Try it on for size, I'm instructed by the affable vendor at the Fort Street Craft Market near Montego Bay's Hip Strip. With a vibe more like a gracious granny than a savvy entrepreneur, her pitch continues. ''Green is your color,'' she says, holding up a batik shirt she notices matches my eyes.
BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS
hed: kicker+6,42,1 The rich are different from you and me. They don't have chickens. This became apparent some weeks ago at Rosewood Little Dix Bay, an ultra-luxe resort on the island of Virgin Gorda. It's one of those places that leaves no blade of grass untrimmed, no stretch of sand unraked in its efforts to provide the best of Caribbean beach life to its discriminating clientele.
MASSACHUSETTS
When I asked our 13-year-old, Allie, why she wanted to spend a spring weekend on Cape Cod, she answered, ``It's so New Englandy.''
TAKING THE KIDS
On her last morning in Florida, 9-year-old Monica Winter finds a small crab washed up on shore amid the anemones and calico scallops. She touches it with her pink-painted fingernails, then picks it up.
Lodging: Check the daily lodgings list at (www.sanibel-captiva.org, 239-472-1080). For Fort Myers, check (www.fortmyers-sanibel.com, 800-237-6444; you also can get a free 152-page guidebook through the website). For condos, check www.greatrentals.com.
TAKING THE KIDS
Make faces at the oh-so-cuddly panda cub or inspect a moon rock. Cheer on a big-league baseball team or practice spycraft. Who says a learning vacation can't be fun? Maybe the kids griped when you suggested heading to the nation's capital rather than the beach. But that was before they knew how much fun they could have.
BELIZE
Barely 100 feet off a deserted, coconut-palm-studded beach in Belize, the professor was getting schooled. ''Strip! Strip!'' ordered fishing guide Kachu Marin, crouched next to my friend Mike Traugott on the forward platform of the 23-foot panga. Mike began to strip in his fly line in short, deliberate tugs. Fifty feet from the skiff and three feet down in the greenish-blue water, the tiny fly inched forward erratically along the sandy bottom.
SOUTH CAROLINA
Hard Rock Park, the first theme park in the world hard-wired to the enduring appeal of rock 'n' roll, is rising just west of the Intracoastal Waterway in South Carolina.
NEW YORK
Running in a major city can feel as if you're a character in a fast-paced video game. Weave around a slow walker on the narrow sidewalk. Sprint through the crosswalk before the light turns green. And if you don't dodge that incoming taxi, it could be game over.
AUSTIN
The University of Texas is a perennial power in the annual listing of the nation's top party schools, and seemingly every one of the 50,000 students was roaming the sidewalks and bars of the Sixth Street entertainment strip on this fall weeknight.
TENNESSEE
On any given night, country music flows from the honky tonk bars on Broadway Avenue in Nashville. Tucked between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, Honky Tonk Row is a tightly-packed block of hole-in-the-wall joints where men and women with wide-brimmed cowboy hats and shiny boots play their hearts out in a haze of cigarette smoke and neon lights.
FLORIDA
You can get by this Valentine's Day with red roses and chocolates in a big, heart-shaped box. But if you really want to keep the flame of romance burning, spring for a night or two in an intimate bed-and-breakfast. Nothing evokes closeness like a getaway to a B&B with a great four-poster bed, fine linen sheets and plump pillows. Nothing says lovin' like toasting your union before a crackling fireplace or in a tub for two brimming with bubbles and surrounded by candles.
MISSOURI
If the words ''Dred Scott'' provoke an unwelcome flashback to junior high history class, we apologize. But this year and last are big years for the Dred Scott case. It was 150 years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the Scott case, which began with slaves Dred and Harriet Scott suing for their freedom in the building we now know as the Old Courthouse.
YBOR CITY
As the sun beat down on the broad roof of the Ybor Cigar Factory, a man in a crisp, white guayabera walked down the aisle between rows of tables stacked high with tobacco leaves, headed for an elevated platform with a single chair in its center.
THE ABACOS
On a Friday afternoon, the ferry from Marsh Harbour to Hope Town is packed with families from the Carolinas, North and South. Some have come to this one-time British Loyalist stronghold for generations.
Getting there: Flights from Miami and Fort Lauderdale on multiple airlines land at Marsh Harbour. Ferry service within the Abacos is run by Albury's, www.alburysferry.com, 242-367-0290.
THE EXUMAS
GEORGE TOWN, Exuma, The Bahamas -- I'm in town less than an hour and just about everyone at the pool bar at the Club Peace n' Plenty hotel knows my story.
What: 365 cays stretching over 120 miles. Getting there: Several flights daily go from Miami and Fort Lauderdale to George Town on Great Exuma.
Originally published Sunday, November 13, 2005
