy-silky sensation of biting into perfectly seared foie gras (a food I first tasted in Hong Kong, of all places). Is it any wonder that my first credit card was for travel on the now-defunct Eastern Airlines?

After 30 years of traveling abroad, I've flown roughly 1.4 million miles -- almost all in coach. Along the way I've pondered the Sistine Chapel, Whistler's Mother and Boticelli's Birth of Venus; explored the Temple at Abu Simbel and the Taj Mahal; sailed through icebergs calved from a melting Greenland. Horses carried me across the Mongolian steppe, camels through the Australian Outback, an elephant through the Thai jungle, a military transport plane to Timbuktu, a hot air balloon above the temple spires of Bagan, Myanmar. Sunrise spilled on Cambodia's Angkor Thom, Java's Borobodur and the moia of Easter Island as I stood in awe.

The world's finest hotels and rough desert tents have provided shelter; dinner has come from the hands of Michelin-starred chefs and the good folks who package Ramen noodles (one of the essentials of any travel kit). Five Stars to Under the Stars, The Husband calls my travel style. I wouldn't have traded a thing.

Except, maybe, the multiple car breakdowns, road washouts and slightly stoned cannibals in Cameroon. But we'll get to those.

IN THE BEGINNING

Dumped in Germany

without a guidebook

My first trip abroad was a month-long railpass hop-on, hop-off backpacking spin-through-Europe prologue to a college study program in England. Bill, a classmate, and I snagged a youth fare on the old QE2, before her 1982 foray into the Falklands War and the facelift that followed. For the grand sum of $330, we each bunked with a trio of same-sex mates in water-level cabins. We were barred from the upper-class dining room and private lounges, but, since we were 21, who cared?

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