ON THE RAILS -- An 11-hour train trip? No, thanks. But four- to seven-hour trips are short enough to allow the novelty of the ride, the steady pace through unfamiliar country, to be an adventure. So with the kids off to summer camp, my wife and I booked a train from New York to Montreal, stopping each way for an overnight stay in New York's Adirondack Mountains. (08/29/2010)

As usual, Dickens said it best: You will see enough in Seven Dials to keep your curiosity awake for a considerable amount of time. When he described the neighborhood in 1836, this was the dodgiest of London byways, dirty, dim and dangerous, whose most famous product was made in illegal gin shops. (08/29/2010)

CASTLEGAR, Canada -- Tucked into the green valleys of southeast British Columbia, a handful of century-old brick houses are mute witnesses to an old way of life. Once these were home to Doukhobors, Christian pacifists who fled the religious persecution of Russia's 19th-century czars and ended up in this far corner of Canada. (08/29/2010)

IN 1932, when the Great Depression was getting its second wind, a New York-based wire editor for the Associated Press published a novel about the agricultural shows he remembered from his childhood in a middle-of-nowhere Iowa town that doesn't even exist anymore. (08/29/2010)

BACKGROUND (08/29/2010)