My husband, Bob, and I planned a 15-day trip to Ethiopia, March 21-April 4, 2008, through an agency based in Addis Ababa. The arrangements included a driver and an experienced professional tour guide who traveled with us the entire time. Once we arrived in Ethiopia we learned, to our delight, that our guide had a rare [...]

My husband and I traveled in Bulgaria, May 12-16, 2007, with a guide I found on the Internet: Patrick Peneff (e-mail patrick@guide-bg.com or visit www.bulgariaprivateguide. com). Patrick and I communicated by e-mail, and he made all the arrangements, improving on my itinerary and booking our hotels. He joined us in Sofia with a car and was [...]

Puerto Varas, or the City of Roses, in Chile, is just that, with rosebushes lining the streets, both in the median as well as along the curb. The setting with Osorno Volcano in the background is breathtaking. On a March trip to the Lake District of Chile, our tours included a half day in and around [...]

A 45-day self-guided trip to southern South America and Antarctica that my wife, Shirley, and I took Dec. 31, 2007-Feb. 14, 2008, took a great deal of planning. I’d like to share some of the valuable lessons learned from this trip. It all cost us about $36,000, which included about $800 in cold-weather clothes for these [...]

Quentin Burke of Holtville, California, wrote the following to ITN readers: “Is it preferable to carry a timer or an alarm clock when traveling? Mostly, we’ve found it better to simply set a miniature digital interval timer to ‘eight hours’ for a night’s sleep than fumble with teeny buttons and worry whether we got a.m. [...]