Travelers' Intercom

To celebrate our 60th Anniversary, my wife, June, and I decided to “live it up” by taking a cruise on the 6-star Silversea ship Silver Shadow, Oct. 7-19, ’04. We left from Puerto Caldera, Costa Rica, and sailed to Ecuador and Peru and back.

Our plans called for us to fly on United Airlines from Boston to San José, Costa Rica, with a change in Washington. All went well until our arrival in San José, where we discovered that our two pieces of luggage did not arrive with us.

Despite repeated phone calls and trips to the San José Airport, there was no sign of our luggage. We had...

My husband, Ward Hoffman, and I have been to Paris more than 20 times and, we confess, we go there these days primarily to eat and take walks, often covering eight or nine miles a day. Before we leave, we do a lot of research on where we want to eat. Once we arrive in Paris, one of our activities is to walk by the restaurants and “put our noses to the window” to check them out.

Following a week’s vacation in Paris in March ’05, we put together some notes on favorite restaurants, which we pass along in the hope that other readers might enjoy some of our “finds.” Most of these...

I spent two weeks in Shenzhen, China, in July ’06 during my husband’s 10-week stay on business. This is a huge city with nothing to brag about. There is a 5-story “copy” mall for those interested in purchasing fakes. I’m not a shopper.

We stayed in the Sheraton Four Points, which had outstanding service. At my request, I received two private cooking lessons with the executive chef as well as the specialty chefs. For each lesson of 1½ hours, the cost was RMB400 (about $50) plus the cost of ingredients — a real bargain. I even wore a chef hat and apron!

I worked out in...