IT'S ONE OF THE GREAT IRONIES OF TRAVEL: You meet someone on a journey, come to know them intimately in just a few hours, then never see them again. You promise to keep in touch, but it seldom happens. When you return home, your own life takes over, and so does theirs. Inevitably, the connection begins to fade.

This summer, while researching a family trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, I happened upon a story in City Paper, a Baltic-states online 'zine, about a new theme park in Lithuania called Stalin World. Surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, with a replica of a human cattle car and a collection of enormous Soviet-era statues, it was said to combine "the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet gulag prison camp." I couldn't imagine a more macabre, yet twistedly appropriate, post-20th-century tourist attraction. Reading the article, I flashed back to the five months I'd spent cycling across the USSR in 1989, and a man I'd met on that trip: Saulius Kunigenas.

I was 30, and part of a seven-person team—three Americans, four Russians (three women, four men). We rode from Vladivostok to Leningrad, sea to sea, 7,500 miles across the largest country on earth. It was the hardest journey of my life—not physically but spiritually.

Two months into the trip, I met Saulius on the shores of Lake Baikal. It was sleeting, and my team spotted a ribbon of smoke in the forest and wheeled off the road to a campfire, around which huddled six Lithuanian cyclists. We shook hands, and they shared their meager food and pushed our shivering bodies toward the warmth of the birch fire. We were kin, members of the fellowship of the wheel.

Saulius was the smallest of the Lithuanians, a sinewy, birdlike man with a hawk nose and burning, white-blue eyes. He and I had an immediate, inexplicable connection. It was as if our friendship were already there, like a set table, just waiting for us to come from the far corners of the world, sit down, and renew a conversation we'd been having for years.

We talked of the surreal Soviet planet we were experiencing: cities with monolithic concrete tenements, only a dirt road leading into and out of town. Bread lines, vegetable lines, vodka lines, but no telephone lines, no newspapers, no magazines. The countless hagiographic statues of Saint Lenin. The Big Brother billboards extolling the virtues of Communism. The KGB trailing us in black Ladas. People so oppressed that they'd lost their dignity.

That evening we all rode together for a stretch, and Saulius and I exchanged bicycles—me struggling along on his heavy, antique velocipede and him piloting my light, modern machine as if it were a glider. While I pounded to keep up with him, Saulius explained to me in broken English the real reason he had come to Siberia: to find the work camp where his wife, Palmira, had been interned as a child.

Deportations of Lithuanians began immediately after the Soviet Union occupied the country, in the summer of 1940. Between 1940 and 1953, Stalin sent some 350,000 Lithuanians to Siberia. Many never returned.

On May 22, 1948, the KGB set a one-day record in Lithuania, arresting 35,766 citizens—10,897 of them children—packing them into cattle cars, and shunting them off to work camps in Siberia. Palmira and her family were victims of this purge. Her grandfather was a successful farmer who owned potato fields, beehives, and a few head of cattle—thus a capitalist, a criminal. Palmira was three, her brother, Remigijus, two. Their father eluded capture, but Palmira and her mother, uncle, grandfather, and brother were deported to the shores of Lake Baikal.

Palmira's father, living under an assumed name, managed to send them food, and they gardened on small plots. But they had to be careful. Were they found to be improving their lives above the lot of others, they would have been sent even deeper into Siberia.

Nine years later, on April 24, 1957, Palmira and her family were released and allowed to leave. Their stone farmhouse had been seized by the government and was now the residence of a Soviet oligarch, so they lived with friends in Kaunas, a small city in central Lithuania.

Riding beside me, Saulius relayed this story with quiet gravity. The next morning, we exchanged addresses, then he and the Lithuanians rode east along Lake Baikal and my team and I rode west.

It would take us three more months to reach Leningrad and become the first people to bicycle across the USSR. It was such a long journey it wasn't a journey at all; it was just life. We rode and we ate and we slept, and then we got up and rode and ate and slept. Our bikes became our friends, and we gave them Russian names. Tom Freisem, the leader of the trip, named his Blagorodnaya Sobaka—"Noble Dog." Torie Scott, the only American female, called hers Zavtra—"Tomorrow." I named my bike Svabodny—"Free."

By the time we dipped our front tires into the ice-blue Baltic, fall had come to Russia. It was snowing and we were so exhausted we could have slept for a year. Instead we threw a party, each of us inviting someone who had meant something special to us during our ride. I invited Saulius. We sang hard and drank hard and danced hard as if it were our last night on this earth. It was the end of 1989, and the Soviet Union was imploding.

In the melancholy hours of the morning I gave Saulius my bicycle, Svabodny.