Book excerpt: Bicycle touring 2,500 miles alone across New Europe is not for the faint of heart, but Barry D. Wood spends several vacations doing just that on his trusty Cannondale hybrid. During an arduous journey-from the shores of the Baltic Sea, across the Polish plain, through Central Europe to the Danube, and over the Carpathian and Balkan mountains to the Adriatic Sea-Barry is repeatedly helped by friendly people who offer shelter and share stories of life under communism and the challenging transition that followed. This is his story of adventure, people, disparate cultures, challenging terrain and historical context. Barry D. Wood is an economics journalist in Washington, DC. For three years in the 1990s, as the Voice of America correspondent in Prague, he wrote extensively about the transition from communism to democracy and market economies in Central and Eastern Europe.