IT was Thursday evening in Medellín and the open-air bars and cafes along fashionable Lleras Park were overflowing with after-work singles. At Triada, a stylish lounge with an orange neon bar and low-slung couches, laughter filled the subtropical air along with the deep-toned drumming of cumbia music. From around the corner, a small group of motorcyclists screeched by, their shiny engines puttering like machine guns. No one flinched, and the party kept rolling.

Not long ago, this scene would have been unthinkable in Medellín, once considered the most dangerous place on earth.

During the 1980s, Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, was home to the drug lord Pablo Escobar, whose infamous cartel turned the city into a bloody battleground and the world’s cocaine capital. Gangs roamed the narrow streets, extortionists preyed on the city’s residents and narcotics traffickers staged attacks against police.

“You couldn’t step outside,” said Bibian Gomez, 28, a commercial real estate broker who sought refuge in the resort town of Cartagena at the height of the violence. “Whenever you saw a young guy on a motorcycle you thought that he was an assassin.”

But in the last decade, this city of two million, with its beautiful colonial architecture and year-round spring-like weather, has awakened from its drug nightmare. Mr. Escobar and his minions are gone and the cocaine trade has been largely dispersed. Bullet-riddled neighborhoods are coming to life with art museums and well-designed parks. And the constant rumble of construction — new shopping malls, flashy casinos and luxury hotels — can be heard throughout the city.

The renaissance is most noticeable in Santo Domingo Savio, a once impenetrable slum of tin-roofed shanties on a hillside in northern Medellín. Though pockets are still marred by a dilapidated jumble of crumbling cinderblocks and concrete stairs, it is now home to paved roads, colorful murals and the gleaming new Parque Biblioteca España. The hulking opal structure has a library, an auditorium, computer rooms, a day care center and an art gallery.

Getting there has gotten much easier, too. What once took an hour on a rickety bus, now takes 10 minutes, thanks to a shiny gondola that opened in 2004, part of a growing public transportation network that is uniting the city and making it more accessible, especially for the poor.

On a recent afternoon, Santo Domingo Savio exuded the easygoing revelry of a small state fair. There were uniformed school children jumping rope, elderly men selling fresh slices of mango, and young couples strolling hand in hand admiring the views of the city below — a landscape of verdant pastures crowned by scattered high-rises and restored 19th-century buildings.

These days, the view also includes construction cranes, largely because of Medellín’s iconoclast mayor, Sergio Fajardo, who has commissioned renowned Colombian architects like Giancarlo Mazzanti and Felipe Uribe to construct libraries and innovative parks in neglected neighborhoods.

The centerpiece is Explora Park, a 398,000-square-foot science and technology park in the northeastern end of town that will be home to one of South America’s largest aquariums when it opens partially in late October. A block south is the sleek Wishes Park, an oasis of concrete floors and polished cherry-wood tables, with a planetarium and a music hall where the Medellín Philharmonic rehearses. Movies are shown outdoors there.

Other education-minded parks, all situated along the improved Metro system, include the Zen-themed Barefoot Park, which invites visitors to walk through a bamboo forest and then dip their feet in cascading water fountains; and the Park of Lights, which resembles a giant birthday cake when all 300 of its 72-foot-tall columns are illuminated at night.

Art has also flourished, led by a native-son, Fernando Botero, frequently referred to as Latin America’s most important living artist. In 2000, he donated 137 of his works to the Museum of Antioquia (Carrera 52 No. 52-43, 57-4-251-3636; www.museodeantioquia.org), including a painting that depicts a pudgy Pablo Escobar toppled by bullets.

But Medellín’s transformation may be most apparent at night. During the cocaine days, those who ventured onto the city’s lifeless, grid-like streets after hours encountered a Wild West showdown of trigger-happy capos. Now, cafes and bars spill onto the sidewalks, lending a festive and carefree vibe to the balmy evenings. Sprawling nightclubs draw thousands with thumping Latin music that keeps the young crowd dancing until dawn.

On a recent Thursday night at the popular Mango’s (Carrera 42 No. 67A-151; 57-4-277-6123), a ranch-style disco with cowboy memorabilia and waiters dressed to match, an eagerly anticipated three-day weekend was about to turn into a four-day party. A cluster of young clubgoers ordered rum-and-coke cocktails as the rhythms of reggaetón and vallenato shook the foggy dance floor.

It was 3 a.m. but you couldn’t tell by the crowd’s infectious energy. They were clearly in it for the long haul, as if making up for lost time.

AS the train rolled across the Tibetan countryside, I stared out into a harsh, bleak landscape. Tibetan nomads rode horses across seemingly endless grasslands dotted with small alpine lakes and ravines cut across snow-capped peaks. Tibetan traders hauling wheelbarrows piled with meat and barley walked a solitary road alongside the train route.

Inside the new Tibet train, which opened last summer and climbs to 16,000 feet while linking Lhasa to other parts of western China , passengers luxuriated in creature comforts. Groups of Chinese travelers played cards in their plush reclining chairs and four-bunk cabins. Even the waitresses, normally surly on Chinese trains, seemed to have attended remedial charm school — they laughed and even bowed slightly as they handed out plates of noodles and spicy Sichuan sautéed tofu. And next year, the trip will become even more luxurious; the company Rail Partners plans to open a high-end route to Lhasa that will include 24-hour butler service and flat-screen TVs.

Even in remote Tibet, it seems, the era of luxury train travel has returned, albeit to areas where it never before existed. Many nations are reinvesting in their train systems since flying has become more uncomfortable and far less luxurious in the age of terrorism and low-cost airlines; this summer has produced more stories of flight delays. And with growing interest in airplanes’ carbon footprint, some travelers also are realizing trains may be more environmentally friendly.

In a world of cramped and unpleasant planes, trains actually may be the last respite of luxury. Sensing this demand, luxury travel companies like Orient-Express have invested in restoring the world’s most famous train routes. And travelers are responding by packing new trains. In China, tickets for the Tibet route are so coveted that a black market has sprung up at some stations, and I had to pay a scalper four times face value to get one of the coveted berths when I traveled last August.

Much of the new boom in luxury trains has come in Asia , which has a generation of newly wealthy tourists eager to see their own countries. Vietnam has upgraded the train system running the length of the country. India’s rail system long has knitted the nation together, but in recent years it has moved beyond its utilitarian purpose. The upscale Taj hotel group, for one, has helped roll out the Deccan Odyssey, which rumbles from Mumbai to Goa and Pune. The Deccan’s interiors resemble maharajas’ palaces, with overstuffed sofas and rich wood walls, and stewards onboard monitor their guests’ every need. A similar luxury train, the Palace on Wheels, runs from Delhi through the tourist triangle of Jaipur and Agra, and the Indian government is considering another luxury route across the entire country.

Orient-Express pioneered the new age of upscale Asian trains, by creating the Eastern & Oriental Express between Singapore and Bangkok in the early ’90s. That train simulates the grand, formal Asian trains of the early 20th century, with cherry paneling, silk curtains and cabins complete with Bulgari toiletries.

The Eastern & Oriental benefits from innate Thai hospitality, which can make even a train breakdown endurable. On one recent trip heading south from Bangkok, on a normal Thai train, the carriage shuddered to a halt just before the next station, leaving my fellow passengers and me staring out the window at rice fields and an occasional water buffalo. The air-conditioning started to falter — not a welcome development on a 100-degree day. Still, while the engineers tried to fix the power, members of the cabin staff distributed bottles of water and boxes of icy fresh papaya and pineapple.

Many of these Asian trains pattern themselves after cruise ships and include amenities far beyond traditional railroads. The Deccan includes a spa room, where you can sample local ayurvedic massage and steam baths as the train rolls on. Other new trains include boutiques and Internet access.

European and African nations also have recognized the demand for luxury rail trips. Competing with South Africa’s long-running Blue Train between Cape Town and Pretoria, a formal experience where men don jackets for dinner in the train restaurant, the South African businessman Rohan Vos began Rovos Rail. Using restored carriages from as far back as 1911, Rovos offers itineraries across southern Africa. Even small, isolated Eritrea has revamped its narrow-gauge railway, dating from the Italian colonial era, so it can run charters. It ascends through impossibly steep passes rising from Asmara, the capital.

As in Asia, Orient-Express helped rebuild the European luxury rail market by restoring 1920s coaches and trying to re-create the most famous train in history, the Orient Express route to Istanbul, which inspired mystery novels and films. The new-old train comes complete with afternoon tea and snaking curves through Austrian mountain passes. No microwaved burgers or other typical train fare here: At meals on Orient-Express’s trains, guests can dig into beluga caviar, white truffle risotto and roasted Alaskan white king salmon.

GW Travel, a British travel company, this year began a luxury trans-Siberian service from Moscow to Vladivostok. The service barely resembles the trip I once took on an old Siberian spur route, where cabin attendants screamed at passengers in the middle of night and, during an hours-long train stop, we waited outside in a dark, decrepit border town as traders tried to sell us ratty Mongolian cashmere sweaters and moldering fruit. Instead, GW’s train features cabins with flat-screen TVs and DVD players.

Even long-maligned Amtrak is getting into the act, and plans to introduce restored vintage cars on several long cross-country and Eastern Seaboard routes.

Working with Grand Luxe Rail Journeys, Amtrak is equipping the cars with lounges that feature live piano music and upscale dining cabins with uniformed waiters. The restored cars will be connected to regular Amtrak trains, but passengers from other cars will not be able to enter the upscale section.

Some things, apparently, never change.

VISITOR INFORMATION

The most comprehensive Web site about international train travel is www.seat61.com. It’s run by a former employee of British train companies and offers route details, extensive information about how to book in many nations and detailed histories of some of the world’s most famous trains.

For organized all-inclusive luxury rail trips through Europe, try the tour operator Great Rail Journeys (www.greatrail.com). These trips normally include train tickets, guides and accommodations for wherever you stop, though this can vary. A 10-day tour of the Tyrol starts at £795 (about $1,645 at $2.07 to the pound), and an 11-day tour through Spain and on to Morocco by ferry starts at £1,750.

Or, you can book luxury trains more directly. For more information about the Deccan, go to www.deccan-odyssey.com, and for more information about the Eastern & Oriental Express and the restored Orient Express see www.orient-express.com. (The Orient Express, now called the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, primarily runs to Venice, but it offers occasional special trips to Istanbul.) For more information about the upscale trans-Siberian route go to www.gwtravel.co.uk. Twin shares on the trans-Siberian route next year start at £5,495. Blue Train information is available at www.bluetrain.co.za, and Rovos information is at www.rovos.com. Information on Amtrak’s new upscale service is available at www.grandluxerail.com. Berths start at $789 a person.

For train bookings in Thailand other than on the Eastern & Oriental, see www.thaifocus.com. An interesting side train trip is to Kanchanaburi, in western Thailand, where museums commemorate the World War II railway link with Burma built by Thai laborers and Allied prisoners of war, which inspired “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

Catherine Donaldson-Evans, Amy Goetzman, Kate Hammer, Carol Pogash, Rachel Pomerance and Paula Schwartz contributed reporting.

AS if commercial air travel weren’t miserable enough, more airlines are using narrower jets on long-haul flights, putting an even greater squeeze on travelers in coach. Delta Air Lines is among the latest to announce plans to use the slim Boeing 757 on trans-Atlantic routes serving destinations like Britain and Ireland. Continental, which now flies 21 routes to 20 European cities with the 757, was among the first. Northwest and US Airways also have begun flying the narrower jets to Europe.

Travelers can find some advantages. The increasing use of 757s to Europe has led to expanded schedules, with more nonstop routes to choose from when planning trips. That means more time saved by avoiding long layovers or plane changes in hub cities. It can also mean a quicker trip through customs at the smaller airports. And for some travelers, like those who live close to Bradley International Airport in Connecticut, where Northwest’s new Hartford-to-Amsterdam service departs, it can mean a shorter drive home than the one from the larger hub airport — Boston Logan in this example.

But the 757s, which are generally tolerated on shorter, domestic routes, tend to bring out claustrophobia in passengers on long-haul flights. Unlike wide-body aircraft like 767s and A330s, which typically have two aisles, a 757 has one, which means a lot less room for stretching cramped legs. Because the 757 has no two-seat rows in coach, just three seats on each side of the aisle, there is a higher chance of getting stuck in a middle seat. And while most airlines using the 757s on trans-Atlantic flights are reconfiguring their premium class cabins with better seats and entertainment systems, the coach cabins haven’t been changed all that much.

“What this means for the economy passenger is that some amenities they typically receive on international flights, such as personal video screens or laptop power ports, are not available,” said Matthew Daimler, founder of Seatguru.com, which ranks seat quality and offers insider information — for example, which exit-row seats won’t recline. In addition to the amenities, Mr. Daimler added, wide-body planes like 777s and A330s, “generally offer more overhead storage per passenger, slightly extra seat width, bassinets for infants and typically a better chance of getting an upgrade.”

For example, there are 48 business class seats on Continental’s international routes flying 777-200 aircraft and 235 seats in coach. That’s roughly one business class seat for every five in coach. On its 757-200, there are 16 business class and 159 coach seats, or about one business class seat for every 10 in coach. And seats in both business and coach are slightly narrower on the 757.

To try to make passengers a little more comfortable, some airlines are taking out seats to offer more legroom in coach and retrofitting their premium cabins with updated business class seats and entertainment. Northwest, for example, has configured its 757s to Europe with 16 new World Business Class seats, which come with portable in-flight entertainment systems with 40 movies, 40 compact discs of music and 6 games. In coach, the pitch, or distance between rows, has been increased up to four inches. Continental completed installation last winter of new entertainment systems in the BusinessFirst cabins of its fleet of 41 Boeing 757 aircraft used primarily on trans-Atlantic flights to and from Newark. This summer it began installing the systems, which offer customers up to 25 movies, 25 short-subject programs and 50 compact discs, in its economy cabins, too. US Airways said it plans to upgrade in-flight entertainment on its 757s later this year.

Still, there is the bathroom factor. Because of the single aisle, travelers are effectively trapped, either in their seats or in the aisle on the way back to their seats, every time a cart comes rolling along, which can be often on an international flight.

“If the only aisle is continually clogged and you’ve got to go — it’s a problem,” said Jerry Chandler, who writes Cheapflights.com’s travel blog. “You’ve got to get a kid back to the bathroom? I’m sorry, you’re stuck.”

The use of 757s on trans-Atlantic flights was recently made possible by so-called blended winglets — new devices on wings that reduce drag, increase fuel efficiency and boost flight range. The 757, which took to the skies in the early 1980s, was used at first on mid-length domestic flights and then, after regulations were changed to allow twin-engine airplanes on longer routes, also on transcontinental flights. The new winglet technology, further expanding the 757’s range, allows United States carriers in search of new markets overseas to expand service to more regions, often with direct routes to smaller cities — moves they wouldn’t be able to justify using larger planes that eat up more fuel and have many more seats to fill.

Northwest, for example, began flying 757s with 160 seats nonstop from Hartford to Amsterdam on July 1. It also started flying from Detroit to Düsseldorf and Brussels this summer using the 757. US Airways now flies 757s to Brussels, Shannon, Dublin, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Glasgow from its Philadelphia hub.

To try to maximize your comfort on a 757 to Europe this summer, take a look at the diagrams on the airline’s homepage to see which seats are open for your flight. Then cross-reference your findings with information on Web sites like SeatGuru.com or SeatExpert.com, which rank seat quality. SeatGuru.com recommends seats in Row 16 on Continental’s 767-200, for instance, because they are exit-row seats, with extra legroom, and they recline fully. It advises avoiding Row 14, where reclining is limited.

Or you could avoid single-aisle planes altogether. Joseph Remy, a financial analyst from Washington, bought a ticket on a 757 from Newark to Dublin in October for the convenience of flying nonstop. But the experience was so miserable, he said, that he purposely avoided 757s when booking another trip to Ireland this summer.

The lack of psychological space was part of the issue. “To go that long, it just seems so small,” said Mr. Remy who was stuck next to “a very large woman” on the way east and to a drunken man on the way home. With only one aisle, “there was no escape route” to take a break from his seatmates or to get around the cart when it came down the aisle. And after having to squint at “a really small screen” for the in-flight movie, Mr. Remy said, “it felt like it was 1965.”

Mr. Remy is flying a two-aisle 767 with a stopover before landing in Dublin for his trip next month. Though a couple of flights on 757s were cheaper, Mr. Remy, said, he wasn’t tempted. “I said no way.”

WE’RE approaching August in Manhattan, when the island pulls a mini-Paris and coughs up a sizable chunk of its population, spraying the natives Jackson Pollock-like onto the beaches and into the country homes of the New York region.

That may mean easy restaurant reservations and plenty of room to play Frisbee in the park, but for those who love the energy of New York’s countless and varied art galleries, it’s a problem. Chelsea’s blocks of galleries become a ghost town in August. And on weekends, even the ghosts flee to the Hamptons.

But there are enough galleries open elsewhere in the city to fill a Saturday, many of them a few subway stops away in the adjoining neighborhoods of SoHo and the Lower East Side. They range from the one-guy-in-a-tiny-room-tending-to-works-of-emerging-artists kind to the elegantly appointed, lusciously air-conditioned places where both the prices and the ceilings can be astonishingly high. Some are even open on, gasp, Sunday.

Here’s a walking tour of eight galleries that plan to be open (at least most) August weekends. Schedules change, so make a list and call the next stop as you go. You can always substitute another place suggested by members of the staff of the last gallery. It’s a small rebel crowd, and they know who they are.

Start at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side (near the F train at Delancey or the J at Essex). At the southern end is the energetic Cuchifritos, a nonprofit run by the Artists Alliance, which has a group show called “Working Space 07” scheduled to open on Saturday and to runthrough Sept. 8.

But there’s no point in deceiving you: The real reason to start the tour here is that you should have brunch at Shopsin’s, the legendary restaurant with the vast menu (just short of 40 varieties of French toast), which just moved there from its second West Village location. It replaced the cuchifrito (or Puerto Rican fried food) spot that the gallery was named after.

Where were we? Ah, art. Next stop: Sunday, on Eldridge Street, is another tiny space with an informal vibe that breaks only for a long Labor Day weekend starting Aug. 27. The gallery, which, according to its owner, Clayton Sean Horton, focuses on “periphery” and “overlooked” artists, has been open since October 2006. Its current exhibition focuses on Royal Robertson, a Louisiana folk artist who died in 1997, and Hilary Baldwin, a New York sculptor. Never heard of them? Exactly.

A couple blocks away at Thierry Goldberg Projects, a show called “No Melody Harder” features Jessica Williams and Allison Katz, two painters who are studying at Columbia. The name of the exhibition, which will open on Thursday, was inspired by a Gertrude Stein poem: “Dirt and not copper makes a color darker. It makes the shape so heavy and makes no melody harder.”

A brief zig and zag down the Bowery onto Spring lands you at Jen Bekman Gallery, which is scheduled to take down its cool group exhibition “A New American Portrait” on Thursday, and reopen on Aug. 8 with “Purple Hearts.” This solo show, by the photographer Nina Berman, looks at wounded soldiers back from Iraq. Ms. Berman won a World Press Photo Award for her wedding portrait of Ty Ziegel, a disfigured Marine sergeant, and his wife, Renée.

That’s it for the tiny galleries. Head down the Bowery and cut back east to Envoy, where “Elegy for the Summer of Love” is scheduled to open Aug. 8 and run through the month. It has images from 1960s New York and San Francisco by the French photographer Alain Dister.

Cross Little Italy into SoHo on Broome Street for a group show of realists and photographers represented by Arcadia Fine Arts. You’ll find everything from Jefferson Hayman’s deceivingly antique-looking gelatin-silver print photographs in found frames to Carlos Vega’s still lifes of fruit, including some tasty-looking persimmons. (O.K., you might be getting hungry again by this point.)

Then it’s up Broadway to the Westwood Gallery, a fifth-floor space that combines a coolly professional look with a pleasantly friendly staff. (Or maybe they’re just thankful to have someone to talk to on a Saturday in summer?) The exhibition, “Color Alert,” has paintings and monotypes inspired by the post-9/11 color-coded government terror alert levels. Also ask about the Warhol screen-prints-on-newsprint in the back.

Your final stop is “Inside/Out,” a group show at the Jonathan Shorr Gallery around the block. According to Mr. Shorr, who likes to set up shop with his Mac laptop on the sidewalk, the subversive-for-SoHo show is about illegal eavesdropping and video surveillance. “I’m trying to bring weird and strange back to New York,” he said.

The back wall is covered with bright, fancifully wacky paintings by Brian Leo, who calls himself a garage pop surrealist. (If you open the nearly hidden door to the left, you’ll find a tiny room filled with even more of his work). There’s a wide range of other artists there, too, including color-rich squares by the Chilean painter German Tagle.

It’s a good place to end, because Mr. Shorr is planning some outdoor events that run into the evening (call for details). A New York art gallery extending its weekend hours in August? Talk about subversive.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Cuchifritos, at the southern end of the Essex Street Market, 120 Essex Street, between Delancey and Rivington Streets, (212) 598-4124; www.aai-nyc.org/cuchifritos. Monday-Saturday, noon to 5:30 p.m.

Sunday, 237 Eldridge Street, between Houston and Stanton Streets, (212) 253-0700; www.sundaynyc.com. Wednesday-Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.

Thierry Goldberg Projects, 5 Rivington Street. between Chrystie Street and the Bowery, (212) 967-2260; www.thierrygoldberg.com. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m to 6 p.m.

Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street, between the Bowery and Elizabeth Street, (212) 219-0166; www.jenbekman.com. Wednesday-Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.

Envoy, 131 Chrystie Street, between Broome and Delancey Streets, (212) 226-4555; www.envoygallery.com. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Arcadia Fine Arts, 51 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand Streets, (212) 965-1387; www.arcadiafinearts.com. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Westwood Gallery, 568 Broadway, fifthfloor, between Prince and Houston Streets, (212) 925-5700; www.westwoodgallery.com. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. May close for part of August.

Jonathan Shorr Gallery, 109 Crosby Street, between Prince and Houston Streets, (212) 334-1199; www.jonathanshorrgallery.com. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

ARE you nuts?” The Royal Shooting Club's ancient caretaker was furious with me. Wandering the club's secluded public gardens above the beach three miles north of Copenhagen, I had stumbled onto a well-manicured range whose target was hidden in a hedge some 200 feet from a high-powered rifle mounted in the club's dining veranda. “You see?” the caretaker said, cooling off and taking me inside to show me the walls filled with portraits of Danish nobles and members' coats of arms. “This is an old place with fine traditions. All the people wandering through here could end things in a minute.”

I should have been dumbfounded to see such an incongruous sight in the crowded suburbs of liberal Copenhagen, but this was, after all, the Whiskey Belt, where the rules of Denmark's traditional egalitarianism don't always apply.

Whiskey Belt is the nickname for the narrow strip of beaches, forests, pleasure gardens and villas that dot the 25 miles of coastline from Copenhagen's northern reaches to Hamlet's castle of Kronborg in Elsinore. Some of Denmark's most prominent citizens live here, facing the country's traditional enemy, the Swedes, on the other side of the narrow Oresund strait, and a steady onslaught of Copenhageners coming up here to unwind.

“ ‘Whiskey Belt' is sort of a bad name for the place, but it's popular,” said Joachim Knop, a Danish opera star who makes his home along the coast. “The idea is that people in Copenhagen drink beer, while life on the north side is so good, we all drink whiskey.”

Perhaps the ultimate compliment to this area is the name of a coming prime-time TV melodrama about the travails of a wealthy Whiskey Belt family: “2900 Happiness”— 2900 being the principal postal code for the Whiskey Belt. “For Danes 2900 is sort of like Beverly Hills 90210,” said Sofie Lassen-Kahlke, who stars in the show and who herself grew up here. “It's where Denmark's most expensive homes and highest salaries are to be found. There's a mystique to the place.”

A single artery, Strandvejen, curves through the area like a Danish version of the Pacific Coast Highway. During the weekends and evenings Strandvejen's bike paths are jammed with inline skaters and bikers heading up to the beaches, getting exercise or simply checking out the scene. Copenhagen's mass transit system, the S-train, also has a “Coastal Line” for commuters, explorers and urban invaders.

The most glamorous part of the coast is six miles north of Copenhagen's center, when you round the bend at Klampenborg and see the bay dotted with Victorian villas and low modern apartment buildings whose white facades and curving forms reflect the seascape. Most striking of all is a formidable mansion with a green-topped cupola hovering on a low hill above the bay. This is Hvidore, where the Danish-born Empress Dagmar of Russia, whose son Czar Nicholas II was murdered after the Russian Revolution, fled with her jewelry and her Cossack guards. From her widow's walk she could gaze across the sound toward Russia, somewhere beyond the Swedish coast. Her gaze is now mirrored by a statue of Knud Rasmussen, the Danish polar explorer, which permanently stares at Sweden from his granite beachside pedestal beneath the mansion.

There's a lot to stare at here. This stretch of road fronts Bellevue Beach, whose summer inhabitants tend to be as sexy, though more blond, than those at Copacabana. And practically every 20th-century structure you see here was designed by Arne Jacobsen, whose organic buildings and furnishings defined Danish Modern for the rest of the world. Jacobsen lived and worked in the Whiskey Belt for most of his career. He even designed the funky white-tiled gas station — now an ice cream parlor — with its George Jetson-ish toadstool awning in front of Skovshoved harbor.

But for me the coolest of Jacobsen's designs is Bellevue Beach itself, with its cartoonish blue-striped lifeguard towers and white geometric kiosks, which, when they were built in 1932, must have seemed half a century before their time.

Time travel does seem possible in the Deer Park, behind the beach. This is probably Denmark's most popular and certainly most populist green spot despite having been a royal hunting ground for three and a half centuries. Cross under the royal crest on the red wooden gate next to Klampenborg Station and enter into an ancient forest worthy of Hansel and Gretel. Some 2,000 deer stride freely around this fenced-in hilly terrain more than three times the size of Central Park, amid massive trees that make other forests seem pygmy-like.

“The trees here are unusually tall because after Denmark lost its navy to the British in the early 1800s, they decided to plant lots of oak and beech trees here for use in building future ships,” said Ingvar Sahlberg, who manages Pieter Lieps Hus restaurant, a popular excursion point for people wandering the forest. “They just never got around to chopping them down.”

Walking past Lieps at night takes you to a surreal sight: Half a mile into the dark woods you come upon a colored light bulb riot of beer gardens, rides, theaters and even a wooden roller coaster. This is Bakken, which bills itself as the world's oldest amusement park. Started in the early 18th century when jugglers, troubadours, clowns and other entertainers began setting up their tents around a holy spring, Bakken remains a boisterous place where Copenhageners flock to eat greasy food, take thrill rides, drink lots of beer and watch risqué cabarets. Bakken's setting in these pricey bucolic surroundings would be a little like bringing Coney Island to Montauk.

“Bakken is bawdier, more folksy, cornier and a lot older than Tivoli,” said Anne Kjeldsen, referring to Copenhagen's famous amusement park. Ms. Kjeldsen owns the Skovly, a colorful restaurant and beer garden in Bakken; keeping with tradition, she and the park's other business owners are still called “tent holders.” “Bakken's got more soul,” she said.

The most famous meal in Bakken is fire, eaten several times a day in front of a little green house inhabited by the park's mascot clown, Pjerrot. Beloved by several generations of Danes, Pjerrot is a character out of Italian comic opera who has been entertaining Bakken's visitors since 1800. He is essentially a set of oversized red lips cracking jokes from a sea of white makeup and clothing. Tivoli also adopted Pjerrot as a mascot, but the difference between the two says it all: Bakken's Pjerrot sings, does tricks and, yes, eats lots of fire; Tivoli's Pjerrot performs in a ballet.

If one seeks deeper refinements, drive 10 minutes north to Louisiana (Gammel Strandvej 13, Humlebaek; 45-4919-0719; www.louisiana.dk; entry 80 kroner, or $14.50 at 5.5 kroner to the dollar), one of Europe's most prominent modern-art museums. It was named, according to legend, by a former owner of the museum's grounds who had three wives named Louise. Few places better epitomize the Whiskey Belt's unique blend of populism and elitism. Part modern museum and part leisure park, Louisiana is a series of pavilions linked by glass walkways along a fantastic garden overlooking the Oresund. When I was there in early June, there was a provocative multimedia exhibit on modern Chinese art alongside the museum's permanent “Best of the 20th Century” collection. But the star of Louisiana is the amazing outdoor surroundings, and most visitors were sunbathing in the seaside garden while their kids tottered about the lawn among the Giacomettis and Calders.

Just down Strandvejen, in Rungsted, lies the creation of another artist. Like Empress Dagmar, Karen Blixen returned to the Whiskey Coast as an exile in her own land. In 1931, divorced from her husband, rejected by her lover, broke and humiliated by the failure of her coffee plantation in Kenya, Blixen moved back with her mother at Rungstedlund to do the only thing that was left for her to do: write. Here on her father's old slanted desk is where she wrote “Out of Africa,” “Babette's Feast” and most of the other tales that would put her on the world literary stage under her pen name, Isak Dinesen. Rungstedlund is now a museum (Rungsted Strandvej 111; 45-4557-1057; www.isak-dinesen.dk; entry 45 kroner), and its densely planted park provides a captivating glimpse at the other talents Blixen cultivated, literally.

Wandering around the park's 40 acres of groves and perennial-filled gardens is like taking a botanical tour of Denmark. Blixen grew herbs, flowers and shrubs from all over the Danish isles here. Ever true to her aristocratic aspirations, she had trees from Denmark's major estates replanted throughout the grounds. But, like a true citizen of the Whiskey Belt, she gave her blue-blooded ideals a populist slant. Four years before she died in 1962, she converted the estate into a bird sanctuary after encouraging the Danish public to donate one krone each to the cause. Some 80,000 Danes complied, and now the park is a popular walking and picnicking area. Blixen herself is buried beneath a giant beech tree at the northern end of the grounds.

From this spot, perched between the forest and the sea, the sight of a rainbow of wildflowers mingles with birdsong. Contemplating this perfect slice of nature at the edge of Copenhagen, a visitor can easily see how Blixen could have written “Out of Africa” here. It's also easy to see why she never went back.

VISITOR INFORMATION

HOW TO GET THERE

Scandinavian Airlines, United and Continental offer flights from Newark Airport to Copenhagen. An Internet search for August flights found S.A.S. round-trip fares starting at $627.

The A, E, F and C lines on the S-Train — Copenhagen's efficient mass-transit system — run along the northern coast (110 Danish kroner, or $20 at 5.5 kroner to the dollar, for a 24-hour ticket). Bakken, Dyrehavsbakken and Bellevue Beach are all gathered around Klampenborg station. The Karen Blixen Museum is a 15-minute walk from Rung-sted station, and the Louisiana museum is a 10-minute walk from Humlebaek station.

Bikes are an excellent way of getting around. There are paved paths along Strandvejen, and bikes can be taken on and off the S-trains (10 kroner extra). Rentals can be had at two central city Rent a Bike locations through www.rentabike.dk; (45) 3333-8613. A bike is 75 kroner a day, with a 500 kroner deposit.

WHERE TO EAT

Strandmoeller Kroen, built on the site of a 500-year-old paper mill, is a favorite with city folk looking for a quaint taste of country. A lunch plate with local specialties like pickled herring, sautéed flounder and Danish cheese is 158 kroner. Strandvejen 808; (45) 3963-0104; www.strandmoellekroen.dk.

Peter Lieps Hus, a straw-roofed former gamekeeper's cottage in the Deer Park next to Bakken amusement park, serves Danish classics like biksemad, a stew with potatoes, pork, onions and egg (116 kroner). Dyrehaven 8; (45) 3964-0786; www.peterliep.dk.

Restaurant Jacobsen, a chic restaurant next to Bellevue Beach, is a tribute to all things Arne Jacobsen from the building itself to the furniture, framed blueprints and even the cutlery. A three-course tasting menu with wine is 565 kroner. Strandvejen 449; (45) 3963-4322; www.restaurantjacobsen.dk.

WHERE TO STAY

Skodsborg Kurhotel, a former royal residence about 10 minutes' walk to the Deer Park and the sea, is now a hotel and a popular spa for well-heeled locals; 1,600 kroner for two, breakfast included. Skodsborg Strandvejen 139; (45) 4558-5800; www.skodsborg.dk.

Skovshoved Hotel is a romantic inn with an excellent restaurant; 1,400 kroner for a double room. Strandvejen 267; (45) 3964-0028; www.skovshovedhotel.dk.

IN 1738 — the year that Louis XV's father-in-law, Stanislas Leszczynski, was given the Duchy of Lorraine — the 240-mile journey to that corner of eastern France from Paris would have taken days. Since June, a fast new TGV train service has cut the time to just 90 minutes. Almost hourly morning departures and evening returns from Gare de l'Est in Paris make Nancy, the artistic and intellectual capital of Lorraine, a great day trip — especially if you like the sinuous, sexy belle époque art form known as Art Nouveau.

Of course, there was nothing nouveau about Stanislas. Making the most of what was his consolation prize for losing the kingdom of Poland, he set about turning Nancy into a glorious rococo showpiece. In an inspired act of urban planning he created a monumental central square to join Nancy's medieval quarter to its 16th-century “new town.” This is a convenient place to start an exploration of Nancy. A short walk from the railroad station, Place Stanislas is a gigantic rectangle, surrounded by gloriously ornamented classical buildings, gilded wrought-iron gates and extravagant fountains. The square and its surroundings, completely restored in 2005, have been named a Unesco World Heritage Site.

But you can find Art Nouveau on the Place Stan at Le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy (3, place Stanislas, 33-3-8385-3072; www.nancy.fr). The light and airy upper floors are devoted to a sampling of artists of the 19th and 20th century — Dufy, Manet, Matisse, Modigliani, Monet, Picasso — as well as one of Rubens's earliest works (“The Transfiguration,” 1605) and one of Caravaggio's last (“The Annunciation,” 1609).

But anyone serious about Art Nouveau, especially its pioneering School of Nancy, will find equivalent treasure in the basement — a collection of some 300 pieces of Daum glass from 1891 to the turn of the 21st century. You can see what Daum is selling now (like glass replicas of horses from different Chinese dynasties) at the company's boutique-museum at 14, place Stanislas (33-3-8332-2165; www.daum.fr).

The Daum company was active in the School of Nancy, an association of artists, artisans and manufacturers established in 1901 to promote the new international decorative style known as Art Nouveau. The school's stated goals: “art in everything” and “art for everyone.” Like Gustav Klimt in Austria, Antonio Gaudí in Barcelona and Hector Guimard in Paris, Nancy artists were experimenting with natural shapes — flowers, vines, birds, insects — and the idea of using industrial techniques and materials to create beauty.

The founder of the School of Nancy was Emile Gallé, such a master of glassmaking innovation that his New York counterpart, Louis Comfort Tiffany, traveled to Nancy to visit his factory. The fascinating Musée de l'Ecole de Nancy is dedicated to his work and that of his associates (36-38, rue du Sergent Blandan, 33-3-8340-1486; www.nancy.fr). In this appropriately Art Nouveau mansion, each room — parlor, music room, dining room, bedrooms, office — is fitted out in period furniture, stained glass and objets d'art. One highlight: Gallé's “Dawn and Dusk” bed, with an amazingly rendered, if rather bizarre, moth theme.

Not far away is the home of Louis Majorelle, a master craftsman in wood (marquetry was his forte) and prominent member of the Nancy School. You can spot the house (1, rue Louis Majorelle; 33-3-8394-3000) by its asymmetrical facade, curvy windows, writhing balconies and flower-shaped chimney pots. Tours take place on Saturdays and Sundays from May to October. Book at the Musée de l'Ecole de Nancy.

There is more to Nancy than Art Nouveau. The thriving city of about 400,000 is also known for quiche Lorraine. Try the egg, ham and cheese tart at Nathalie Lalonde (3, rue Stanislas, 33-3-8351-6708; www.nathalie-lalonde.com). For macaroons, the almond cookies said to have been invented in Nancy by Benedictine nuns, go to the Maison des Soeurs Macarons (21, rue Gambetta, 33-3-8332-2425; www.macaron-de-nancy.com). The sisters sold them to support themselves during the French Revolution. Also try their bergamotes, hard candies that taste of Earl Grey tea.

There is serious food in Nancy, too, like at the minuscule Le V'Four (10, rue St.-Michel, 33-3-8332-4948), whose fresh-from-the-market menus are 25 and 37 euros ($35 and $52 at $1.40 to the euro). But wine is another matter. Lorraine's offerings are not up to the quality of the Alsace region next door.

Still, Alsace and Lorraine have something of a shared history — at times annexed to Germany, then reverting to France. They have been on military front lines from the Burgundy Wars of the 15th century to World Wars I and II. Amazingly, Nancy has survived all this conflict relatively unscathed. Its medieval old town features the 13th-century Craffe Gate, the 15th-century Cordelier Church and remnants of an early 16th-century palace. The delightfully eclectic Musée Lorrain (64, Grande Rue, 33-3-8332-1874; www.nancy.fr) includes medieval church sculpture, a display of historic French porcelain, and important works from two 17th-century local artists: Georges de La Tour, the master of indirect lighting, and Jacques Callot, one of the most socially perceptive engravers in art history.

But for art lovers, collectors and design connoisseurs, Nancy means Nouveau. You can still find museum-quality Art Nouveau objects in Nancy, but they are pricey.

“The good pieces are getting more expensive and more difficult to find,” said Denis Ruga, whose shop Antiquités (13, rue Stanislas, 33-3-8335-2079) specializes in Art Nouveau. On display were two sets of nesting tables. One, featuring floral marquetry, was signed by Majorelle (4,100 euros); the second, with a highly intricate bird-and-branch design, was inlaid with Gallé's name (5,800 euros). The best work in the gallery, said Mr. Ruga, was an early rose-tinted lamp signed by Gallé, priced at 20,000 euros. (It has since been sold.) For about that price at Antiquités Collignon (81, Grande Rue, 33-3-8332-8273) you could have bought an original (but unsigned) finely detailed five-piece Art Nouveau love-seat and chair set.

For a less expensive souvenir, try Aujourd'hui 1900 (29, rue du Sergent Blandan, 33-3-8390-7368; www.laflor1900.fr), a cheerful shop across the street from the Musée de l'Ecole de Nancy. What at first appear to be examples of Daum and Gallé lamps and vases are in fact respectful reinterpretations of them, bearing the Laflor trademark. “It's a combination of Lorraine and la fleur,” Martine Jacques explained, using the French word for flower. Her uncle Francis Pérignon started the enterprise three years ago after retiring from an electrical business. Since his mother had worked for Daum, Mr. Pérignon had grown up with the School of Nancy aesthetic.

Like the Nancy artists before him, Mr. Pérignon designs each vase or lamp and then sends off the plans — for multiple layers of glass, say, or specific acid etching — to artisans often working at home. Each of the items, which range from 20 to 700 euros, comes with a certificate affirming that the hand-blown glass follows in the tradition of Lorraine's master glassmakers at the turn of the 20th century.

After a nonstop Nouveau day in Nancy, the most appropriate place to end your excursion is L'Excelsior, a century-old brasserie (50, rue Henri-Poincaré, 33-3-8335-2457; brasserie-excelsior.com). It's a complete 1911 period piece: creamy molded ceilings, russet-colored stained-glass windows, polished brass chandeliers — all with a fern or flower motif. It has regional-contemporary food, oysters in season, amazing desserts, a Majorelle piano, and it's just a block from the railroad station.

ALONG an estuary at the northwest tip of Wales, a one-hour hike through a hill town called Portmeirion can lead past a pagoda-shaped chinoiserie gazebo, some Gothic pinnacles, eucalyptus groves, a crenelated castle, a Mediterranean bell tower, a Jacobean town hall, and an Art Deco cylindrical watchtower. And watch your head while you duck through some archways and doors because they are four-fifths of normal scale.

Portmeirion is actually a resort where no one has ever lived. A self-taught Welsh architect named Sir Clough Williams-Ellis built it from architectural salvage from the 1920s to 1970s, loosely based on his memories of trips to Portofino on the Italian Riviera. He kept improving Portmeirion until his death at age 94 in 1978. In his long career, he designed almost nothing else memorable, except some country houses for British aristocrats.

Portmeirion now belongs to a charity, run by Sir Clough’s grandson, Robin Llywelyn, a Welsh novelist who is the co-author of a gloriously illustrated and lively history, “Portmeirion” (Antique Collectors’ Club, 2006). The family dutifully maintains the 50 bright-colored buildings and has even brought them a bit upscale the last few years, hiring Sir Terence Conran to redecorate some public spaces in a taupe and celadon palette. But no renovation has yet tamped down the abiding weirdness of Portmeirion, which is surrounded by gray slate hills and gray slate villages. When I mentioned my planned trip to a Welsh friend, I was a little nervous that he would consider it a Disney-fied tourist trap, but instead he went wide-eyed and nostalgic. “It’s an absolutely batty place,” he said. “We got married there.”

In the summer high season, about 200 guests a night pack into Portmeirion’s two hotels and dozens of rental cottages. Another hundred or so pay £6.80 ($13.60 at $2 to the pound) just to stroll the grounds. Sir Clough (pronounced CLUFF) wrote gleefully in his 1971 autobiography that he knew visitors might “find it all insufferably chaotic, contrived, whimsical or out of place.” He wanted them to at least remember the place, which had a polemic subtext: he hated his era’s taste for modernist architecture.

When he started building Portmeirion, the rectilinear glass walls of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were becoming fashionable, but “their work seems to me to be so unfeeling,” he said. He called the resort “a home for fallen buildings,” and its ragged skyline and playful narrow passageways were meant to provide “more fun for more people.”

An aristocrat who declared ancestry from a 12th-century king, Sir Clough was such a committed neotraditionalist that he dressed in breeches and waistcoats. When he wasn’t tweaking Portmeirion, he often proselytized pro bono for environmentalist causes; he was an early promoter of wind farms, bike paths, national parks and bans on billboards.

Modernist critics like Lewis Mumford dismissed Portmeirion as “a monumental joke” or “ridiculous Welsh fantasy,” but the British government declared it a protected landmark in 1971, and it seduced tourists as well. “Its economic success has staggered me,” Sir Clough declared near the end of his life. Mr. Llywelyn’s book, which contains a loving essay by the travel writer Jan Morris, who lives nearby, lists bold-face visitors including Bertrand Russell, the Duke of Windsor, King Zog of Albania, and the actor Patrick McGoohan (his creepy 1960s TV series “The Prisoner” was filmed at Portmeirion). Noel Coward wrote “Blithe Spirit” at a Portmeirion cottage in a five-day sprint in 1941 (he’d been suffering from writer’s block in London, where his home had been destroyed during the Blitz), and the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, spent a few summer vacations in a suite tucked above a Portmeirion archway.

The celebrities returned year after year, partly to see what Sir Clough had newly wrought. He kept teams of carpenters and masons on call. They never knew what salvage delivery would arrive next: gilded statues of Burmese goddesses, 18th-century cannons, a Victorian sandstone fireplace, a 1640s ballroom ceiling. Wherever an appropriate antique wasn’t available, Sir Clough improvised: many windows and pilasters are trompe l’oeils, painted illusions, and the domes on the lighthouse and the town hall are both made from overturned pig boilers.

Staff gardeners meanwhile lined paths with formal topiary rows and palm trees. They also set aside 70 acres for unkempt stands of tree ferns, redwoods, gingkos and rhododendrons (Gulf Stream currents in the estuary make for a subtropical microclimate). The contrast between the architecture and the exotic groves is surreal: in an essay in Mr. Llywelyn’s book, the British garden writer Stephen Lacey describes “the magical shock of exchanging bustling Riviera for silent rainforest in a single step.”

On my own all-too-short two-day visit a few months ago, I mostly clambered along hairpin turns in the village’s cobblestone paths, puzzling over Sir Clough’s inventions, stage-set tricks and juxtapositions. After a while, I pitied the maintenance crews, and said as much to Mr. Llywelyn, when I called his office for an interview after my incognito trip.

“I don’t think my grandfather realized how long this place would be popular, how long the buildings would be expected to withstand the sea air and winds here,” he said rather wearily. Nor have his grandfather’s furnishings choices held up well, he added: “Especially the four-poster beds in the guestrooms, those were, unfortunately, quite creaky, quite narrow and so uncomfortable.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Conran-inspired replacement beds, with leather-upholstered headboards, seem hopelessly generic in such a loopy place.

The regulars and celebrities aren’t fazed by the changes, apparently. Portmeirion is booked solid for August; Welsh and English families return annually to the same cottages, which have cute names like Salutation, Neptune and Unicorn. (Consider a fall trip, so you can reflect on the season’s shortening days at a town constantly battling decay.) Sightings of Jude Law and Liam Neeson, Mr. Llywelyn told me, have been reported in the last few years.

But I saw no one even faintly fabulous, just serious hikers with water bottles dangling from backpacks as they headed into the faux wilderness and khaki-and-loafer-wearing hotel guests photographing one another along the colonnades or browsing the gift shops. The souvenir stock, I found, was rather perfunctory, dominated by “Prisoner” memorabilia and mermaid-logo pencils and magnets. So instead I picked up a pinky-size fragment of stucco painted turquoise from a housekeeper’s pile of sweepings of palm fronds and pebbles.

No one saw me pocket this treasure, but I felt compelled anyway to confess the looting to Mr. Llywelyn. He said he didn’t mind at all, he’d heard similar stories before. Still, I felt better that he knew a salvaged piece of his grandfather’s 50-year salvage operation had reached New York. I keep the artifact next to my computer, in case I am ever tempted to think that my trip to Portmeirion was a dream.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Portmeirion is a two-hour drive from Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham and nearly five hours from London (see www.portmeirion-village.com for directions). Trains (www.britishrail.com) to the nearest major stop, Bangor, are three and a half hours from London (starting at £68 round trip, or $136 at $2 to the pound) or two hours from Manchester (starting at £28.80). The hotel can arrange taxi service (£50) for the one-hour drive from Bangor.

Summer nightly rates for rooms in the cottages (some of which require weeklong stays) and two hotels (Castell Deudraeth, a crenelated Victorian folly, and the Hotel Portmeirion, a bow-fronted Victorian villa) are £167 to £277. Each hotel has a formal restaurant. A half-dozen snack bars and food shops are scattered around the village.

TOM Cassidy never married and spent much of his adult life living alone in a one-room cabin in eastern Tennessee. It’s said that he once commented that all a man needed was “a cot, stove, dresser, chair, fiddle and a pistol”— lucky for him, since that’s all his diminutive abode could hold. After Mr. Cassidy died in 1989, his cabin (with a 1950s Kitty Wells publicity photo still tacked to the wall) was boarded up and abandoned. But, happily, not forgotten.

Enter John Rice Irwin, 76, an old family friend, who acquired the shack and had it moved. Now it sits among 35 preserved log structures in his impressive collection, which dots the landscape at the Museum of Appalachia, in Norris, Tenn. One day this summer, sheep grazed in a field near one of the buildings, a beautiful cantilevered barn. Old-time tunes from a clutch of musicians up on a porch wafted lazily on the breeze.

With its down-home authenticity and its location hard by the mountains less than an hour from the Knoxville airport, the museum makes a perfect starting point for a trip into the heart of Appalachia.

Mr. Irwin started the museum by accident. In the late 1960s he bought an 1890s log house and furnished it with period items purchased at flea markets and auctions or found in the barns and attics of friends and family. “Like so many people, I liked to collect things, and that was sort of my hobby,” he said over a lunch of fried green tomatoes, chicken pot pie and cornbread salad in the museum cafe. “People began to talk about my cabin and come over and see it.” Soon curious locals were lining up on Sundays after church, and he began charging 50 cents for a tour.

One cabin led to another — all moved to his land in Norris — and the collection now includes furniture, farm tools, pottery, paintings, musical instruments and oddball items like a Civil War-era perpetual motion machine and a chair made of horseshoes. Hundreds upon hundreds of objects are accompanied by photographs and hand-written cards detailing the lives and times of their owners: “Although Granny Irwin washed, sewed, scrubbed, and cooked for her 10 brothers, she still found time to express her artistry and sentiments as evidenced by this ‘crazy quilt’ she made ca. 1900,” reads one card.

Visitors now pay $12.95, and about 100,000 drop by every year, finding their way from all over the country and around the world. “There are so many stories here,” Brenda Newman of Winchester, Ind., said as she and her sister, Diana Rees, toured their way through. In May the museum was named an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.

Over the twisting roads, through rugged hills swathed in every imaginable shade of green, there’s much more to explore in the upland countryside where Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina all have their pieces of the Appalachians.

At the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park, about 50 miles to the north on Route 63, the visitor center recounts Indian life in the region, describes Daniel Boone’s building of the Wilderness Road and tells tales of the hundreds of thousands of pioneers who made their way west over it. The Pinnacle Overlook provides a bird’s-eye view of the gap itself, a crease in the otherwise largely impenetrable range. The gap changed hands four times during the Civil War.

A bit farther north, Route 119 leads deeper into the hill country. This time of year, the roadside is ablaze with golden black-eyed Susans and bright blue cornflowers.

“We’re a pretty well kept secret,” said Shirley Dodd, as she served a heaping plate of fried chicken livers, mashed potatoes and green beans at the Coal Bin, a thrift store and cafe in Benham, Ky., a tiny town that was once a prosperous coal camp. The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum, a collection of coal mining artifacts, dioramas, old photos and other mementoes, is next door; across the street is the restored Coal Miners Memorial Theater; and up the hill the Benham School House Bed & Breakfast puts up guests in a former elementary and high school that still has lockers in the hallways.

Nearby are the towns of Cumberland, where the Poor Fork Arts & Crafts Guild sells a wide variety of handicrafts, and Lynch, where starting in October, tourists will be able to descend several hundred feet into Portal 31, a defunct coal mine.

From Lynch, Route 160 will take you on an impressive ride up and over Black Mountain, the highest point in Kentucky at 4,145 feet, and on to the Virginia towns of Appalachia and Norton.

“Just remember, around here it’s Ap-pa-LATCH-a,” teased Bill Jones, who was sitting on the front porch of Country Cabin II, a bluegrass and old-time music concert and dance hall in Norton on a Saturday night. Northeasterners have a way of saying “Ap-pa-LAY-sha,” he explained, and it “tends to get under our skin.”

Mr. Jones is president of Appalachian Traditions, a nonprofit group that aims to promote the local mountain heritage. The original Country Cabin, which still stands across the street, was built in the late 1930s by the Work Projects Administration and used as a recreation center. Locals spent decades of Saturday nights there, clogging, flatfooting and two-stepping the night away. “If we had 45 people in there it was crowded, so most people would stand outside and listen to the music,” Mr. Jones said.

In 2002, Appalachian Traditions moved to its current, larger digs, where, on a good night, up to 150 people raise the roof. On this particular Saturday, Fast Train, a local group made up of fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass, soon had the joint jumping.

These mountains echo everywhere with great tunes and the sounds of dancing feet. Nearby in Hiltons, Va., members of the Carter family perform weekly at the Carter Family Fold. Bristol, a town that’s half in Virginia and half in Tennessee, calls itself the Birthplace of Country Music, and on Thursday nights there the Mountain Music Museum holds a bluegrass gathering called the Pickin’ Porch Show. Bristol is also a good place to browse through antiques shops and sample the biscuits and gravy at a classic diner, the Burger Bar.

Farther south, nestled between the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, the lovingly restored town of Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest, gives road-trippers views of 18th- and 19th-century buildings and invites them to the International Storytelling Center. Of course, countless tall tales have made their way out of the hollows of Appalachia. Today, the center casts a wide net, and performers may be from just about anywhere. After a good yarn, sample the soup beans and cornbread at the Cranberry Thistle.

The mountains were around long before the towns, and you haven’t really seen them until you’ve done some exploring on foot. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with miles of trails, is the most visited national park in the United States, with more than nine million people touring inside in 2006. Many head straight for Gatlinburg, Tenn., the famous tourist town that abuts the western edge of the park. On a summer day, visitors by the thousands jam its sidewalks and pack into its souvenir shops, antiques stores, pancake houses, barbecue joints and, believe it or not, three Ripley’s Believe It Or Not attractions. But if you look beyond the most popular spots, there is still solitude to be found in the Smokies.

In the center of the park, at the base of the Chimney Tops trail, which rises 1,700 feet over two miles, a sign goads reluctant hikers: “The View Is Worth the Climb.” Along the trail, the air is cool and damp, and dark-green thickets of rosebay rhododendron are dotted in summer with bunches of white blossoms as plump as Hostess Sno Balls. Water gushes and tumbles over rocks into large green pools.

A friendly young couple on their way down helpfully advised a first timer: “When you get to the top, follow the path to the right and use the branches to climb up the rocks. You’ll get a much better view.”

The last half of the trail is strenuous, but glimpses of the nearby ridges that peek through the trees are tantalizing motivators. And at the top, after the near vertical scramble up dark, slate-like rocks, the reward is all that could be hoped — cascades of hilly peaks, blanketed in a carpet of green.

Laura Dean, 41, visiting from Racine, La., sat on a rocky outcropping at the peak with her hiking companion Darren Hill, 48, and summed it up. “This is just phenomenal,” she said. “Really breathtaking.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

THE Museum of Appalachia (856-494-7680; www.museumofappalachia.com) is in Norris, Tenn., one mile east of Interstate 75 at exit 122. The Cumberland Gap National Historic Park (www.nps.gov/cuga; 606-248-2817) is at the point near Middlesboro, Ky., where Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky come together.

For food and lodging in Cumberland Gap, Tenn., try Webb’s Country Kitchen (602 Colwyn Avenue; 423-869-5877) and the Olde Mill Bed & Breakfast Inn (603 Pennlyn Avenue; 423-869-9839; $65- $185), in an old mill whose water wheel still turns. In Cumberland, Ky., handmade items are sold at the Poor Fork Arts & Craft Store (218 West Main Street; 606-589-2545).

The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum (606-848-1530; www.kingdomcome.org/museum) and the Coal Bin thrift store and cafe are on Main Street in Benham, Ky. The Benham School House Bed & Breakfast (100 Central Avenue; 606-848-3000; www.kingdomcome.org/inn) has rooms from $65 to $89 a night. Tours of Portal 31 (www.portal31.org), a defunct coal mine in Lynch, Ky., begin in October.

Music and dancing at the Country Cabin II (6034 Kent Junction Road, Norton, Va.; 276-679-2632; www.appalachiantraditions.net) start at 8 p.m. on Saturdays. The Country Inn & RV Park in Big Stone Gap (627 Gilley Avenue; 276-523-0374) has rooms at $45 to $61 a night.

The Mountain Music Museum (276-645-0035; www.mountainmusicmuseum.org) is in the Bristol Mall at 500 Gate City Highway in Bristol, Va. The Burger Bar (8 Piedmont Avenue; 276-466-6200) is downtown, off State Street.

In Jonesborough, Tenn., storytellers perform at 2 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday until Oct. 27 at the International Storytelling Center (116 West Main Street; 423-753-2171; www.storytellingcenter.com). The national story telling festival will be held Oct. 5 to 7.

THE sun was setting in the high desert mountains east of Los Angeles, meat was sizzling on the grill, and a throng of people milled around an outdoor kitchen, sipping red wine and laughing. The hosts of the party, Roger and Sandy Schield, circulated through the crowd, topping off glasses, shooting jokes and putting out platters of food to keep the mood light.

Some guests were sitting on plush chairs next to the rock fireplace, while others gazed at the flat-screen TV, sat at the bar or ambled over to the artificial waterfall.

It could have been a party in the backyard of any upscale home except for one thing: This was an RV park.

Gone are the days when recreational vehicle parks were rustic campgrounds with dirt roads, wooden picnic tables and a single pay phone. Now many of them, like Outdoor Resorts Rancho California, in Aguanga, in Southern California, where the Schields own a lot, resemble country clubs, with their manicured lawns, golf courses, clubhouses, swimming pools and tennis courts. Some parks are going even further and adding water slides, spas, restaurants and summer camps for children.

“Campers expect a Ritz-Carlton type of experience,” said Randall Henderson, founder of Outdoor Resorts of America and president of resort development at Monaco Coach, a recreational vehicle manufacturer based in Coburg, Ore.

Parked behind the Schields’ open-air kitchen, bar and living room is their 40-foot-long RV. Outfitted with granite countertops, satellite television and a washer and dryer, it sits on a 3,800-square-foot lot the couple bought and remodeled last year. Their “neighborhood” is lined with similar vehicles, which cost anywhere from $250,000 to $1.4 million.

“All the owners get to play golf for free,” said Mr. Schield, 70. “How many places can you do that? You can’t. When it comes down to it, it’s the peacefulness and the quiet of the area that draws us here.”

He is at the resort most of the time, while Mrs. Schield, 60, visits a few weekends a month.

WHILE there are RV parks across the country, most of the upscale ones are in places where there are a lot of second homes, like Nevada, Florida, Texas and Southern California. The Buckhorn Lake Resort in Kerrville, Tex., added covered RV storage last month and will open guest cottages with private patios in the fall. At Elk Meadow Lodge and RV Resort in Estes Park, Colo., there are outdoor chuckwagon dinners with comedy shows and dances this year.

Industry representatives say residents of high-end parks like these are changing what it means to travel in an RV. Hitting the road means taking all the amenities of home with them, like cable television and Internet access. It’s a sharp difference from the experiences of their parents, who often liked to pitch a tent and camp in the woods.

“The W.W. II generation was used to going without, and they knew how to do things, or at least they weren’t afraid of cooking over a fire,” said Linda Profaizer, president of the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds in Falls Church, Va. “Baby boomers want everything to be fed to them, and they want it to be easy.”

The lifestyle in these parks doesn’t come cheap. A parking spot, which can be a plain concrete pad or have “build outs” like an outdoor kitchen and bar, can cost $68,000 to $280,000. At Aguanga, a concrete pad generally sells for $80,000 to $120,000. A monthly fee of $330 includes daily trash pickup, water, sewer, cable TV and golfing for members. Owners can rent out their lots when they’re not there for $55 a night.

The prices haven’t made owners at Rancho California flinch. After spending $1.4 million for a custom-built motorhome last year, Susan and Hank Thomas of Carson City, Nev., thought nothing of paying $236,000 for two lots at Aguanga. With their rig’s polished stainless-steel body and roof-wrapping windows, it’s easy to see why they wanted an equally upscale parking spot.

“What makes it nice is that you’re outdoors and meeting people. You could buy a second home, and you’d never meet your neighbors,” said Mrs. Thomas, 60, in her black Dior sunglasses. “There’s nothing like it.”

Even campground operators who cater to travelers with tents and truck trailers have been upgrading their parks, many of which were built when Nixon was president. They’re widening and lengthening sites so big rigs, which top out at 60 feet with a towed car, can fit, and upgrading electrical systems to power RVs’ air-conditioners, washing machines, televisions and stoves.

Kampgrounds of America, one of the country’s oldest operators, has been going upscale, adding dog parks, jumping pillows, splash pads, swimming pools, exercise classes, patios and campfire pits to some of its 450 parks. This year, it is rolling out its own brand of coffee and cafes.“We have to be all things to all people,” said Mike Gast, KOA’s spokesman.

That is what the Schields want on their weekends. A few weekends a month, Mrs. Schield drives her Mercedes convertible 143 miles from their home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where she works as an assistant to an executive at Amgen, to visit her husband, a retired private equity manager, and their two big dogs. When she gets there, she wants to sleep in or visit with friends.“I love cooking out in the open and talking to people as they walk by,” she said.

If she wants to do something else, there are always impromptu parties at the other lots. People zoom around the park on golf carts, winding around the golf course and palm trees, waving and smiling at everyone. Invitations for cocktails and dinner come easily.

The parties and chatty people convinced Ann Marie and Steven Beck, who live in nearby Lake Elsinore, to buy a lot at Rancho California. They’ve quickly collected a lot of new friends as they drive around the park in their golf cart with their dog, Jessie J. With its purple fins and orange flames painted on the side, the cart resembles a 1957 Chevy Bel Air.

“I know more people here than I do at home,” said Ann Marie Beck, 51. “There’s always a party going on.”

Family and friends who don’t own motorhomes are also invited. The Schields’ two sons come down a few times a year and they often go on trips together in the RV. But like many visitors, they weren’t such fans at first. “We told our kids we were buying an RV, and they said, ‘Oh great, you guys are officially old,’ ” Mr. Schield said.

With lofty gasoline prices, many of the owners at Rancho California, with full-time jobs and children, are staying longer and driving less. (Motorcoaches on average get only 8 to 10 miles a gallon, according to the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association.) This means that owners are turning their RVs into more or less stationary weekend homes, and the amenities are even more important.

Bill and Carolyn Dalton, who live in Temecula, 18 miles to the west, sold their second home south of Palm Springs when they grew lonely and bought a lake-view lot at Rancho California in April for $115,000. Over the last few months, they have planted palm trees and grass and have built a thatch-covered bar that reminds them of a Mexican beach resort.

They come nearly every weekend, often with friends, and now prefer staying in their RV to being at home. Even vacations pale compared with life at their lot.

Mr. Dalton, 62, said, “We come back from vacation, cook a few steaks and ask each other, ‘Why did we leave?’ ”

THE British writer Rebecca West once called Budva, the largest and northernmost city on the Montenegrin Riviera, “a little white tortoise against the blue sea.” Not much has changed over the course of two wars, a Communist regime and almost 70 years since she wrote that: Budva is still a white-walled jewel jutting into the glass-clear Adriatic Sea, a dramatic entry point to the miles of beaches that stretch south toward the Albanian border. Along its lee side lies a small harbor stocked with fishing and pleasure boats; along its seaside runs an imposing Venetian fortress.

With its narrow stone streets and expansive sea views, Budva reminds many visitors of Dubrovnik, its tourist-choked Croatian neighbor 60 miles north. And Montenegro, having seen what a little tourism can do for an ex-Communist economy, is eager to cash in on the similarities. Though not yet a member of the European Union, it has already adopted the euro as its official currency, the better to draw wealthy Western Europeans. Hotel staff members wear neatly pressed uniforms and speak perfect English. And everywhere roads are being widened, wineries are sprouting and luxury resorts are opening for business — at a steep discount from even Croatia’s tourist fare, let alone France’s or Italy’s.

The old city of Budva teems with shops, restaurants and bars, interposed with the occasional church-fronted plaza. The town (according to legend founded by Cadmus and Harmonia, but more likely settled in the fifth century B.C. by Greek colonists) and its environs abound with ruins, primarily Roman, including thermae uncovered by a 1979 earthquake. The newer parts of the city are not much to look at beyond the beach, although in fairness it’s hard to tell for all the construction and roadwork.

To avoid the crowds, you can head southeast a mile or two to a new strip of luxury hotels rising along Becici’s beach, including the four-star Queen of Montenegro, where a little over 100 euros a night will fetch a balconied room overlooking the Adriatic. The hotel, majority-owned by an Austrian concern, is the result of a rush by international investors to cash in on the Montenegrin coast’s growing popularity. Just up the road is the Hotel Splendid, built by a Russian company; meanwhile, a Singaporean company has plans to renovate Sveti Stefan, a fishing-village-cum-hotel — once luxe, now down at the heels — on a small peninsula a few miles south of Budva.

Montenegro has seen all of this before. During the height of Communist Yugoslavia, Belgrade poured money into its coast as a way of attracting domestic and international tourists. The real draw was Sveti Stefan, which opened in the 1950s after officials converted its cottages into luxury suites and its plazas into exclusive alfresco restaurants.

Over the next several decades people like Sophia Loren, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor paid a visit, and it was rumored to be the destination of choice for Charles and Diana’s honeymoon (until press attention forced the couple to change plans). The complex essentially shut down during the Balkan wars, but its new operators have plans to reopen it in its former glory sometime in the next few years.

Becici, at least in the off-season, is still mostly a local hangout. English menus are fewer, and a little Serbo-Croatian goes a long way in negotiating dinner. Running along the beach is a promenade of restaurants and bars, and on a recent visit I watched from my sidewalk table at a beachside tavern as a small army of local high school students paraded by, duded up in tuxes and ball gowns, their destination unclear.

Budva is also a good base from which to set out on day trips down Montenegro’s coast and into its mountainous interior. The two-lane “Adriatic Highway” running south to the Albanian border isn’t the best road, especially when you’re stuck behind slow-going trucks, but the scenery is a good diversion. Wrapped alongside a steep slope rising straight up from a rocky coastline, the road is akin to the more dramatic parts of California’s Route 1, but dotted with Orthodox monasteries and roadside markets.

Like elsewhere along the Adriatic coast, nearly every stari grad (old city) is a former port. One exception is Bar, the oldest portion of which sits a few miles inland and uphill from its bustling modern seaside. Destroyed in the same earthquake that uncovered ruins in Budva, old Bar is now uninhabited and overgrown; the locals have installed historical exhibits in some of the still-standing buildings and charge a euro to enter, with proceeds going to renovation.

As I wandered, I met a Russian couple who seemed to like Bar the way it was. In a grassy courtyard overlooking the coast, Marina Lazareva was drawing sketches of the town to take back to Moscow, where she would use them in making mezzotints and watercolors. It’s the light, said Vladimir, her husband and interpreter. “We came here last year, and we want to come again next year.”

Another good day trip is Lake Skadar. Ringed by thousands of acres of marsh grass and populated by flocks of black ibises, the lake seems a thousand miles from the sandy beach, instead of just seven. The southern reaches of the lake are in Albania, but about two-thirds of the northern shoreline is Montenegrin and constitutes a national park.

Just north of Budva lies the Boka Kotorska, a T-shaped fjord between the Riviera and the Croatian border. Half a dozen somnolent towns occupy the thin strips of flat land between the calm water and the mountains that cup it, including the bay’s namesake, Kotor, whose triangular stari grad is a Unesco World Heritage Site.

I stayed overnight in Kotor, dining on branzino at Restaurant Gallery, just outside the city walls, and sleeping at Hotel Marija, one of the few options in town (and fortunately a good one). Though still relatively untouristed, Kotor comes alive at night: a string of stone plazas overflow with enormous cafes that stay packed until the early morning.

Farther up the fjord is Perast, another old port legendary for its seamen. They fought under the Venetians at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and later Peter the Great of Russia sent some of his noblemen to the town to study at its maritime academy.

Little remains of Perast’s nautical fame, though along its pier dock a few boats that, for 3 euros, will take you out to a pair of islands in the middle of the fjord, St. George and Our Lady of the Rock, the latter artificially built in the 17th century as a place for leaders of the coastal towns to meet and work out their differences — a sort of United Nations in miniature.

From Perast it is only about two hours to the Dubrovnik airport. As I drove there to catch my flight home, I decided that Montenegro was best compared to a stage immediately before a play. The set is ready, the cast waits nervously in the wings. All that’s missing is the audience.

VISITOR INFORMATION

HOW TO GET THERE

Flights from New York to Podgorica, the capital, generally involve changing planes (and airlines) in Europe, and start at about $1,800 round trip for trips in August. Austrian Airlines runs regular flights from Vienna for about $500. Montenegro Airlines also offers flights to Podgorica and Tivat, near Kotor, from Belgrade and other European cities. Shuttles are available from Podgorica and Tivat to Budva. An alternative is to fly to Dubrovnik, in Croatia, and rent a car, though there is often a surcharge for taking a car into Montenegro.

WHERE TO STAY

Montenegro still has a way to go before joining the European Union, but it has already adopted the euro as its currency.

The Queen of Montenegro (381-86-662-662; www.queenofmontenegro.com) is in Becici, outside Budva. Double rooms start between 55 euros (about $76 at $1.39 to the euro) and 110 euros a person, breakfast included, depending on the season.

Hotel Splendid (381-86-773-777; www.montenegrostars.com) is also in Becici. One of a trio of resort hotels in the area, it has double rooms starting at 97 euros to 137 euros a person, breakfast included, depending on the season.

In Kotor, I stayed at Hotel Marija (Stari Grad 449; 381-82-325-062). Doubles are 90 euros for two people, breakfast included.

WHERE TO EAT

Konoba Jadran (Slovenska Obala 10; 381-86-451-028) is a family-run local favorite, specializing in seafood.

Dolce Vita (Becicka Plaza 53; 381-67-317-544) offers quiet seaside dining a few miles south of Budva proper. Dinner with wine here, or at Konoba Jadran, will cost about 35 euros.

Masa (Gradska Luka; 381-86-453-777) in a enormous tented deck rising on a spit just east of the city walls, is a fantastic place to grab a drink (3 to 5 euros) or dessert (most are 3 euros) and watch the sun set over St. Nikola, an island just off the coast.

THE Statue of Liberty, as you'd probably guess, is a New York City landmark. It is protected by law from modernizing scalawags who might want to pound windows into the folds of her gown or build tacky balconies for patriotic sunbathing.

Same with the New York Stock Exchange (sorry, no adding busts of Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin) or the Tweed Courthouse (carving hieroglyphs into the pillars is prohibited).

But nobody needs to alert visitors to their presence. They're visible from afar, and you're hardly likely to miss them unless fog rolling in off the Atlantic becomes very, very thick.

The city's smaller landmarks, though, are harder to spot, hidden on side streets that most visitors would only wander down by chance, or camouflaged by the more ordinary (and often taller) buildings that surround them. You'd walk past many of them unless you happened to stop right across the street, then suddenly took a 90-degree turn.

But by missing them, you're giving up on the city's architectural amuse-bouches while pigging out on the grander sights. So along with your Fodor's or Frommer's or Lonely Planet guides, consider taking along the city's paperback Guide to New York City Landmarks, with maps and summaries of hundreds of such spots (along with descriptions of the superstars, too). Sure, the latest edition was published in 2004, which by regular standards would be woefully inaccurate, but this is a guidebook that, by definition, never goes out of date (although new landmarks are added every year).

Even without the book, for example, you might catch a glimpse of the colorful onion domes of the Central Synagogue, a Reform temple built on Lexington Avenue in the 1870s, following a Moorish-style synagogue-building trend that started in Germany and arrived in New York via Cincinnati. But you'd miss the two landmarked buildings that are the synagogue's neighbors on otherwise nondescript East 55th Street.

At No. 116-118, there's a neo-Georgian house from 1927 that has Flemish-bond brickwork, elegant shutters and two carved eagles guarding the entrance. And at No. 124, the Mary Hale Cunningham House, renovated with a neo-Tudor facade in 1909, has perplexing signs attached to the second-story railing that read “Eleanor's Building” and “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” Turns out those were put up there in 1983 (before the house was landmarked) as a fanciful tribute to the wife of the owner of a television production company based in the building.

The West Village is thick with landmarks, especially since a huge chunk of it is part of the Greenwich Village Historic District. The book picks out several can't-miss (but easy to miss) buildings. There is, for example, the spare but elegant Federal-style triangular building stuck in the middle of an intersection of Waverly Place and Christopher Street with the battered signs that read “Northern Dispensary, Founded 1827.”

It looks like the kind of place where Ben Franklin or Sam Adams might have hung out, but it was a clinic for the poor. The book says that it was built in two stories, but a third story was added in 1855; if it didn't, you'd never notice that the third-story bricks are just a bit different from those of the second.

Also in the Village, you might never go down East 10th Street from Fifth Avenue to check out the Lockwood de Forest House, which is now part of New York University, at No. 7. But its intricately detailed teak on the second-floor facade, brought in from Ahmadabad, India, in the late 19th century, is amazing. And you'd never end up at the far western end of cobblestoned Jane Street to check out the American Seamen's Friend Society Sailors' Home and Institute, a hotel for indigent sailors that was host to crew members who survived the sinking of the Titanic. There's another reason to visit these days; the building is home to Socialista, a new upscale Cuban lounge that has a downstairs restaurant.

If you're near Macy's or the Empire State Building, the East 30s have a nice batch of landmarks, including the town houses of the Murray Hill Historic District. But on 36th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, a block you would be strolling down only by blind luck, is hidden Sniffen Court, a quaint private alley of former horse stables built starting in 1863 and now inhabited by well-off humans.

Or the supercool wooden doors at the James F. D. and Harriet Lanier House at 123 East 35th Street, built between 1901 and 1903 in the Beaux-Arts style. Gaze at it from across the street, where your view will only be slightly corrupted by the significantly more contemporary Muni-Meter parking ticket machine. (The sidewalk is apparently not protected by the landmarks law.)

As you wander past these buildings, the question that will gnaw at you is: “Who the heck lives there?” But surprisingly often, you'll catch real people (not dressed in period attire) coming in and out of the buildings. Who are they? How did they end up in the house? Perhaps they won't appreciate your stopping them to ask about the house, but that's one way to find out.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Guide to New York City Landmarks, Third Edition (Wiley, 2004, $26.95). Maps of the historic districts (but not the individual landmarks) are available at www.nyc.gov/landmarks.

A few more worth a detour:

The former German-American Shooting Society Clubhouse, 12 St. Marks Place, between Second and Third Avenues, an 1889 German Renaissance building.

An 1858 house at 152 East 38th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, set dramatically back from the street, and 149 East 38th Street, an ornate stable building in the Dutch Renaissance Revival style.

The former William J. Syms Operating Theater of Roosevelt Hospital, 400 West 59th Street, at Columbus Avenue.

Five townhouses from 11 to 21 (odd numbers) East 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, near the Frick Collection (itself in a landmark building).

IT was lunchtime in Palermo, and in the old quarter, a small trattoria was filling up with burly construction workers and fishermen in sodden boots — all crowded around rickety tables watching a soccer match on a staticky television set. The place was noisy with clanking glasses and men talking over one another. Platters of sautéed vegetables and grilled calamari lined the countertop, and the perfume of sizzling garlic drifted through the room. I scanned the other tables and ordered what everyone else was having: spaghetti, drizzled with olive oil and laden with fresh clams, mussels and tomatoes.

But when the pasta arrived, drenched in a briny, spicy tomato broth, there was no fork and no waiter in sight. There was just the owner, known simply as Pina, shuffling in threadbare slippers, a lighted cigarette precariously perched on the edge of her mouth. “You need a fork?” Pina barked. Her gravelly voice was so intimidating that I was ready to eat with my hands. “Get it yourself. Top drawer, next to the stove.”

If eating in Palermo's rustic trattorias seems like visiting someone's home, that's because it often is. Pina, a gruff Sicilian mother, keeps a bedroom behind the kitchen and five days a week opens her canteen-sized dining room for lunch, serving some of the most authentic food in this port city.

At Zia Pina (Via Argenteria, 67), four blocks from the Tyrrhenian Sea, you won't find a sign welcoming diners, written menus, a reservation book or even a telephone. Instead, there are half a dozen tables, biblical paintings and dented pots and pans gurgling and steaming on a beat-up stove.

But you can't simply walk in. If Pina doesn't like the look of you, she'll tell you the trattoria is closed — and she'll do it as she's serving platters of stuffed mushrooms and grilled swordfish to a table of hungry fishermen. Luckily, I arrived with my Sicilian friend Emanuele, a photojournalist who has been eating at places like Zia Pina since he was a child.

The food of Palermo, like its rocky shoreline and weathered faces, is a bit rough. Vegetables are crudely chopped; fish is served with head and tail; everything comes under a veil of coarse sea salt. Pina's cooking was no exception. She was partial to pasta tossed with fresh shrimp, calamari or sea bass, as well as hearty salads of potatoes, capers and onions. If you're still hungry, you're welcome to seconds, but don't expect Pina to bring them. You can help yourself from the caldron on the stove.

At-home trattorias are not the insular tradition they used to be in Sicily. What began decades ago as lunch counters for blue-collar workers, usually started by their wives at home, are spreading to garages and empty houses — and they are becoming increasingly popular with young Sicilians and businessmen, who come for the laid-back atmosphere, low prices and arguably the best food in Sicily.

The amateur chefs are cautiously opening their doors to the public, and their menus are expanding, too, though not by much. They are still open only for lunch (about 12:30 to 2 p.m.), prices are remarkably cheap (pasta is usually under 3 euros, about $4 at $1.38 to the euro), and the recipes were handed down from the chef's grandmother. A click more relaxed than standard trattorias, these places have the air of an old-fashioned speakeasy — the proprietor might sleep in the back room, and the entrance is purposely hard to find, with unmarked doors, few signs and no advertising.

And because the places are not entirely legal, the would-be restaurateurs don't have to worry about things like workplace insurance, smoking laws, liquor licenses or even taxes. “Most of these places pay protection money to the Mafia,” Emanuele said. “They just want to serve good food to their regulars and keep their heads down.”

Well, that and watch soccer. A few days later, Emanuele and I walked into La Rosa Nero, or the Pink Black — a small, free-standing concrete hut in the middle of the quiet, dusty Piazzetta della Api. On a Saturday afternoon last January, the scene inside was another story. Two small rooms, painted pink and black, were crammed with flimsy plastic tables and crowded with groups of men hunched over bowls of steaming pasta, plates of fried calamari and small cups of red wine. Their eyes were fixed on the television — Palermo versus Lazio, and Palermo was losing. Shouts and jeers filled the small trattoria. There wasn't an empty seat in the house.

Rosa Nero is run by a young man named Benedetto. He wouldn't reveal his last name because his trattoria is not licensed and he preferred not to call attention to himself. Benedetto explained that this used to be his mother's house. Friends would come over to watch soccer, and his mother would whip up bowls of spaghetti with sardines. Before he knew it, the dining room had grown into a neighborhood soccer club and, as more friends came, a trattoria was born.

Emanuele and I sat down next to a group of teenagers and ordered the house special: angiova, or pasta with sardines. It arrived like an untossed salad — whole sardines (heads on), chunks of tomato and a splatter of pine nuts and sweet raisins, all piled atop a small mountain of pasta. I grabbed the fork and spoon, and mixed it up until it turned into a hearty sauce — sweet, salty and a little nutty.

Full and happy, we got up to leave and I started to leave a tip. “This isn't done,” said Emanuele. “These places don't pay taxes; all the money goes in their pockets.” Do they ever get in trouble with the law? “See those two men in the corner?” he pointed. “They're police, and they like the food as much as the rest of us.”

On my last afternoon in Palermo, Emanuele and I walked down to the waterfront, to an area known as Piazza Kalsa. Our destination was Padre Aldo (again, no address, no phone). The trattoria could easily be mistaken for someone's home — a tidy house on a residential block with a little garden on one side and a paved driveway on the other. “I was born next door,” said Aldo Balestreri, a lively 77-year-old with a stubbly white beard. “My specialty is grilled fish.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And Camilla Parker Bowles ate here once.”

Mr. Balestreri added that this used to be a taverna — a hall where men drank grappa until sunrise. Then, one summer about 40 years ago, he rolled a barbecue grill onto the driveway and started cooking meat. Next thing he knew, he had a trattoria.

Despite the chilly weather, most patrons were sitting at plastic tables on the driveway, now a patio. We sat down and listened to the menu. Moments later, an antipasto of olives, sardines, tomatoes and capers, drizzled in olive oil and coarse grains of salt, arrived on a worn block of wood. For pasta, we had spaghetti with baby shrimp, mussels, rough-cut garlic and spicy red pepper flakes. We washed it down with chilled red wine and watched the lunch crowd ramble in — young suntanned couples, gray-haired men with callused hands, and teenage boys with greasy hair and baggy jeans.

Then Padre Aldo re-emerged, holding two swordfish steaks. He slapped them on the grill and started calling out the day's menu over the hiss of the barbecue. A few moments later, he brought us two plates of spada alla palermitana, or swordfish Palermo-style — lightly breaded with a few drops of olive oil and a fat lemon wedge.

The three courses and a bottle of wine came out to 20 euros. As we walked away, Aldo called out from the searing iron grill: “You never asked why they call me Padre Aldo. It's because they think I'm Jesus — my food is that good.”

I AM in a deep, deep tunnel, die-straight and dark and two miles long, a fingernail of faraway brilliance at its mouth brightening every second until, with startling suddenness, it is daylight. Ahead of the car are scores upon scores upon scores of mighty towers, climbing endlessly into the foggy sky, like some surreal and unexpected ruined city. It is a sight utterly to astonish the unprepared, akin only perhaps to the moment when a Midwestern soybean farmer is flushed out of the Lincoln Tunnel into the canyons of Midtown Manhattan.

But this is not New York. This is central China, and a remote part of the mountains of northwestern Hunan province, until lately seldom visited and indeed until 50 years ago barely even settled. The tunnel is brand new, built last year for the equivalent of $200 million, and the towers to which it leads are not skyscrapers — well, they are, though not made of steel and glass, but natural, of a buff Cretaceous sandstone, and topped with clinging pine trees. There are well over 3,000 spires, and they make up what the United Nations 15 years ago declared to be one of the most remarkable geomorphological spectacles existing on our planet.

The Wulingyuan National Park is magnificent enough — for its topography, for its rare plants and trees and for its stupendous (though panda-free) fauna — that it has been officially designated by Unesco as demanding protection for the benefit of all mankind. Once word of this designation became known, though, all mankind decided it wanted a look-see — and armies of tourists began to descend on the wilderness of northwestern Hunan, trampling the trails, muddying the ground and causing deep anxiety among those charged with managing the region’s treasures.

So far, only a smattering are Westerners. But the Chinese themselves, who with their newfound freedoms and prosperity (and cars and superhighways and cellphone towers) are fast discovering their country as never before, have all of a sudden, and in their millions, discovered Wulingyuan.

The manner in which that discovery is manifesting itself speaks volumes about the way the world can and should be dealing with its most precious places.

The deliciously intricate geology of China — basically an immense tectonic plate endlessly tormented by titanic collisions with the neighboring plates that bear India and Australia — is of course responsible for both the fabulous complexities and the extreme isolation of Wulingyuan. Sixty million years ago there were tropical seas there; sometimes they were deep, leaving soft and fossil-rich limestones, sometimes shallow, leaving hard beach-sandstone. Then the land rose under tectonic pressure, and the weathering of the limestones and sandstones proceeded in that peculiar way that is called, after a geologically similar area in Slovenia, karst. The limestones dissolved over millions of years into fissures and sinkholes and immense caves, the sandstones cracked into knife-edged pillars, some of them like needle-shaped mesas, fully 1,000 feet high.

Tourists come to this increasingly accessible corner of China to see both — although most I spoke to said they had come for the landscape of towers, which looks uncannily like the ink-and-paper drawings that for centuries have presented a defining aspect of classical Chinese art. Yet there is a difference: the art is fanciful, the imagined landscapes of the creative mind; the geology of Wulingyuan has produced more than 100 square miles of landscape that is very much the real thing, however fantastic it might at first appear.

As I drove there from the immense and grubby city of Chongqing, a hard day’s journey, I confess to having fairly low expectations. The weather was unpropitious, to say the least: it was raining hard, and a stiff westerly gale was blowing the stain of city pollution almost to the fringes of the park. I had been to countless other Chinese tourist sites before and had winced at how often the authorities seemed to render their charges into Asian versions of Gatlinburg or Blackpool or, at best, Disneyland.

But at that first sight of those soaring towers at the tunnel mouth, everything changed. (As did the weather: as if by an edict of the gods the wind eased, the rain softened until it had become no more than mist, and the summits of the pillars became wrapped in fronds of cloud as delicate as skeins of silk.)

The scenery in Wulingyuan turns out to be so immense and impressive, and yet so geologically frangible, that it seems positively to demand to be cared for. Like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, the huge forests of pillars stand foursquare against the distant blue hills, announcing themselves to be the very treasures that Unesco declares them to be. At every twist and turn of the road there is a view to make one gasp.

In terms of astonishment I found myself saying time and again, as I gaped from cliff-edge and bridge and viewing tower: This is as great as the Great Wall. And all the while I had to remind myself that Wulingyuan had been made by nature for China, and though it looks in places almost too perfect and carefully hewn to be true, not made, like the wall, by politically motivated man.

Yet politics has contributed significantly to turning Wulingyuan into an important way-station for the modern Chinese visitor. A senior Communist soldier named He Long — who was from the minority Tujia ethnic group and so was particularly venerated for his loyalty to the Maoist cause — happened to come from this region of Hunan. During the Civil War of the 1930s he took refuge in the canyons and remote river valleys, venturing out from time to time to wreak havoc on any nearby Republican forces.

When the war was over and the People’s Republic was declared in 1949, Marshal He became a national hero, and the theaters of his battlings entered the geography of the national epic, along with the route of Mao Zedong’s Long March and the details of the capture of Beijing. So a trickle of visitors started in the mid-1950s, all ardent pioneers taking part in a patriotic pilgrimage. A gigantic bronze statue of Marshal He was erected, looking suitably heroic on a cliff edge, a quiverful of 600-foot sandstone spears bristling up from the depths behind him. To touch the hem of the marshal’s cloak in Wulingyuan is, for many, the realization of an immense ideological ideal.

But now it is mostly about tourism, and pleasure. In the late 20th century, a rapidly changing China realized that it had in Hunan a scenic amazement on its hands. It already had the Great Wall and Guilin and the terra-cotta warriors of Xian. Now, within easy reach of Shanghai and Guangzhou and not too far from Beijing, it had a gem of a place, hitherto unknown, unseen, scenically unforgettable, culturally impeccable and politically just the ticket. The central government declared it the country’s first National Forest Park in 1982; Unesco awarded it World Heritage Site status in 1992, and then, in 2004, declared it one of the world’s GeoParks, a classical and world-class demonstration of remarkable geology. Whereupon the floodgates opened, and all China began to pour in.

A brand-new domestic airport has just opened in Zhangjiajie City, 20 miles away; a new road will connect the park to Chongqing, which has a municipal population exceeding 30 million and lies just 300 miles to the west and will soon not take a long hard day to drive, as it had taken me; a four-lane superhighway has just been opened to the huge city of Changsha, three hours off; four flights daily connect to Hong Kong. There are even more flights connecting to Seoul, and Wulingyuan is being heavily advertised on South Korean television.

I had my fears. I have been on the Great Wall on a stifling summer’s day; I have seen Kyoto’s Philosopher’s Walk in mid sakura season, and I have known Venice during the Biennale — and so I have seen the third circle of tourism hell, and I fret over its potential for spreading. But now that I have been there, I have little hesitation in applauding the Chinese for managing this most extraordinary of sights — using a mixture of ruthless discipline and tender care. Wulingyuan, it seems to me, works. This truly world-class spectacle is remaining, if barely, uncrowded and unruined by the immense battalions who now quite understandably wish to see it.

High technology and high cost control the crowds. A truly bewildering array of entry charges — all of them displayed on a board at the park entrance that has to be fully 20 feet long to accommodate their various permutations — comes down to one reality: it costs a bald 248 yuan to get in. That is about $32, a little more than an average week’s wages in China.

Once inside there are more charges: to ride a bus or the aerial cableway (Austrian-built, installed last year, and breathtaking as it swings between and above the sandstone pillars); to take a three-car glass-walled elevator bolted up the side of one of the tallest pillars; to visit the caves (which are privately owned by one of Deng Xiaoping’s grandsons); to circle an artificial lake owned by a Hong Kong investment firm. There is some rather tame whitewater rafting, too, 130 additional yuan for an experience not much more exciting than tubing on the middle reaches of the Susquehanna.

All things considered, a Chinese family visiting Wulingyuan can easily spend two months’ pay in a single day. A foreign family will perhaps feel less pain, but because of the high prices all feel a sense of privilege once inside — which is a feeling, I am fast coming to think, that responsible 21st-century tourism should perhaps engender.

Moreover, the gatekeepers know exactly how many are inside the park at any one time, and they have the power to shut would-be visitors out, which might seem harsh, but to those trapped in a heaving summer scrum on Piazza San Marco or inside the Forbidden City, it is the kind of decision that would probably seem a sensible relief.

The disadvantage is that the park’s cost-free walkways — most notably that along a three-mile canyon close to the lower entrance — can be unbearably crowded, with long lines of strollers (and the unfit and the elderly in bamboo sedan chairs) creating an ugly and noisy congestion. As elsewhere in Wulingyuan, there are monkeys aplenty for such mobs to see and feed (illegally); but if there really are cloud leopards and pangolins and all the other animals and birds for which this reserve is said to be famous, the commotion along the Golden Whip River Canyon has clearly sent them all scurrying off into the forest.

As most Western visitors would dearly like to do, I suspect. The park regulations do not seem to allow overnight camping; but they do permit wandering on half-defined trails, and I imagine that most outsiders who get to the park would have little interest in paying obeisance to Marshal He, but would relish the chance, especially if the weather is good (and springtime, when the cherry and plum trees are in full blossom, is splendidly cool and misty) to walk, and commune with that rarest of treasures — Chinese nature.

And there is one superb benefit for doing so, I discovered as I trekked up the 3,000 stone steps to a temple site on top of one of the mountains. According to signs posted every half mile or so, there is No Smoking, anywhere inside the park. I didn’t see a single soul lighting up — and in China that is quite remarkable.

The consequence is that in Wulingyuan, not only are the peaks tall and the waters clear, the birds in full song and the flowers in bloom, but the atmosphere is — as almost nowhere else in China — well nigh perfectly clear. And that is perhaps the very best reason to go. Here you can breathe fresh air, something that in today’s China is the most precious of finds, and a very great delight.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Wulingyuan National Park, about 860 miles southwest of Beijing, covers more than 100 square miles in Hunan Province and encompasses four major scenic areas: Zhangjiajie Forest Park, Yangjiajie Scenic Spot, and Tianzishan and Suoxiyu Natural Resources Reserves. A tour of several attractions takes about three days.

A general-entry ticket, good for two days, costs 248 yuan ($31.90 at 7.77 yuan to the dollar) at the park gates. Separate tickets are required for cable cars, lifts and access to some areas. Within Suoxiyu Reserve, for example, prices include 130 yuan for rafting on the Maoyan River, 65 yuan to visit Longwang Cave (Dragon King Cave) and 62 yuan for Baofeng Lake.

The most convenient airport, Lotus Airport (Hehua Airport) in Zhangjiajie City, about 23 miles from the park entrance, is served by daily flights to and from several major Chinese cities. The two-hour flight from Beijing on Air China or Hainan Airline costs 1,470 yuan , with discounts available during the off-season. Flights from Hong Kong on China Southern Airlines arrive twice a week. A taxi from the airport to the national park costs 80 to 100 yuan , with most drivers open to negotiation.

There is no direct bus to the park, but buses run from the airport to the bus station in downtown Zhangjiajie City, and from there to the park every 10 minutes from 5 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Traffic at the park gate is usually light, with long lines expected only during peak holiday periods, such as October and the first week of May. Shuttle buses within the park connect major sites.

Hotels within walking distance of the park gates include Hunan Xiangdian International Hotel (86-744-5712999), with mountain-view rooms starting at 480 yuan ; Hunan Pipaxi Hotel (86-744-5718888), in the courtyard style of the local Tujia people, with rooms from 440 yuan ; and Best Western Premier Zhangjiajie (86-744-5669888), the best-appointed of area hotels, with rooms from 800 yuan. To get the lowest rates, book through a travel agent.

Most visitors have breakfast and dinner at their hotels and eat lunch inside the park, where restaurants are easy to find at popular tourist sites but rare in less visited areas. The most popular fast-food places in the park are Tianzi Fastfood, with three locations, (86) 744-5618588, (86) 744-5617888 and (86) 744-5617777, and Tianqiao Fastfood, (86) 744-5719226. These offer buffets as well as regular meals, including such local delicacies as wild fungus, pine mushroom, sweet corn on the cob, kiwi, partridge and wild boar. Locally run restaurants are also found in the park.

In Zhingjianjie, try Xiang Li Ren Jia (Second Floor, Tianmen Clothing Mall, Huilong Road, Zhangjiajie City, 86-744-8297977), featuring local sour and spicy Hunan-style dishes. By LIN YANG

SNOOTY travelers could be forgiven for overlooking Brussels, a European capital whose iconic monument is a 17th-century bronze statue of a little boy urinating into a fountain. But travelers who ignore Brussels, home of the European Union, twice-fried French fries and the Surrealist painter René Magritte, do so at their peril. For one thing, there is the food — a veritable galaxy of Michelin stars. Then there is the beer: more than 600 varieties, including ales brewed by monks. Add to that a thriving design scene, and the city — once dismissed as a provincial and humorless wasteland — is finally making cultural waves. Just join the crowds in front of the Manneken-Pis, the pixyish statue, and you'll get the idea. Locals delight in dressing up the young boy as Elvis or, sometimes, in a giant condom.

Friday

5 p.m.
1) BEERS ON THE GRAND' PLACE

For centuries, tourists have reportedly fainted when confronted with the sheer beauty of Florence. This won't happen in Brussels. The city does not have the Uffizi Gallery or Michelangelo's “David.” But it does have the Grand' Place, a truly marvelous square in the city's center. Brave the hordes of tourists (and the kitschy lace shops and overpriced seafood joints nearby) to drink a Trappist beer at Le Roy d'Espagne (Grand' Place 1; 32-2-513-0807, www.roydespagne.be), an atmospheric bar in one of the Grand' Place's grandest guild houses. Expect pigs' bladders hanging from the ceiling and harried waiters in long white aprons that match their long faces. Grab a seat on the outdoor terrace so you can gawk at the Baroque square.

8 p.m.
2) RABBIT STEW

Brussels is a foodies' paradise, and you'll struggle to eat a bad meal. A standout among the hundreds of traditional Belgian brasseries is Les Brassins (36, rue Keyenveld; 32-2-512 6999; www.lesbrassins.com), a lively place that serves 50 different brews and Belgian classics like lapin à la Kriek (rabbit stewed in flavored beer) and stoemp (a winter stew with potatoes, carrots, onion sauce and sausages) for under 15 euros ($20, at $1.35 to the euro). The restaurant is at the end of a hard-to-find back street in Ixelles, a neighborhood popular with expatriates. After your meal, wander up the street and find the plaque marking the birthplace of Audrey Hepburn.

Midnight
3) JAZZY BARS

In a city full of alluring bars, the granddaddy of cool may be the L'Archiduc (6, rue Antoine Dansaert; 32-2-512-0652; www.archiduc.net), in the downtown area near the stock exchange. Ring the doorbell, go through a steel bubble swinging door and marvel at the Art Deco room, furnished with high ceilings and an undulating bar. Nazis were rumored to have frequented the bar during the German occupation; today, the clientele consists mainly of goateed beatniks and media types. L'Archiduc is particularly popular with jazz fans — Miles Davis once jammed there — and impromptu jam sessions often take place on weekends. A warning: the service can be nonchalant, verging on nonexistent.

SATURDAY

10 a.m.
4) BREAK FOR NOUVEAU

If the institutional modernism of the European Union's sprawling offices leaves you cold, escape can be found in the city's Art Nouveau, the flowery architectural style popular at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the genre's finest practitioners, and a father of Belgian Art Nouveau, was Victor Horta. Visit his home and studio, which have been turned into the Musée Horta (25, rue Américaine, St.-Gilles; 32-2-543-0490; www.hortamuseum.be; hours are 2 to 5:30 p.m., but earlier tours can be arranged by e-mail at least a week in advance). The exterior is typically Belgian: understated. The interior hides lots of astonishing details, including a grand stairwell made of marble and wrought iron that undulates into the expressive shapes of an abstract painting. Natural light pours down from a stained-glass canopy onto the floral mirrors, Tiffany lamps, mosaic floors and carved banister. The effect is dreamlike — until the hordes of tourists bring you back to earth.

Noon
5) MOULES FRITES, ANYONE?

For lunch (from July 17, when it reopens), head to the 80-year-old Aux Armes de Bruxelles (13, rue des Bouchers; 32-2-511-5550; www.armebrux.be), near the Grand' Place, which has some of the freshest buckets of mussels, complete with French fries and mayonnaise. Real Bruxellois eat the first mussel with their fingers, and use the empty shell as a utensil for scooping up the rest. Don't forget to mop up the mussel soup with a hunk of crusty bread. If you want a spot away from the tourists, moules frites aficionados swear by Au Vieux Bruxelles (35, rue St.-Boniface; 32-2-503-3111; www.auvieuxbruxelles.com) in the heart of a lively Congolese neighborhood, which serves delectable mussels made with beer, curry and blue cheese, for about 20 euros.

2 p.m.
6) SHOPPING À LA BELGE

Bargain hunters throughout Europe flock to the Place du Jeu de Balle for a flea market in Brussels' oldest quarter, the working-class but quickly gentrifying Marolles. The market has everything from African masks and retro cinema chairs to fake reproductions of old Belgian masters like Bruegel. The surrounding streets — Rue Blaes and Rue Haute — are peppered with a quirky mix of antique furniture shops, galleries and cafes. For more froufrou surroundings, walk five minutes north to the Sablon, an upscale district frequented by bourgeois grannies whose outfits match their French poodles. The district's jewel is the Place du Petit Sablon, a small and picturesque park framed by an imposing Gothic church, with railings by the Art Nouveau master Paul Hankar, as well as statues of famous Belgians you've never heard of.

6 p.m.
7) SWEET BREAK

Get a chocolate boost at Pierre Marcolini (1, rue des Minimes; 32-2-514-1206; www.marcolini.be), one of the best places to buy chocolate in a city that takes the cocoa bean very seriously. An assortment of 33 chocolates, including truffles and dark chocolate, costs 16.50 euros.

9 p.m.
8) ROYAL CUISINE

Some restaurants in Brussels leave you feeling giddy, if not a bit ecstatic. Museum Brasserie (3, place Royale; 32-2-508-3590; www.museumfood.be), a new place from the Flemish chef Peter Goossens, is among them. (His other restaurant, Hof van Cleve, has three Michelin stars.) Set in a Victor Horta building that's part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, the minimalist interior is dominated by immense black chandeliers and attracts Flemish hipsters and matrons alike. The kitchen specializes in updated Belgian classics like eel in green sauce, veal kidneys with Ghent mustard and spit-roasted cockerel — all accompanied by perfect frites (Mr. Goossens started his culinary career peddling fries). The wine cellar, encased in sleek glass, offers a nice mix of French and New World varieties, including a delightful Flemish chardonnay with hints of seaweed. For dessert, order the waffles from Liège, a town in Belgium, which manage to be baroque without being too sweet. Dinner for two, not including wine, runs about 70 euros.

Midnight
9) BOHEMIAN BROTHEL

For good times, stumble over to Goupil le Fol (22, rue de la Violette; 32-2-511-1396), an eccentric, three-story bar housed in a former brothel that looks like a cross between an opium den and a 1970s porno set. The walls are covered with old paintings of nudes and lurid landscapes, as well as vinyl LPs. Sink into one of the couches, order one of the owner's favorite fruit wines and party into the wee hours, with an Edith Piaf song blaring from a nearby jukebox. Those with less bohemian instincts should stay downstairs, as the clientele gets more and more risqué the higher you climb.

Sunday

11 a.m.
10) A FAMILIAR BRUNCH SPOT

You can find this bakery chain in Manhattan or Paris, but the original Le Pain Quotidien is in Brussels and remains one of the better brunch spots in a town that's not great at doing brunch. The flagship bakery is on the Grand Sablon (11, rue des Sablons; 32-2-513-5154; www.lepainquotidien.com) with large pine tables crammed with jams, chocolates and bread. The wait can be irksome, but the farmers' bread is hot from the oven, coffee is served in large bowls and the cheese tartines are always fresh. Plus, on those rare Brussels days when the sun is out, the retractable roof lets in a slice of heaven. Breakfast for two, about 40 euros.

1 p.m.
11) PICNIC AT A CHATEAU

For pastoral escape, stroll the grounds of the Château de la Hulpe (111, chaussée de Bruxelles; 32-2-653-6404; www.chateaudelahulpe.wallonie.be), an enchanting French-style castle built in 1842 that overlooks 561 acres of woods and ponds on the border of Brussels' Forêt de Soignes. The castle is not generally open to the public, but the grounds — adorned with rhododendrons and azaleas — are more than worth the 25-minute train ride. And the farmhouse of the main castle houses the Fondation Folon (6A, drève de la Ramée, La Hulpe; 322-653-3456; www.fondationfolon.be), which shows the work of the prolific Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon.

VISITOR INFORMATION

SN Brussels Airlines and American Airlines have daily flights from Kennedy Airport in New York to Brussels Airport, while Continental Airlines flies from Newark. A recent Web search for early August showed round-trip fares starting at $1,037.

The best way to get into central Brussels is on the 30-minute Brussels Airport Express to Central Station. It runs every 15 minutes and costs 3 euros, or $4.05 at $1.35 to the euro.

Brussels hotels are expensive, thanks to the constant influx of Armani-clad diplomats. One bargain — starting at 95 euros for a double — is the Baroque Hotel Mozart (23, rue du Marché aux Fromages; 32-2-502-6661; www.hotel-mozart.be), which has 50 comfortable, compact rooms.

If you packed Armani, try the Jolly Hotel du Grand Sablon (2/4 rue Bodenbroek, 800-221-2626, www.jollyhotels.com/eng), a luxurious hotel on a chic square within walking distance of the Royal Palace, the Grand' Place and the main museums. Summer specials start at 99 euros.

CERTAIN things about Savannah never change — it remains one of America's loveliest cities, organized around a grid of 21 squares, where children play, couples wed and, in the evenings, lone saxophonists deliver a jazz soundtrack. But that doesn't mean Savannah has nothing new to offer. Perhaps most notable is a budding art scene that includes the high — a major expansion of the Telfair Museum — and the low — a scene energized by students and instructors at the booming Savannah College of Art and Design. Civic boosters are even trying to reposition the region as the “Creative Coast.” And then there is change of another kind: restoration. Before iron-clad protection of the historic district was established, Savannah lost 3 of its 24 squares to developers. Now one of the oldest, Ellis Square, long dominated by a parking lot, is being restored to its antebellum glory.

Friday

3 p.m.
1) GOOD AND EVIL

You're in the heart of the gracious South, so embrace every cliché from the frilly to the Gothic, with some eccentric characters for good measure. Begin with a tour of the splendid Mercer Williams House on Monterey Square ($12.50 tickets at the Carriage House Shop, 430 Whitaker Street, 912-236-6352; www.mercerhouse.com). It was built in the 1860s for the great-grandfather of the songwriter Johnny Mercer and restored by Jim Williams, the antiques dealer memorialized in a now-classic book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” The stern guide won't dwell on the three murder trials of Mr. Williams, who was acquitted, and guests aren't allowed on the second floor, where Mr. Williams's sister, Dorothy Kingery, still lives. But the guide will offer plenty of detail about the formal courtyard, the nap-ready veranda, the Continental rococo and the Edwardian Murano glass.

7 p.m.
2) SHRIMP WITH COFFEE

Dress up a bit (no flip-flops) for the froufrou milieu of Elizabeth on 37th (105 East 37th Street, 912-236-5547; www.elizabethon37th.net), a Lowcountry restaurant housed in an early 20th-century mansion where the décor may be prissy but the food is anything but. The revered Elizabeth Terry is no longer the chef, but critics still run out of superlatives trying to describe the seafood-rich menu and what is arguably Savannah's quintessential dining experience. You won't go wrong with the shrimp and grits with red-eye gravy, traditionally made from leftover coffee ($13.95), Bluffton oysters served three ways, including raw with tomato-cilantro ice ($14.95), or snapper with a chewy crust of shredded potato and asiago cheese ($30.95). You'll soon forget about the flowery wallpaper, the cramped bathroom and even the nervous couples nearby, trying to impress their in-laws.

9 p.m.
3) CREEPY COCKTAILS

The city of Savannah began peacefully enough, with a friendship between Tomochichi, the chief of the Yamacraw tribe, and Gen. James Oglethorpe, leader of the British settlers who founded the city in 1733. But then came war, yellow fever, hurricanes and fires, not to mention pirates and curses — making the city seem, at least to the builders digging around, like one big graveyard. Savannah has turned that sordid history to its advantage: about 30 ghost tours are offered in the city, including a haunted pub crawl. Only one, though, picks you up at your hotel in an open-top hearse, Hearse Tours (912-695-1578; www.hearseghosttours.com, $15; pickups are made at the Doubletree and other hotels). In addition to recounting some of Savannah's most notorious murders, suicides and deathbed tales, your joke-telling guide might share personal paranormal theories, make everyone scream in unison to spook passersby or stop for cocktails at favorite haunts. (It's legal to take your julep for a stroll.)

Saturday

Noon
4) ART, BATS AND BREAD

Hard to believe, but there is more to Savannah than the historic district, like the up-and-coming area called Starland, now filled with galleries and studios. Start at desot O row Gallery (2427 De Soto Avenue, 912-220-0939; www.desotorow.com), a gallery run by current and recent art students, where a recent exhibition featured painted big-box radios and a mirrored mannequin by the local artist Ryan V. Brennan. Next, make your way up to Maldoror's (2418 De Soto Avenue, 912-443-5355; www.maldorors.com), a frame shop with the aura of a Victorian curio cabinet and a print collection to match. Rounding the corner, you'll come to Back in the Day (2403 Bull Street, 912-495-9292; www.backinthedaybakery.com), an old-fashioned bakery that inspires fervent loyalty among locals. Pick up one of the sandwiches, like the Madras curry chicken on ciabatta ($6.95), and maybe a cupcake ($2 to $3.50) for lunch.

2:30 p.m.
5) PICNIC WITH THE DEAD

Few cemeteries are more stately and picnic-perfect than Bonaventure Cemetery (330 Bonaventure Road), with its 250-year-old live oaks draped with Spanish moss as if perpetually decorated for Halloween. The cemetery, where Conrad Aiken, Johnny Mercer and other notable residents are buried, looks out over the intracoastal waterway, and is a gathering spot for anglers as well as mourners.

4 p.m.
6) OLD STREETS, NEW MUSEUM

The battle took years and matched two unlikely adversaries: the Telfair Museum of Art, the oldest art museum in the South, which wanted to expand, and the powerful Savannah Historic District Board of Review. The result, after intense haggling, was a light-filled building that is as trim as a yacht and has won accolades for its architect, Moshe Safdie. The year-old addition, the Jepson Center for the Arts (207 West York Street; www.telfair.org), preserved Savannah's cherished street grid by dividing the structure into two, and joining it with two glass bridges, while giving the museum much-needed space. The original 19th-century museum (121 Barnard Street) is home to the Bird Girl, the now-famous statue that adorns the cover of “Midnight in the Garden”; it was relocated, like a federal witness, from Bonaventure Cemetery for her protection. The museum also operates tours of the nearly 200-year-old Owens-Thomas House (124 Abercorn Street). Admission to all three is $15.

5:30 p.m.
7) SCHOOL FAIR

Shopping in Savannah is increasingly sophisticated, with the latest addition an imposing Marc by Marc Jacobs store on the rapidly gentrifying Broughton Street. But the most interesting retail is at shopSCAD, a boutique that sells the creations of the students, faculty, alumni and staff of the Savannah College of Art and Design (340 Bull Street, 912-525-5180; www.shopscadonline.com). There is fine art — like Stephanie Howard's pen-and-ink drawings, with tiny obsessive patterns reminiscent of quilts ($400 to $2,100) — as well as decorative and wearable items, including hand-dyed ties by Jen Swearington ($48) and a pendant lamp by Christopher Moulder ($1,150).

7:30 p.m.
8) CRAB HEAVEN

Forget about crab cakes, stuffed soft shells or crabmeat au gratin. Crab is most rewarding when it is pure and unadulterated, served in a pile on newspaper with a can of beer and a blunt instrument for whacking at the shell. That, plus some boiled potatoes and corn, is what you will find at Desposito's (1 Macceo Drive, 912-897-9963), an unadorned shack in Thunderbolt, a onetime fishing village on the outskirts of town. Dinner for two, plus $2 Budweisers, is about $40. This is not dining; this is working, but the sweet morsels are better than any payday.

9:30 p.m.
9) DRINKING IN THE SCENE

Many of Savannah's finest bars close early — often when the owners feel like it — so don't wait to start on your drink-by-drink tour. Begin at the American Legion Post 135, south of Forsyth Park (1108 Bull Street, 912-233-9277; www.americanlegionpost135.com), a surprisingly shimmery, mirrored space where the clientele is a mix of age and vocation, and where the British bartender might hold forth on Savannah's Anglophile side. Proceed to the Crystal Beer Parlor (301 West Jones Street, 912-443-9200, www.crystalbeerparlor.net). On the outside, it's as anonymous as a speakeasy, which it was, but inside, its high-backed booths and Tiffany lamps are more ice cream than booze. A full menu is available. Wind up at Planters Tavern (23 Abercorn Street, 912-232-4286), a noisy, low-ceilinged bar in the basement of the high-dollar Olde Pink House, a dignified restaurant in a 1771 house. With a fireplace on either end of the room, live music and boisterous locals, it's the place to be. A warning: they don't do juleps.

Sunday

11 a.m.
10) CHURCH'S CHICKEN

Church and food go together in the South, and they do so especially well at the Masada Café (2301 West Bay Street, 912-236-9499), a buffet annex to the United House of Prayer for All People. The church has several locations in Savannah; this one is a mission of sorts, catering to the poor, but the inexpensive, revolving buffet of soul food classics like fried chicken and macaroni and cheese has gained a following among food critics and locals. Get there at 11 a.m. for the Sunday service, where the music and rhythmic handclapping surely shares some DNA with the “ring shouts” of the Gullah-Geechee people, descendants of slaves who once lived on the nearby barrier islands.

The Basics

Drive five hours from Atlanta, or fly in to the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, which is served by major airlines. Airport shuttles to the city center are under $20 (www.lowcountryadventures.com). The historic district, where most restaurants and hotels are situated, is easily traversed by foot. A cab or a car may be necessary for other destinations.

Hotels are pricey, especially during the high season. For budget accommodations, the Thunderbird Inn (611 West Oglethorpe Avenue, 912-232-2661; www.thethunderbirdinn.com), a no-frills motel recently refurbished with a vintage flair (no fitness room, but no flame-retardant bedding either), is the way to go, if you can get a reservation. Rooms start at $109.

Savannah has an endless selection of bed-and-breakfasts, including several that are said to be haunted, that range between $200 and $300 a night. The Association of Historic Inns of Savannah has listings at www.historicinnsofsavannah.com.

For a splurge, check into the Mansion on Forsyth Park (700 Drayton Street, 912-238-5158; www.mansiononforsythpark.com). The exterior of the 1888 home was so faithfully restored as to be almost imperceptible. The interior, however, is another story — the décor equivalent of purple prose, with garish paintings, an antique hat collection and elevators decked out with fresh flowers. Rooms start at $229.