At the conclusion of our October ’05 trip to Slovenia, my wife, Paula, and I felt that it was the most beautiful and photogenic of the 18 countries we had visited. Here are some resources and tips we would like to share from that trip.

PLANNING — Guidebooks we used included “Lonely Planet Slovenia” and “Rick Steves’ Best of Eastern Europe,” and we highly recommend both. It’s hard to beat the comprehensive Lonely Planet guidebooks for detail nor Rick Steves’ for practical guidance...

In planning our trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg in July ’06, I noted three private guides recommended by ITN readers and, after a series of e-mails, selected Alexei Fetisov (Oct. ’05, pg. 122) from Palladium Travel Agency (Artilleriyskaya St. #1, Office 160, St. Petersburg, Russia; phone 7-812 579 6644, fax 6584 or visit www.palladium.spb.ru) to make my arrangements. Of the three, he gave the most detailed itinerary based on my expressed interests.

We found the guides in his...

As a minor amplification to the picture on page 74 in the December ’06 edition of ITN, on a 1998 trip to Australia we found lots of termite mounds all over the central area, especially around Alice. Of interest is that the mounds are known in many parts as “magnetic mounds.” The reference is not to any magnetism.

Rather, in most cases the mounds are slab-sided, and the termites apparently prefer to spend the morning in the sun on the east side of the mound and then move to the west...