"Why am I here?" reverberates through my mind, as much as anything reverberates in Acapulco's sweltering afternoon sun after indulgence in the refried cornucopia of a Mexican buffet.

The check-out clerk at our hotel in London looked at us as if we were out of our minds. My wife Diane had just told her we planned to walk the mile and a quarter from our hotel at Russell Square to Waterloo International, the rail station where we would board the EuroStar to Paris through the Channel Tunnel.

About a year and a half ago, the big casino at Foxwoods in Connecticut, run by the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation, began a ferry service to and from my town of Glen Cove, which is directly across Long Island Sound from the resort and casino. As part of the arrangement permitting the gambler trips, our city council demanded the people at Foxwoods provide ferry service between Glen Cove and Wall Street. Despite having to arise at 5 a.m. to make the ferry's 6:30 departure, I decided to try the service, and treat myself to the first class Admiral's Deck, up top . . . $40 roundtrip. I've been hooked ever since. I relax to coffee and bagels, served at my own booth, read the copy of The New York Times I bring with me, and the Wall Street Journal provided by the crew. We skirt the north shore of Long Island to our left, then the New York borough of Queens and finally part of Brooklyn, while Manhattan makes its dramatic appearance to our right. We cruise - under bridges, past LaGuardia Airport, by tugs hauling tankers, sport fishermen heading out to the sound - into the maw of that man-made colossus of gigantic buildings, as the early morning sky turns from deep red to blue. Then we disembark at Pier 11 on the East River, just below South Street Seaport, into the midst of New York's financial district as it awakes to that smell of morning coffee somehow so much more aromatic in the heart of the city.

What lies behind the beauty in desolation, in forbidding landscapes back-dropped by moods of unforgiving peril? I ponder this at one of the best named pieces of real estate in the world, the Skeleton Coast. Odds are thin for travel to Mars. A suitable substitute is this otherworldly historic terror for sailors, many of whom mingled their bones among whale ribs and shipwrecks.

Peter Jones paces about like a leopard tracking prey. Inside his home on the bluffs overlooking the Zambezi River, his guests sit on makeshift bleachers and throw back fine South African wines, while watching the telecast of a rugby championship between England and Australia. Whenever the satellite feed blurs and crackles, Jones curses and rattles suspect electronics; whenever England scores, he redefines irrational exuberance and his hounds take up his howl. England victorious, during dinner, Jones skewers his Australian chef so mercilessly that it seems advisable to hire a food taster. The zany side of the impresario of the posh River Club in Zambia is local legend. At nearby Simonga Village, the former British commando officer and Falklands veteran is celebrated for his serious side.

I love Paris. For a long time I kept a large map of this grande passion on my bathroom wall. After a while, I thought I knew its outlines so well, that if I was ever lost in this city, I would have only to enter a sidewalk pissoir, stand with my eyes closed, and there the map would appear. It didn't work. Fortunately, they have 'you-are-here' displays outside Metro stations, so I don't have to depend on my bladder for directions.

I'd been to rodeos before but this … this was the mother of all rodeos. For a week-and-a-half in early July each year, Calgary, in Canada's western province of Alberta, decks out and suits up for the Calgary Stampede, in the process becoming the ultimate cow town. Waves of bobbing cowboy/girl hats roll on toward the huge fairgrounds, not far from the center of the city. Beneath the bobbing headwear are men in blue jeans with decorative shirts of varying flagrant designs; women favoring black jeans and colorful blouses; all shod in the appropriate bootwear. Decidedly out of style in baseball cap and Docksiders, I was nonetheless drawn along with the human wave, sensing adventure, the sound of down-home music, savory food and just an all-'round good time.

As the oil and gas capital of Canada and one of the major financial centers, Calgary is well represented with properties of the big hotel chains: Sheraton, Westin, Radisson, Fairmont among the higher-end hotels; Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Super 8 among the lesser priced. Most have properties downtown, a commuter train stop or two from Stampede Park. I stayed at the Delta Bow Valley, a wonderful hotel, part of a Canadian chain. My 20th floor room provided a great view of the city and came with all the modern accouterments, including cable TV and phone jack for Internet connection. The hotel also dresses up for the Stampede, the staff in cowboy outfits and the lobby decorated in western motif, complete with hay bales and chuck wagon.

Six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador in an Atlantian setting of volcanic rock, scores of sea lions frolic in the shallows of the western Pacific near 13 islands seemingly untouched by time. Penguins swim here, too. And marine iguanas as large as tea cup poodles that dog-paddle with sharpened claws, cutting a crest with their heads through the often roiling waters.

The small French soldier sits on a rickety wooden chair near the Maginot Line. He faces away from us, toward the German frontier, his rifle leaning by his side, legs crossed, pipe lit – the imperturbable confident behind the impenetrable.

We're sitting outside at the café of our hotel, two of my sons and I, at the Kempinski For me, music has long been in a category similar to wine. There is adventure in the sampling, the taste test of an untried varietal, a finer variation on a familiar one. Montréal at Jazz Festival time is a music-taster's dreamland. From noon on, during the week and a half of the festival in early summer (this year June 27 to July 7), it is virtually impossible to walk anywhere in the Place des Arts, the magnificent plaza that forms the core of the festival venues, or sit in a sidewalk café along its perimeter, without the serenade of some form of musical accompaniment.

We're sitting outside at the café of our hotel, two of my sons and I, at the Kempinski Bristol on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. It's sunny and hot, and due to hit the mid-90s again. The previous evening we had had dinner across the Ku-damm and down one of the leafy side streets in a kitschy, dark-paneled restaurant serving typical Berlin fare — which seemed to consist of pig-fat in all its many forms. That in the heat, and a toothache, had driven me back to my room early. Still, I'm curious about what Chris and Mike were up to. Even though they're grown men, the paternal instinct is never far away. Also, I'm at the point where they have more fun than I do.

Berlin has a lineup of special events for each month of the year, ranging from music festivals to beer fests to the famous "Love Parade."

From my balcony's high ground I took aim but before I could get off my shot, the Prussian general from the 30-Years War flung his weapon, a flonz. Bouncing off my forehead, the blood sausage - Karneval's trademark hangover preventative - botched my photo and fell to a mob of laughing clowns. I was flonzed. The grinning general straightened his tunic and rode on behind a giant papier-mâché cannon about to fire off a man who may have been the mythic Baron von Munchhausen.

In November, 2000, Donald Bain, author of the bestselling "Murder, She Wrote" series of books, and his wife, Renée Paley-Bain (who now collaborates with him on the series), headed for Provence to research it as a setting for an upcoming book in the series. They reported on their trip for naturaltraveler.com in the

It was my first time skiing in Europe and my first view of the Swiss Alps at Gstaad. My last visit, decades earlier, including hitchhiking, youth hosteling, and a picnic with locals on a slope near Appenzell in eastern Switzerland, the last bastion of open-air, male-only democracy in Europe. in eastern Switzerland, the last bastion of open-air, male-only democracy in Europe.

The National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are asking every bird enthusiast across North America to help celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) by counting birds Feb. 15 - 18, 2002.

Gstaad's ski pleasures are terrific, but wandering around its uniform Swiss chalet architecture reminds one, if unfairly, of the admonition of Harry Limes, the Orson Welles character in "The Third Man," that centuries of Swiss tranquility had produced the cultural high of the cuckoo clock, of which the town feels like a giant version. After all, William F. Buckley hangs out there. Enjoy Gstaad and its environs, including less fancy nearby towns, but also explore the Alps contrast offered by Oberstdorf, Germany, a 5-1/2-hour drive from Gstaad, through pastoral mountain valleys, many of which are remarkably unchanged over the last century or so.

Bernafay Wood lies quietly in the darkness. Outside the old railway station at Montauban in northern France, a few horses and a munching cow drowse in the warm night, only the occasional twitch of a tail disturbing the stillness.

After the formalities at the border, this was a welcomed change. As the train had inched its way through the black night, the dark-uniformed officials had been cool but correct, inspecting my documents for what seemed to be an overlong period of time.