Food & Wine

For a limited time, Hyatt resort properties in Puerto Rico, Aruba and Grand Cayman are offering an all-inclusive food-and-beverage option.

Large whitecaps topped the waves. The gale prevented us from going on the deck. Amazingly, we hardly felt the ship rock as we were sitting on the verandah of our stateroom. The stabilizers worked amazingly well.

For days we had been enjoying our cruise on the vast, 18-deck, majestic Star Princess as it hurtled through the vast expanse of the empty Pacific, never encountering another ship.

On a trip to Paris in June ’03 we stayed, as usual, at Hôtel du Danube (58 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris, France; phone +33 01 42 60 34 70, e-mail info@hoteldanube.fr) — in the Saint Germain des Pres area on the Left Bank. Rooms run €110-€160 (near $130-$190), with a junior suite or apartment €220.

We paid return visits to two favorite places to eat:

I enjoyed Rita Murray’s comments about her meals in Paris at La Tour d’Argent very much (May ’04, pg. 52). I wonder if ITN readers might be interested in reading about how different things were in Paris and at the Tour d’Argent in 1952.

I was in my early twenties and living and working for the U.S. Army in Germany. Europe had not yet made an economic recovery from the Second World War and there were few tourists.

In the May ’04 issue (page 52) a reader raved about La Tour d’Argent in Paris. Thirty-plus years ago we dined there and also had their famous pressed duck.

by Chloe Ryan Winston, Redding, CA

I took a 20-day custom tour, Jan. 20-Feb. 2, ’03, arranged for me by Ceylon Express International (Huntington Beach, CA). The entire cost of the trip, including international and domestic air, hotels, breakfasts, my own car and driver and English-speaking guides in each city, was about $6,300.

Queenstown, set along the gorgeous, blue-green Lake Wakatipu and surrounded by the beautiful Remarkable Mountains, should be on every New Zealand visitor’s itinerary. It offers golf, sailing, paragliding, jet boat riding, bungy jumping and more. The dress code is casual, with hiking boots common.

We traveled to Italy, April 27-May 1, ’04.