Adventure

In May 2005, DreamWorks Animation SKG and Aardman Animations announced that, following their collaborations on "Chicken Run," "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and "Flushed Away," their next joint venture would be "Crood Awakening," a stop-motion comedy about a caveman living in a small village with a prehistoric genius. John Cleese of Monty Python fame and Kirk DeMicco ("Racing Stripes") were hired to write the script. And now nearly eight years later, a vastly different version of the tale is opening Friday.

PHOENIX - Let me tell you about Josh Hamilton's first rocket ship of spring. It isn't a perfect home run. He gets under it a bit more than he would've liked, so it's towering, corpulent, full of cha-cha. At last sighting, it was in geosynchronous orbit with Earth. NBC was about to bounce Brian Williams' evening newscasts off of it, and someone at Palomar was pronouncing it a planet. So no, it wasn't a perfect home run by any means. But it got your attention, all right. It was the kind of celestial event befitting the newest Angel.

With the spring fishing season fast approaching, a remote lodge in British Columbia is offering the opportunity to fly fish for trout in some of the most pristine coastal rivers in Canada. At Nimmo Bay Wilderness Resort , near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, the fishing spots are so isolated that guests, accompanied by expert guides, reach them by helicopter. The season opens April 15 and continues through May 31, when many of the fish have reached 25 pounds in weight.

With the possible exception of that football team in Minnesota, the vikings have seen some fairly serious brand slippage over the years. Once the scourge of Europe, vikings have increasingly lost their mojo - the Wagnerian soprano in the horned hat and even the scraggly barbarians of Capitol One ads are actually Visigoths, although the Viking cruise line still proudly tours where its titular progenitors once conquered. So the time is right for an image refurbishment, and here is History, in the midst of its own makeover, to provide just that.

Armchair travelers and adventurer-seekers who dream of getting off the grid will find a taste of the exotic in a new trip being organized by Asia Transpacific Journeys called The Wild Jungles of Borneo . The April 8-21 trip will explore the Southeast Asian island's national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, known for their variety of species. The tour promises a chance to search for tigers, rhinos, elephants and leopards from treetop aerial walkways and to observe nocturnal wildlife and birds on a night safari.

Phil Keoghan of "The Amazing Race" has scuba dived with a dog, swilled the blood of a cobra and attended a nudist wedding. He also tried swimming the mile across the Bosporus strait that separates the Asian and European sides of Istanbul, but drifted downstream three miles before getting fished out. And he sometimes gets lost when he travels as host of the TV show too (but not for the same reasons as the contestants do.) "I love traveling," the New Zealand-born Keoghan told the audience Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Times Travel Show . "My whole philosophy is 'no opportunity wasted' or NOW, which means living the biggest possible life you can. " In case you miss the point, he has written a book with the same title that encourages people to draft their own life list.

Crying my eyes out the morning after, I replayed over and over the events of the previous evening when Mr. Latest Flame had calmly stated that his fondness for me had flickered out. Clearly, finding love was not in the cards for me. It was the mid-'80s, and at 31, I suddenly felt old and washed up, laden by baggage heavy with broken engagements and other failed relationships and even a brief marriage. This was the last straw. Whatever hope I still entertained for finding a soul mate was extinguished, and I just felt like locking myself in the divorce-settlement Toyota with the windows rolled up and the world shut out. Like a passenger in a sinking boat, watching her life flash before her eyes, I reviewed the minutiae of every event, every conversation, every development in what I thought had been a promising new relationship over the previous couple of months.

"Escape From Planet Earth" - an animated adventure that's more down-to-earth than earth-shattering - builds a family-friendly sci-fi constellation out of fresh chuckles and recycled parts, a number of them from Planet Pixar. Feel-good but not cloying, zippy but not frenetic, and refreshingly free of snark, the default setting for a lot of kids' fare these days, the feature takes a pleasingly retro-futuristic stance on matters of décor and attitude. Fueling the ride is an outstanding voice cast that includes Rob Corddry, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sofia Vergara and, in irresistibly hammy villain mode, William Shatner.

Want to go traveling with your supermarket? Whole Foods Market this year kicked off a travel venture in January called Whole Journeys that promises authentic food and food experiences for active travelers. Trips throughout the year cover eight destinations -- from a culinary tour of Idaho's Salmon River to tea ceremonies in China -- and accent artisan cheese and wine makers, visits to local farms, cooking classes and other food-centric activities led by local experts.

Somehow, "Life of Pi," even with 11 Oscar nominations - only "Lincoln," with 12, has more - seems as lost at sea as its Indian teen and Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. The film is finding an audience, especially overseas, but director Ang Lee's mystical work has dropped out of the conversation on the awards front. Honestly, I don't care about that any more than Joaquin Phoenix does, but I do wish that this finely adapted literary hit was causing more of a stir in Hollywood. Screenwriter David Magee managed what many thought impossible in adapting Yann Martel's novel.