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• Watch City Brewery – rotating selection of homemade microbrews. Try the Titan Ale, and come winter, the Frostbite.
• Bison County – excellent bbq with best sweet potato fries in town and a fine list of whiskeys
• Indian restaurants – five of them in as many blocks. New Mother India and Bombay Mahal come to mind.
• Tom Can Cook – intriguing Korean and Thai dishes, great appetizers, quiet mood
• Lizzy’s Ice Cream – it’s all good … spice lovers must try the Mango Madness, made w/ habanero peppers

Then over to Fairbanks, down to Anchorage, and return via the Inside Passage to finish in peaceful, urbane Vancouver.

I’m not making this up. It was 1977 and I was hitchhiking from NY to the Canadian Rockies. A trucker dropped me off on I-90 outside Pierre, SD. After baking in the July sun for a couple hours, I started to assume that my appearance, large backpack, and probable odor were dooming me to take the bus.

Then a car stopped. The driver was a blond woman, maybe 20, in a bikini top and denim cutoffs. Ohmigod: a Penthouse Forum moment. I got in, and she set off at 100 m.p.h. for Rapid City, 220 miles up the road. She was a stripper, she said, and commuted between clubs in each city. Her boyfriend, a policeman, lent her a car with a police radio - she tapped it proudly - so she could avoid tickets.

Ooo-k. Making chitchat, I asked her if she thought it was a good idea to pick up scruffy-looking strangers on the side of the road. She reached under her seat and pulled out a large pistol, one of the very few actual guns I have ever seen. She said: I’m not worried, because we’re not going to have a problem, are we?

You meet the most interesting people on the road.

Can’t recommend this overbuilt, Disney-fied casino town in spite of its once-lovely surroundings. If you want to gamble, do Vegas; if you want to camp, do Yosemite.

Spent a week at Club Med with my wife and thoroughly enjoyed it. If memory serves, I read Umberto Eco’s novel “Foucault’s Pendulum” on the beach between mojitos and swims.

Extraordinary day hikes out of Innsbruck, nestled just south of the Bavarian Alps and just north of Switzerland.

or not. I remember going to Tivoli Gardens when I was eight; Louis Armstrong was playing. Magical. The Little Mermaid in the harbor honored Hans Christian Andersen, rather than Disney.

Returning in my 20s, I focused on other activities. But Copenhagen serenely hosts all comers, ages 8 to 80. I look forward to sharing it with my kids.

Because I was ten years old.

De rigeur.

Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners – the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.

Enjoy your tak breaks, Louis. We’ll just eat Krispy Kremes.