Scenery

Whether by necessity or choice, a quarter of Americans take at least one vacation by themselves each year. Some solo travelers are single. Some have partners who dislike travel or have different interests or can't get away. Some just crave freedom. But all face the same question: What's the best trip for the person traveling alone? "The key is to know yourself," said Beth Whitman, author of a guide for women traveling alone and founder of Wanderlustandlipstick.com , a website devoted to advice and tours for women on the go. "There are times when you just need to get away, to recuperate.

MAMMOTH LAKES - On the banks of a jutting little river, I'm trying to think like a trout thinks: Did I pay the mortgage on time? When do the Kings play next? Whatever happened to that sassy Helen Hunt? No, wait, those are my thoughts. Then, WHAM, something takes the lure and I'm officially a fly fisherman. Constantly looking for an activity where my deficiencies aren't quite so apparent, something outdoors where I don't have to run a lot, or strip down to my skivvies, or maintain eye contact for more than a moment, I am drawn now to fly fishing, not so much a sport as a Christopher Guest movie.

"Most of what follows is true. " That's the opening of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," the 1969 movie about two bandits born as the sun was setting over the mesas and buttes of the old Wild West. Morally ambiguous, the movie struck a chord with Vietnam War-era audiences who stood and cheered when Paul Newman as Butch and Robert Redford as Sundance met a hail of bullets in a dusty Bolivian town, etching the final freeze frame onto my 15-year-old heart. I didn't know it then, but the movie wrote something else there: a love of the sumptuous Western scenery, which I rediscovered on a trip last month to southern Utah.

The forward did not have to ring twice. In this case, Dwight King only had to knock once. Last week King was able to break the news to Manchester Monarchs teammate Jordan Nolan that they were both being called up from the minors by the Kings with a quick knock on his door. "He said to wake up, pack up. We're leaving in an hour," Nolan said in El Segundo on Tuesday after the Kings' practice. Said King: "He'll get to remember that forever. His first call-up, I was the guy to tell him. It's a good story.

"Beauty and the Beast" is considered by many to be a wonderful show. I would like it captioned for the hearing-impaired. I think the scenery is wonderful, but I wish I could know what is being said. Mrs. Dorothy E. Bates, Thousand Oaks

American Ballet Theatre's production of "The Nutcracker" ballet has arrived at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, filling the Segerstrom Hall stage with a 30-foot-tall Christmas tree, a chandeliered ballroom, a swirling sled and even a snow flurry or two. To create ABT's elaborate winter setting, at 3 a.m. on Monday, nearly 60 workers started unloading the dance troupe's five, five-ton trucks at the Center, installing a portable dance floor and almost 20 separate pieces of scenery.

The Perfect Sonya by Beverly Lowry (Viking: $16.95; 241 pages) In a conversation, the normal answer to "Tell me about yourself" is to talk about an occupation, or a childhood, or a marriage, or a packet of problems. For a novelist, the job is different. Fictional characters, unlike people, do not exist until written about. They won't come alive simply by assigning them problems or childhoods or dreams or occupations.

It's a warm, clear weekday morning, a perfect day to play hooky from work and meet the people of the city's most splendid street of visual pleasures. Not quite the time, perhaps, to catch the notorious people of Mulholland Drive--the hot-rod racers, the moonlight lovers and the urban elves who come inexplicably at night to deposit their trash. But, at any time, the 55-mile drive from the Hollywood Freeway to the Pacific Ocean can be counted on to yield a traveler's tale or two.

"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.

"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.

With mild temperatures, calm water and minimal fog, this can be a good time of year to visit the Central Coast , and there's no better place to see it than on the water in a kayak. For those prepping for a "big year" of bird-watching, this section of coast, with its diversity of waterfowl and shorebirds, is possibly the finest in California . If you've kayaked only on lakes and prefer water on the tamer side, Morro Bay is the place to paddle. Open-ocean kayaking is a whole different ballgame, and launching from just any beach shouldn't be attempted by novices (as we learned on a recent trip; more on that in a bit)

If you want to travel to the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, you will need two days, minimum, travel time on several planes and thousands of dollars. Or you can come to El Paso. Since 1917, structures on the campus of the former Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy have been built in the unique style of Bhutan's majestic dzongs, fortresses constructed with sloping 8-foot-thick walls and red-colored roofs. The school, now known as the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP, has grown to 77 buildings, all constructed or retrofitted around the theme.

I am standing atop Clay Head, a 70-foot-high bluff, looking over miles and miles of open ocean on a clear summer morning. It is an ideal way to greet a day that will include hiking, biking, birding, skimming stones and eating my weight in fried clams. And I have to smile. Back home in St. Louis, my wife, Nancy, and I had told a friend that we were heading for three days on this glorious island. Blank stare. "Block Island. Where is that?" Exactly. And fine with me if Block keeps a low pro. For all its craggy grandeur, Block Island has never been etched into the nation's consciousness quite like its big sisters Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

I am sitting on the balcony of the Grand Hotel Timeo eating almond-flavored granita (a kind of Italian sherbet) for breakfast and thinking about Lady Chatterley. More accurately, I am thinking about the real-life inspiration for Lady Chatterley — an upper-class Englishwoman who had come to Taormina and carried on a steamy (think R-rated behavior in an olive grove) affair with a Sicilian farmer. Part of the reason I am thinking about this uninhibited British woman is that D.H. Lawrence wrote part of his frequently banned novel while staying at this very hotel.

On a towering cliff overlooking the sun-sparkled shores of Carlsbad, Calif., Dawn Santos watched a squadron of pelicans fly past the campsite where she and her family were staying for four days of campfires, bike rides and splashing in the surf. "It's gorgeous," the Rancho Cucamonga mother of three marveled as the afternoon sky turned bright pink. Here at South Carlsbad State Beach in San Diego County, the Santos family took a break from work and school by renting a 26-foot trailer to enjoy one of California's most valuable economic assets — its outdoor riches.

"Now I know what's meant by 'steering committee,'" the lock tender said with a laugh as the water, rushing through the sluice gates of Erie Canal Lock 32, raised us to his level. Karin was at the tiller of Seneca, our 42-foot charter boat, and I had my hand on the controls of that loveliest of maneuvering cheats: the bow thruster, which effortlessly moved the bow to port or starboard. Chuck and Karin Gedge and my wife, Laurel, and I were on our first full day of a weeklong voyage in July on the western end of New York's historic Erie Canal.

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When the last Jungle Cruise boat docks for the night and lights fade to black on Sleeping Beauty's Castle, the real work begins. At lush Pixie Hollow, gardeners don miner's headlamps as they begin uprooting stubborn weeds. On Main Street, custodians scrape chewing gum off the sidewalk. And over at Mickey's Toontown, painters sand and recoat chipped handrails. Few see it happen, except perhaps for the dozens of feral cats that emerge from their hiding places to prowl the park after hours, stalking rodents.

Reporting From San Francisco ? Southern California audiences have become accustomed over the last two decades to being entertained inside a tent, thanks to Cirque du Soleil's elaborately made-up and costumed circus acts, with their otherworldly narratives delivered in other languages. By contrast, the production of "Peter Pan" that opens Sunday in a big-top setting in Costa Mesa is a familiar English-language tale that generations have experienced through theater, television and movies.

The view from a moving car framed by a window is a snapshot many travelers have locked in their memories. Lee Friedlander, well known for his idiosyncratic style of photography, has applied his old tricks to incorporate alternative visuals of those hours-long adventures traversing back roads and highways. Friedlander hit the road on a years-long trek across 50 states capturing snippets of Americana as seen through a thin layer of tinted cover glass. The resulting multidimensional photographs are the subject of his recently released book "America by Car. " In it is a revealing portrait of America as a beautiful, kitschy, gritty and diverse landscape.