But the longitudes of the world I had never traveled across, east of Kunduz, Afghanistan, and west of Bangkok, I would experience tucked inside the fuselage of a Lufthansa jet. The composer John Philip Sousa had also been a member and even wrote a march in honor of the club. She excitedly told him that she had been around the world already as a schoolgirl. And I certainly didn’t know that the first person to successfully make it around the world may have been an escaped slave. A friend joked that if I went to Italy I could call it my World War II Axis Powers circumnavigation.

Source: International New York Times October 14, 2016 09:56 UTC