While my wife and I were planning our cruise around South America that would give us a total of six continents visited, we were wondering whether we should select an expensive option—a day flight to Antarctica. Our geographer grandson, who was eight at the time, said we should go. Then he could say he knew people who had been to all seven continents.

While envisioning my third Carol Golden novel, Dangerous Wind, I could picture Carol circling the globe in pursuit of freedom—or perhaps more correctly, in pursuit of whatever people were trying to take away our freedom. At the moment, the earth is all the territory we have to live on, work on, play on. We can’t yet move to the moon or to Mars. If we can’t find freedom here we can’t find it anywhere.

Writing about travel has been popular ever since people started writing books. Homer did it in The Odyssey, Marco Polo wrote about his travels to Asia, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.

Dangerous Wind is not just a travelogue, however, although Carol gets to visit some of the most famous places in the world, natural and manmade. It has action, adventure, suspense and mystery. Carol is abducted from her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by a mysterious group apparently with the government (remember Reagan’s sarcastic phrase, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help…”) and immediately flown to London.

 Here she learns that her mission (which she did not choose to accept) is to find an old boyfriend she doesn’t remember because of her amnesia (her memory was lost in Forget to Remember). Then it’s on to Switzerland and the Matterhorn, a mountain every schoolchild can recognize.

The plot thickens as Carol uses her mathematical skills to decode a message that will take her to Cairo and the pyramids. From here she will travel to China (the Great Wall), Australia (Ayers Rock aka Uluru) and various places in South America including Ipanema Beach in Rio (are you old enough to remember “The Girl from Ipanema”?). She also goes to Tahiti and Bora Bora.

Dangerous Wind climaxes on the Greek island of Santorini, one of the most beautiful and fragile dots in the world. Santorini, you see, is a live volcano. Originally known as Thera, it blew up around 1600 BCE, sending tsunamis throughout the Mediterranean Sea and leaving the crescent that is Santorini today. A devastating earthquake in 1956 reminded us mortals that the volcano could erupt again at any time.

Oh yes, Carol also gets to visit Antarctica, land of snow, ice and penguins, as my wife and I did, so that she can tell her grandchildren she’s been to all seven continents.