50 unforgettable trips from Susan Spano (1-24)

I arrived at the hotel first, checked in and walked up the road to see about exploring the river by kayak. The man in the rental office near the landing said it would take about an hour to float down the Semois from Chiny to Lacuisine, where he'd pick me up in a truck. So I clambered into a bright yellow plastic kayak and set off, hoping I wouldn't encounter any Class IV rapids. As it turns out, the Semois is about as savage as the Easter bunny. Once, a vicious-looking Belgian watchdog barked at me from the bank, and raindrops occasionally splattered from an overcast sky. A heron swooped over the river, and two fishermen wished me bon journée. In my kayak, I felt like a yellow leaf drifting along with the current. >> Read more

I arrived at the hotel first, checked in and walked up the road to see about exploring the river by kayak. The man in the rental office near the landing said it would take about an hour to float down the Semois from Chiny to Lacuisine, where he’d pick me up in a truck. So I clambered into a bright yellow plastic kayak and set off, hoping I wouldn’t encounter any Class IV rapids.

As it turns out, the Semois is about as savage as the Easter bunny. Once, a vicious-looking Belgian watchdog barked at me from the bank, and raindrops occasionally splattered from an overcast sky. A heron swooped over the river, and two fishermen wished me bon journée. In my kayak, I felt like a yellow leaf drifting along with the current.

>> Read more   (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

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8. Harris Ranch, Coalinga, Calif.

About 100 miles north of the Grapevine, near the turnoff for Coalinga, straw-colored hills bubble up and Harris Ranch appears, an oasis at Exit 334, where the sprinklers always seem to be turned on, watering neatly trimmed lime trees and beds of flowers. Often, a man selling bonsai plants out of his truck is stationed across from the entrance.

Like most exits on Interstate 5, 334 has a handful of the kind of chain restaurants and motels that always remind me of a road trip I once took with a friend. When we stopped at a Denny’s, she called the restaurant the symbol of everything wrong with America. I like their tuna melts but must admit I know what she means, which is partly why I love the independently owned Harris Ranch Inn & Restaurant. To me it’s the symbol of what’s right with America.

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Pictured: Harris Ranch restaurant  (Gary Kazanjian / For The Times)

9. Hotel del Coronado, San Diego

The Hotel del Coronado hovered in my mind as I drove south from L.A. I’d never stayed there but knew about it from the 1959 Billy Wilder movie “Some Like It Hot,” which was filmed partly at the hotel. Storied, elegant, traditional, the Del opened on Coronado Island (actually a 5.3-square-mile peninsula west of downtown San Diego) in 1888 and is one of a handful of grandes dames in the West such as the Fairmont Empress in Victoria, Canada, and the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.

>> Read more  (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

10. U.S. 395 road trip

I had driven California 14 before to Death Valley, loving the way the roads along the way head off forever on straight shots through the desert. Just when you’re about to get bored, 14 plows through Red Rock Canyon about 150 miles northeast of L.A., with its tilted cliff faces striated like Neapolitan ice cream. As the Sierra comes into view to the west, 14 yields to 395 and you enter the Owens Valley, in the hot, dry rain shadow of the mountains.

>> Read more  (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

11. Palm Springs

At the entrance to Palm Springs, where California Highway 111 turns into Palm Canyon Drive, the smashingly restored Tramway Gas Station symbolizes the resurgence of the town and the style, re-christened as mid-century modern. The gas station was designed with a soaring “butterfly” roof in 1965 by Albert Frey, a Swiss-born architect who worked with Le Corbusier in Europe before moving here in the 1930s to become one of the town’s defining architects. Boarded up and threatened with demolition three years ago, the gas station was brought back to life by two San Franciscans who have turned it into a gallery specializing in objets d’art for the garden.

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Pictured: Tramway Gas Station  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

12. Big Sur

I let the car tell me what to do, and it turned off on Route G18 at Bradley, which leads eventually to the Nacimiento-Fergusson Road. I bought corn chips and a packaged tuna sandwich at a gas station along the way and picnicked beside blowzy yellow roses in the still garden at the Mission San Antonio, founded in 1771 by Father Junipero Serra. Mozart seemed right for the Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, which posed no challenge even to a wimpy driver like me. At the road’s crest, intersected by the Cone Peak Trail, I did something I’d long been meaning to do: I took the top down, so that descending the mounded ridge brushed with purple lupine and goldenrod, I could feel the Pacific wind messing up my hair.

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Pictured: Bixby Historic Bridge  (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

16. Paris

Knowing I was a foreigner, my neighborhood greengrocer consistently overcharged me at first. Now she throws extra apples and tomatoes in my bag. I will miss these people and my handful of dear French and American expatriate friends. I will miss having my sister come to visit me in my ideal little Left Bank apartment. I will miss my hairdresser, Frank, on the Rue du Pre aux Clercs, and the flower peddler on the Rue du Bac whose breath always smelled of alcohol. I will miss Monoprix, the Arlequin movie theater on the Rue des Rennes -- especially on Sunday mornings -- and the winter and summer sales at shops along the Boulevard St.-Germain.

>> Read more  (Ian Langsdon / EPA)

17. The Louvre

The Louvre has been standing alongside the Seine of Paris for more than 800 years, first as a medieval fortress built around 1190 by crusading king Philippe Auguste (Philip II) and then as a rambling royal palace on which a long chain of French artists and architects put their marks. The kings of France were insatiable collectors, so when the palace opened as a museum in 1793, the treasure-trove became the property of the French people.

>> Read more  (Remy de la Mauviniere / Associated Press)

21. Chicago

Stand at the pedestrian walkway on the graceful Art Deco double-decker drawbridge that carries Michigan Avenue over the Chicago River, circle the Loop on the El, ride the Navy Pier Ferris wheel, or take a cruise on the river with the Chicago Architecture Foundation and you will see what I mean: a stunning skyline, from the Sears to the Amoco to the John Hancock Center--at 110, 82 and 100 stories, respectively. More important is the fact that almost every building in the lineup is worth thinking about individually. They document the course of late 19th and 20th century urban American architectural history.

>> Read more   (Jeff Haynes / AFP / Getty Images)

22. Holland, by bike

Near the village of Loenen we saw our first thatch-roofed windmill and crossed over a one-lane drawbridge. (The attendant told us he worked from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in summer but had to be summoned by telephone when someone wanted to go over the bridge in winter.)

Between the villages, we traveled through polder land mowed by goats, sheep and cows, which left me craving a cold glass of chocolate milk. Every farmhouse we passed looked like something out of a painting by Pieter de Hooch or Jan Vermeer, with windows kept so scrupulously clean that they gleamed like diamonds, revealing glimpses of thriving potted plants, lace antimacassars and china caddies inside.

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Pictured: Amsterdam  (Gail Fisher / Los Angeles Times)