Trip Coach: A Romantic Trip to Italy

After serving overseas in the air force, Richard Farrow is planning to take his wife, Andrea, on a whirlwind vacation.

"Two years ago, my husband got activated with the military," Andrea Farrow, of Murrieta, Calif., wrote to us last summer. "While he has been all over the world, he has actually 'seen' very little of it other than military bases." Andrea was planning on dropping off her three sons with Grandma and taking a two-week trip to Europe in late March with her husband, Richard, a member of the Air Force Reserves, soon after he was released from duty. She wasn't sure where to go...

Road Trip: Lost in Southern Utah

Two friends make the rounds of Utah’s National Parks in four days of adventure in the high desert

I wouldn’t recommend cramming five national parks into just four days. Especially not if you also plan to scramble through narrow canyons, mountain bike over Kodachrome mesas, and get lost on an Indian reservation along the way. (Not that my buddy Stew and I planned on that last one.) If, however, you are going to attempt such a foolhardy quest, Southern Utah’s the place to do it.

  

The Little Wonder Restaurants of Rome

Even in the Eternal City's third millennium, you can still enjoy a feast fit for a Roman emperor. The tricky part is finagling a full meal in Rome for less than $12. Your best bet is to hunt down one of a handful of traditional Roman osterie, the sort of down-home, family-run restaurant holdover straight out of a 1950s Fellini film. There are several listed below, but to find your own just listen for the clink of glasses and murmur of Roman dialect emanating from behind the strings of beads hanging in a doorway with no sign and no menu posted...
  

Istria: Europe's All-purpose Peninsula

Longing for the beach? Join the Europeans summering on Istria's west coast. Need a city fix? Sip espresso at a café in Pula. Prefer the countryside? Stay on a farm in the hilly interior. But hurry: Come 2010, the area plans to switch to the euro. The beauty will still be there, but we're not so sure about the bargains.

My first experience with Istria was eight years ago. I was on a day trip from Trieste, Italy, just 25 miles to the northeast, and spent most of my time in Okrepcevalnica Cantina, a cozy bar with a wood-beamed ceiling in the backstreets of Piran (on the strip of Istrian coast that belongs to Slovenia). I stopped in for just one drink, but when I went to pay, I asked the kindly proprietor about a tap behind the counter labeled REFOSK...