In the ’90s, my wife, Alice, and I three times hired a car and drove through the newly opened countries of Eastern Europe, but we had yet to visit the three countries that were former Soviet states: Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. In May ’05 we made up for that omission.

If we were younger, we would have handled the trip totally independently, but we’re now in our mid-70s and the thought of arriving at airports and train stations and trying to sound out the Cyrillic alphabet (let alone...

ITN was mailed a copy of a letter sent to Discovery World Cruises*, as follows.

I was a passenger on the “In the Wake of the Bounty” cruise of the M.V. Discovery, Jan. 31-Feb. 15, ’05. My sole purpose in taking this cruise was to visit Pitcairn Island. To insure this, before booking I spoke with your company and was told they had Zodiacs available for landing. I was prepared for the possibility of weather preventing landing, but I was not prepared to find that Discovery World Cruises...

In the many years my husband, Ted, and I have traveled around the world on ship, on tours and independently, we have booked travel insurance about two-thirds of the time. We have seldom needed to use it and always questioned the expense of bothering with it.

One outstanding event that precluded travel for which we could make no claim on a typical travel insurance policy was a cruise we had booked with the former line Renaissance Cruises, leaving a European port on 9/12/01 — yes, the...