THE WORLD IS A BOOK Part 2

Over the years we've stayed in flats, homes, villas, castles, inns, boats, barges and a host of other spots where your corner pub or bar owner or cook may not speak English and shopping's a bike ride down the road. I've tried houseboats in Kashmir and huts over the ocean in Bali; and shivered out a day in a villa outside Paris when we discovered the furnace didn't work, but the owners more than repaid us with pasta making lessons. There have been villas with ghosts, leaks, pools -- one with an alligator and more with salamanders -- and even a barge where we parked our bikes on the bank and woke up 10 miles down a canal. Fortunately, the barge skipper stuck the bikes on the bow deck.

Most of the larger villas offered up to eight or nine apartments, pools, private fireplaces and more history than most American towns. Some places we booked on our own were dumps. Other lodgings are treasures. Our favorite might be a ground floor flat in London where double French doors opened to a private garden. Then there was a converted stable in Paris where you awoke to the smell of fresh bread, an old mill outside Brussels with the rustle of the millrace to ease you to sleep, rooms in a gatehouse on a Yorkshire estate that smelled of new hay and where pheasants cackled, and a winter sunrise over Czarist Palace near St. Petersburg where I discovered the dubious joys of pepper vodka.

Such delights enchant one beyond description if you earn them with a tolerant attitude about the proximity of showers or baths to sleeping quarters. Such seems a fair exchange for ocean or vineyard views and walls so old they had moss before Columbus left Italy for Spain.

Some spots come with characters for plays unwritten. Such experiences put you in touch with another culture in a way no city hotel or guided tour affords. Finally, I suppose, they provide you with a batch of stories to entertain your acquaintances, bore your family and entertain you in your old age -- like the daughter of a British hostess who, after I broke my foot, spend three days exploring the range of possible crisp --potato chips to Americans-- flavors. They stopped at 43! You can reach out and become a traveler. You don't need much of a foreign language. Do adjust your expectations to that of the locals -- for example, Italians have, on the whole, a rather cavalier attitude toward plumbing, Germans go bananas when mechanical bits and pieces don't work and the French get extremely testy about food failures. The British seem to muddle through no matter what. Relax, it's only a week, just enjoy your visit as a tourist or traveler and you'll have many nice memories to cherish.

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