The dates, flights and hotels for a six-week trip through Asia with my husband, Ted, were plotted on my Excel spreadsheet. We would check out the main attractions: the immense and impressive Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul; the ancient coins at the Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur; a handful of the 2,000 Buddhist temples in Bagan, Myanmar (formerly Burma); and Angkor Wat, a Buddhist religious site originally built for the Hindu god Vishnu that is the world’s largest religious monument, in Siem Reap, Cambodia. And when it came time to fill in the blanks on the itinerary, I would look for Jewish sights.

This was Asia, Part II. In 1982, before children and in between Ted’s surgical residencies, we spent three months backpacking from Kashmir to Kyoto. Now with the kids out of the house, it was time to see the places we had missed. We would be taking half the time and twice as much luggage. We had more medicine and fewer paperback guidebooks, but we were just as excited.