I walk the cobbled path along the stockade-trimmed ramparts that rim the sea. It's an uncommonly warm day for Avalon, in early autumn, although eddies of mist twist across the settlement and poke holes in the heat with chilled fingers.

We are bird-watching during the first day of the hunting season, the last weekend in September; the ducks we have our binocs trained on are at the top of the hit list. My guide, Pascal Poirier, is pointing out some pintails, and scaups, off in the distance, then he gestures toward an SUV parked just off the road we are taking on a long ribbon of sand bar. We can just make out where the hunter is posted, the ducks well out of range of any shotgun blast.

Balthazar Restaurant (80 Spring Street) is not your grandmother's French bistro. It is true that you can find an authentically prepared Duck Confit—cooked in the "traditional" fried-in-its-own-fat manner, or a steak au poivre with pomme frites that taste as if they came right out of the oven at L'Epopee, one of the best-kept secrets in Paris until now (it's located at 89 avenue Emile Zola).

In the lush mountains that define the Central Valley of Costa Rica, there is an area called Dota, where some of the world's finest coffee is grown and processed. Locus of this activity is a tiny town called Santa María de Dota, about two hours south of the capital city of San José.

"All right, let's have some fun." That's never a bad suggestion. But when it comes from the sommelier at Manoir Hovey in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, it sounds even better. My wife Kay and I had arrived at the Manoir late on a Sunday afternoon, after a few hours’ ramble from our home in Vermont.

In a culinary potpourri that made my head spin – metaphorically – like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist,” my mission for the past seven months has been to seek out and explore the best in fine dining and finesse cooking in British Columbia — the most underrated and underpublicized gastrononomic center in North America.

I am seated at a table at Primera Plana, a small outdoor café, just beneath and beyond the overpass for Avenida Nueve de Julio, a tree-lined thoroughfare through the heart of Buenos Aires, that lays claim to being the broadest boulevard in the world, with more lanes than the Champs Elysée. I am having a ham and cheese sandwich and a cold Quilmes beer.

Andre Saint-Jacques is a Renaissance man with several potent passions. Saint-Jacques, the owner of Bearfoot Bistro in Whistler, is among the foremost experts on Champagne in North America. His "Bistro" is without a doubt one of the top two or three restaurants in British Columbia and will be a featured offering on the "big picture" of the food and wine scene in B.C. in an upcoming edition of naturaltraveler.com.

The gleaming waters of the Adriatic Sea, the crème de cacao spires of the Split cathedral, it's a warm day and the cafés that line the streets surrounding the 15th century walls are filled with customers sipping espressos and nibbling on plates of freshly caught calamari. It's a divine experience or at least one befitting the great Roman emperor Diocletian whose stone palace dominates the coastline.

The prehistoric trout from Macedonia's Lake Ohrid, Europe's oldest and perhaps deepest lake, was so big it took two hours to cook. My five Dutch dinner companions, ex-military men who've combated mayhem from Lebanon to Rwanda, lost count of the wine bottles that passed the time. When the fish swam to the table with the kitchen's apologies and more bottles, I dove into the delicious pink flesh as if my survival depended on it. During cigars afterwards, we returned the favor with wine for restaurant staff that stayed past closing for us. This was, after all, an exercise in nation building.

After five months of touring the restaurants of Vancouver and Whistler, B.C., I thought we'd break for the month of August to explore the wonders of B.C. cheeses. Forget about the famed Quebec goat cheeses that give the French and California chevre makers a run for the money in terms of texture, style and flavor. Our culinary mission is to hop on an imaginary ferry and take a virtual trip to Salt Spring Island, the largest of the Southern Gulf Islands, nestled in the triangle of glistening blue water between Vancouver, Victoria and Nanaimo.

"When you see a lot of pine trees and bluebells, take the path that leads off to the left." The man talking to me was standing in his garden, one of those artfully disheveled forests of flowers and shrubs that brighten dooryards all over rural England. It seemed perfectly appropriate for him to be putting a botanical spin on the directions from Rowsley to Bakewell, in the county of Derbyshire.

When Bill Marriott broke ground in 1980 for a new hotel on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets, anybody who agreed that his would be the first step in the revitalization of Times Square was declared a wild-eyed optimist.

Buffets evoke mixed emotions from food lovers. Many children of the '70s were dragged to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Sizzler, where Tuesday nights were set aside for all the garlic bread and overcooked meat you could pile on your plastic tray. Then there was the mythical buffet of Herculean proportions at your local four-star hotel-for me, that meant the Hyatt Regency Cambridge in Boston: You could chow down on eight blissful courses, ranging from lean prime rib to lobster tails to Boston cream pie, and then collapse along the banks of the Charles River to sleep away a lazy Sunday afternoon.

With the touch of gold and silver lingering on my fingertips and my mind filled with dazzling dreams of Spanish treasure from long ago shipwrecks, my wife Cindi brought me back to real world, "Norman, it's time to go."

By Patrick Downes

In Mel Brooks' brilliant film "The Producers," Zero Mostel convinces Gene Wilder to dine "alfresco" in Central Park while talking him into the biggest mistake of his life (I'd rather not get into the plot of the film right here, but feel free to go see the Broadway play that lacks the insane edge of the original motion picture).

It is early evening and I have just finished settling in at the Holiday Inn for a reprise of the Montréal Jazz Festival I covered last year. Couldn't wait to do it again.

Gord Martin, the genius-domus who lords over the two leading tapas parlours in Vancouver, is a talk-straight-and-forget-the-bullshit kind of a guy. If Clint Eastwood had decided to deep-six his film career, he might have come up with two brilliant restaurants, Bin 941 (941 Davie St). and Bin 942 (1521 West Broadway) that double as social-sexual zones of intrigue.

One of the great attractions of music festivals or a stop on a music tour, for the listener, is the anticipation that the venue will result in the discovery of an artist who will provide instant gratification followed by long-term enjoyment of that performer's particular art. However, we wondered what the experience would be like from the perspective of the performer who walks out onto a stage to face an audience in his exploration of terra incognita.

So this stewardess enters the cockpit and asks the captain, "Coffee, tea or me?"

Sounded like a good idea at the time. Go to places where the scene is hot and see what I can see (or hear, I guess). But why was I really going? By the time I got back, I would have been freelancing full-time for four months, I'd be almost halfway to 29 and I would hopefully still have a job offer from D.C. and another one brewing closer to home.

Walking around the Yaletown neighborhood of Vancouver is a sensory overload of coffee bars, upscale restaurants and girls in tight-tight-tight jeans. The genius of the Opus Hotel is that you can merge all of these pleasures into one venue, a home base for soaking up the ambience of this hip-leather-jacket-wearing corner of North America's most beautiful city.

It's a sunny Wednesday in mid-June, a time of year many in western Canada will tell you is the best time to be there. I am in Vancouver, British Columbia's principal city, a return stay at the Listel Vancouver Hotel, one of my favorite hotels anywhere.

Lumière owner-cum-culinary genius Robert "Rob" Feenie is the most unpretentious French-trained chef on the face of the earth. A Canadian in every sense of the word-and I mean that in a favorable way, Feenie is a gifted hockey player and cyclist, Vancouver Canucks fanatic and a cultural observer on provocative subjects ranging from Canadian-born baseball players (B.C. native Jeff Zimmerman of the Texas Rangers is a fan of Feenie's cooking) to the latest snow conditions in Nelson and Whistler.

Recently, Jessica Fletcher of "Murder, She Wrote" fame traveled to Vancouver and other areas of British Columbia and ended up solving yet another murder. The victim was killed on an historic train trip from Vancouver into the wilds of British Columbia, and she tells the tale in her soon-to-be-published book, "Destination Murder," due to be published in hardcover in October 2003. The following are two excerpts from the book.

Saturday morning in Honfleur. It's market day in the ancient fishing village on the Normandy coast, and the old ladies have been out early in the square setting up their goods on the dew-washed cobblestones: stands of shelves packed with glimmering bottles of Bordeaux and Calvados; crisp baskets of fresh-cut flowers and potted plants hang beneath canvas awnings; long wooden tables brim with farm produce - melons, grapes and tomatoes - all of it pristine and inviting, fussed and polished and picked over by their proprietors.

The turtles that flipper up onto the beach at the Disney Vero Beach Resort, each summer, are not made of space-age plastic, nor are they powered by some high-tech wizardry. They are the real McCoy, females, mostly loggerheads, returning to a nesting area these great sea creatures and their ancestors have used since long before man began reshaping the Florida coastline with pink-walled high-rises.