Countryside

I enjoyed John Sheehan's article, "Venturing Into the U.K. Countryside" (April 26). Once visited, the countryside of Kirkcudbrightshire is never to be forgotten. He describes the summit near Loch Trool as 2,700 meters (8,600 feet). Since Britain is where the word "foot" originated, the British likely would never use metric measure to define the height of a local mountain. The highest point in the U.K. is Ben Nevis, a mountain in Scotland near the town of Fort William that measures 4,406 feet.

Balmule House is a beautiful bed-and-breakfast on 30 acres in the Scottish countryside, 20 minutes from the Edinburgh airport. The gracious hosts are extremely helpful in planning activities as well as preparing afternoon tea or cocktails and delicious breakfasts. Eight bedrooms, from about $302 a night. Balmule House B&B, Dunfermline, Scotland; 011-44-1383-432-999, http://www.balmule.co.uk Ginny and Wylie Carlyle Irvine

I would like to express my appreciation for Paul Fussell's article. I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to explain to people the type of traveling I enjoy but have never found words to express my feelings properly. For me, traveling means exposure and experiencing, and I am not concerned if some experiences are not good; not everything should be a highlight. And if I am given a choice of walking through the streets or countryside of an unfamiliar place versus seeing famous sights, my choice would be to walk the unfamiliar.

Road trips by their very nature tend to be part plan, part improvisation, part fun, part irritation. And so it is with "The Trip," starring British comic actor Steve Coogan and his frequent pranking partner, Rob Brydon. They're doing another riff on the "characters" Steve and Rob, who were responsible for most of the tongue-in-cheekiness of "Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. " This latest bit of silliness reunites them with filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, who seems to have endless patience with their antics, having worked with them on 2005's "Tristram" and 2002's "24 Hour Party People.

Re "A Twist for an Ancient Tongue Trying to Survive," April 24: I read with some amusement your front-page article on the English language being removed from Irish road signs. My wife and I drove across Ireland, from Galway Bay to Cork and back, some four years ago. Between us, we saw about a dozen road signs, total. This profound lack of directional aid caused us to navigate by the scientific method. For example, "I hypothesize that this road here is the R590. As a test of this hypothesis, I propose that we turn left.

Peter Greenberg's Aug. 17 article on the resurgence of afternoon tea was informative of a new social pattern, but authenticated a common American misconception about a simple occasion called tea. High tea may sound better to someone who, quite properly, wants the best, but its only connection with tea, apart from the beverage, is that it occurs at about the same time of day, and is seldom followed by anything very substantial. It is what we would call a light supper and, in Great Britain at least, may be not that light.

"Don't go there," a well-traveled friend said when I mentioned my plans to visit Capri, a sunny island off southern Italy. Why? "You're not going to want to come home," he said. I laughed. My friend, a know-it-all author, loves to give advice. I didn't need it; I already knew I would fall in love with Capri. It's been one of Europe's favorite island getaway for more than 2,000 years, enthralling a cast of characters ranging from Roman emperors to 21st century luminaries and A-listers.

As many a Peruvian traveler can tell you, climbing Machu Picchu is easy, especially if you take one of those tourist buses that do most of the work. It's embracing Cuzco that can be hard. Cuzco (often spelled Cusco) usually is the Peruvian city you fly into before catching the train through the Sacred Valley to those famous mountaintop ruins at Machu Picchu. But Cuzco is much more than a gateway. In the 15th century, it was the capital of the Incan empire, a wealthy city whose stone buildings, which still form the skeleton of the city, were chiseled and placed with astounding precision.

"I used to win like crazy," my friend Juanita Mendonca would tell me. "Every slot machine turned to gold. I'd come home and my purse would be stuffed with money. " Juanita, a retired parochial school teacher with a magic touch at the slots, loved to regale me with tales of her exploits at Valley View Casino. I had never been there, so when my husband, Lou, suggested we take a quick trip to Las Vegas, I proposed an overnighter to check out Valley View's new hotel instead. So there we were, driving into the hills of Valley Center in north San Diego County's backcountry.

MÉRIDA, Mexico - Until this winter, Mérida had just been a busy city I passed through on my way to the ancient Mayan ruins. Then, in mid-December, I made it my destination. I pretty much had to: I'd been hearing the city's name all fall, from house-hunting shows on TV to acquaintances in Minnesota trading tips about winter getaways. Even my new dog groomer turned out to be renovating a house here. Was Mérida, the capital of Yucatán state, going to be Mexico's next big Yankee magnet - a new Ajijic or San Miguel de Allende?

Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift has bought a Beverly Hills-area compound for more than $3.5 million that's, fittingly, a little bit country. On close to 1.5 acres, the three-bedroom, 31/2-bathroom main house sits behind gates at the end of a long driveway. It has a countryside vibe with dormer windows, vine-covered arbors, stone paths and wood fencing. The first-floor master suite has dual bathrooms and walk-in closets. French doors open to the grounds, which include a patio with an outdoor fireplace off the back of the house and a lighted paddle tennis court.

The gift for his family's loyalty, service and sacrifice was an AK-47 assault rifle. Seventeen-year-old Abubakr Issa brandished the weapon with pride in the courtyard of his family's home in Bani Walid, a small tribal town about 100 miles southeast of Tripoli, the capital. Three days earlier his 37-year-old brother Fatih, a career infantryman in the Libyan armed forces, had died during an airstrike near Benghazi. "I was happy to learn my brother died because he is now a martyr," the young man said Wednesday as a multinational coalition's aircraft and missiles pounded Libyan military targets for a fifth day. "I also want to go to the front.

Auto Europe is offering rental cars in Ireland for daily rates that start at less than the cost of a movie ticket. Pay a base rate of $7.50 a day for a weekly rental and get unlimited mileage to tour the countryside. The deal: The lowest rate covers an economy car with manual transmission and is based on a week's rental. Car-rental pickups are arranged through local suppliers at the airport, train station and other locations. When: The offer is good from Saturday through April 20 with some blackout dates.

There had already been three years of failed harvests. Three straight years of weeding, planting, pruning, every day, into every night, on every weekend, with only the prospect of more work and an uncertain future, by the time Véronique Hupin and Mike Marler made the decision never to quit, no matter the cost. The tally was $200,000 and rising — far more than their life savings, which they dropped in the summer of 1999 on a tiny vineyard called Les Pervenches, near Farnham in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

Even in normal times, Edwin Andre has all he can do to eke out a living from the corn, tomatoes and sweet potatoes he coaxes from an acre plot in northern Haiti. His wife, Roselaine Cius, peddles the produce roadside and cooks rice-and-bean plates from a stick-frame lunch shack to help support their family of eight. Suddenly, though, eight hungry mouths soared to 18 after siblings and in-laws from earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince fled by rattletrap bus to this sweep of farmland, a two-hour drive from the capital.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were American patriots, co-framers of the Declaration of Independence, our second and third presidents. Sometimes friends, sometimes rivals, they lived in tandem through our nation's difficult birth: Jefferson, the sophisticated Virginia planter, Adams, the Massachusetts yeoman farmer. What is less well-known is that they once went tooting around the English countryside together in a hired coach. David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning Adams biography, the basis for last year's HBO "John Adams" miniseries, briefly mentions their trip.

OUTSIDE SAN LUIS DE LA LOMA, Mexico - Don Polo's heavily armed convoy wound its way through the hills above the lush coastal plain of Guerrero state, its groves of slender palm trees now far below him. The two-lane country road twisted eastward, and upward, for miles. But around each bend, there were no campesinos , no burros, no dogs, no cars barreling down toward the Pacific. Fields of yellow grass, grown taller than a man, covered the landscape, animated only by the wind. This, though, was no vision of tranquillity.

Mrs. Liu could have had three daughters by now. But the shame and legal costs would have been unbearable, so she gave her second daughter away at birth and aborted a third when an ultrasound scan showed that fetus, too, was female. In 1949, the Communist Party took power promising to end centuries of degradation for China's women. Yet hundreds of thousands of unwanted baby girls are abandoned, aborted and even killed each year. For poor, rural families, the choice is as stark as it is cruel.

In Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's view, the key to success in Afghanistan is to "secure the population." The thinking is that the populated area of the country, largely the Pashtun belt in the south and the east, must be cleared of Taliban insurgents. Concurrently, the U.S. must win hearts and minds through local development projects. Over time, with enough U.S. troops, the population will come to feel protected, and the insurgents will be marginalized. So goes the plan. But after eight years of war, this approach is surprisingly ignorant of both the realities of Afghan society and the limitations of America's tolerance for casualties.

The Children's Book A Novel A.S. Byatt Alfred A. Knopf: 680 pp., $26.95 A.S. Byatt writes about English society at the end of chrysalid stages (there's a naturalist metaphor I'm sure she'd appreciate) -- when hidden forces are about to burst the norms and conventions of an age, sometimes producing a butterfly, but not always. You find these transforming pressures in the tetralogy she started with 1978's "The Virgin in the Garden" and ended with 2002's "A Whistling Woman."