My oldest child, Virginia, turned 65 this past week. This sort of thing usually evokes, on social media, the comment, “Goodness! Where did the time go?” I shall avoid that; I know perfectly well where the time has gone since that sunny spring day in Keene Valley, New York, with robins hopping on the green lawn among the dying snowbanks. It’s been a long, adventurous, sometimes slogging career from there to here (you may read “career” in any sense of the word you like).

She went to college in the State of Washington, and except for occasional visits, has never come back East. But thanks to email, we’ve kept in touch, so I’ve been able to follow her course for many decades.

In recent years she’s taken up long-distance hiking and cycling. I believe she’s walked the Camino de Santiago across Spain twice, and once across France. This year in mid-July she’ll tackle Spain again — probably, she says, for the last time. We talked for a while about the logistics of the thing, and I was amazed to hear she gets along on the trail with an 11-pound load, including the clothes she’s wearing. I wished when she told me that, that we’d been talking on Facetime, so I could properly register my astonishment and respect. I travel light myself, but that kind of discipline is in a league different from mine.

Which reminds me: I’m packing for a trip myself. Virginia and I spoke briefly about that. Ten days in Austria; I’ll be back home about the time you read this. But the big push this week is to get three columns written in advance to cover my absence from the computer. I have two done so far. “What’s the third one about?” she asked. I admitted that I had hardly the foggiest; she suggested I write about how much easier and more pleasant travel and border crossings are in Europe compared to here.

She’s right. Even though Americans are at the moment not exactly the Miss Congeniality of the global beauty pageant, we tend to get waved through border crossings without even as much scrutiny as we get at American security screenings. To be fair: Recently, when my pal Bea and I traveled to Quebec, we expected some grumpiness and suspicion at the border, thanks to the Donald’s threat of punitive tariffs. But both going and coming, we encountered guards who I swear were rehearsing for solo auditions at The Second City. Real comedians. One extra agent on the way back even gratuitously translated the Greek of my license plate. Nice.

Europeans, perhaps because of their extra centuries of living conjointly, seem to have many of the problems of travel solved. France features more friendly secondary highways and roundabouts at junctions. The roundabouts take some getting used to, there are so many, but they do make life easier and safer. They’re really well marked for directions; and if you miss your exit, you just go ‘round again. You learn the meaning of Prochaine Sortie and Nächste Ausfahrt and get over laughing about it.

Bicyclists travel often in pelotons. In the United States they’re the object of wrath, especially of pickup trucks; in Europe, where any peloton may contain the next winner of the Tour de France, traffic slows behind them, and when there’s room to pass, the cars flash their left turning lights and give them a full lane as they pass. Not a single flying Budweiser can to be seen.

You can see a touch of Europe when you cross the border on the way to Montreal. The street lights, high up and bright as kliegs, are sleek and aluminum. The highway is about as safe as in daylight.

My wife and I drove across France’s famous Millau Viaduct one day, one of the highest in the world. She couldn’t look out the window. Luckily, I could. Cable-stayed, like the Zakim Bridge in Boston or the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Searsport, it’s a spectacular way to bear a four-lane highway across a gorge.

Of course there are occasions for the flashing autostrada signs, Trafico Intenso, and the locals do rather zip around us old guys who don’t know where we are or how we’re going to get there. But the comfort of having your restaurant table for the whole evening, if you like, is priceless. A tiny cup of espresso after dinner is just lovely. And no matter where you go or what borders you cross, it’s Euros everywhere. Very civilized. We do our best to act the same.