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Catching lobsters online
With just a few clicks, you can bring the fresh bounty of New England into your kitchen.
By Steven A. Shaw
[12/28/99]

In our bubbly is our beginning
New Year's rituals reveal what different cultures revere.
By Burt Wolf
[12/24/99]

Travel Advisor
Last-minute New Year's tips
Our travel expert reassures the Bali-bound Y2K-minded and offers Seattle celebration suggestions.
By Donald D. Groff
[12/23/99]

Out of the Blue
'Tis the season to be pissed off
Too many bags and too few bins make frequent flyers cry foul.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[12/22/99]

It's a bird, it's a plane -- it's SkyMall!
Where can you order an indoor/outdoor miniature golf course for only $18,999.95? In the mother ship of all catalogs.
By Christine Kenneally
[12/21/99]

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Millennium night in Cricieth, Wales:

I was planning to go to bed, but then I heard that at midnight our local arts center, housed in a former chapel in the shadow of our waterfront castle, was going to celebrate the moment by opening a Potters' Path, to which artists from 22 different countries have contributed their own tiles as a gesture of universal friendship. So, as the last chimes of the 20th century sound, I shall be standing there in the drizzle with half a dozen others while a damp firework or two, I would guess, fizzles out over the Irish Sea. THEN I shall go to bed.

Salon Travel contributing editor Jan Morris has written more than 30 works of travel literature, including "Fifty Years of Europe," "The Matter of Wales," "Hong Kong," "Venice" and "Spain."

MORRIS DYE

Keeping track of the days and years is tricky business here in Thailand. The Gregorian calendar, which counts years from the birth of Christ, is widely used to keep the kingdom in sync with other nations, but it's not the only way the Thais organize their time. Many local holidays are set according to the lunar calendar, and often reflect seasonal events that are completely alien to the European climes that gave birth to the Gregorian system -- the onset of the wet season, for example, when the annual Songkhran festival signals the traditional start of a new year. Chinese New Year is celebrated here as well, especially in Bangkok, which has a significant Chinese-Thai population. And while Thailand's official Buddhist calendar conforms to the Western convention of beginning each year on Jan. 1, years are numbered not from the birth of Christ, but from the Buddha's entry into Nirvana.

When the day dawns on Jan. 1, I will be kicking back in a simple cottage on the island of Ko Samui, and dividing my affections between two significant others: Lyn, my lovely wife, and Caitlyn, a gorgeous petite blonde with dreamy blue eyes and a wickedly flirtatious smile who captured my heart in August 1998. Caitlyn is the 17-month-old daughter of some dear friends from California who are bringing her to Thailand for her very first overseas journey.

After spending Christmas in the northern hill country of Mae Hong Son, we'll head south to Samui and meet up with other friends at the Tamarind Hill Retreat, a collection of hillside vacation homes adjacent to the Tamarind Springs spa. There we'll launch the New Year in tropical style, with blue skies and sweet ocean breezes, birds and frogs singing in the garden, traditional massage, all the fresh fruit and Thai food we can eat, a delightful toddler in our midst and not a care in the world about the Y2K bug. Nirvana? Perhaps not in a strictly devotional sense, but it certainly seems an auspicious way to embrace the year known in Thailand as 2543.

Morris Dye is Salon Travel's Bangkok correspondent. He also writes for Islands, Time Asia and numerous other publications.

PAUL THEROUX

My plan is simple -- it is to spend New Year's 1999 with as many members of my family as possible, in the happiest surroundings I can think of. This might involve a pleasant hotel in New York City, but it is the family that matters and the memorable and effective peace-making ritual of eating a meal together.

Paul Theroux is the author of more than 30 books, including "The Great Railway Bazaar," "The Old Patagonian Express," "The Happy Isles of Oceania," "The Mosquito Coast," "Saint Jack" and "Half Moon Street."

JEFF GREENWALD

What am I doing on New Year's Eve? Funny you should ask. Only a few days ago did I truly realize, for the first time, how weird and freaky this whole new century business is. It happened in the Emery Bay Theater. I was looking at posters of coming attractions, and there it was:

The glib nonchalance of the poster -- and the very notion of thousands of people already waiting for the year 2000 to end -- brought it all home. The century is over. Forever. We're closing the joint, turning out the lights, boarding up the windows.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with nostalgia. I experienced a sort of temporal vertigo -- as if the whole 20th century was receding beneath me, spiraling forever out of sight, with everything I'd done and felt and thought for 45 years falling away into a battered trash bin. I dropped to my knees and began tearing great hunks out of the carpet with my teeth: my own private Y2K meltdown.

That said, it will come as no surprise that I intend to spend New Year's Eve in a remote location, with my feet planted firmly on the ground. And my favorite piece of ground on this planet is the Point Reyes National Seashore, an hour north of San Francisco. There's nowhere I'd rather be, a truth that becomes more difficult to argue the more I travel. For the past 20 years I've been schlepping myself around the globe, trekking across muddy valleys or riding sardine-can night coaches to reach an assortment of highly-touted destinations. And 90 percent of the time, my first thought when I actually reach those destinations is, "Gee ... I'd rather be at Point Reyes."

For one thing, I feel a sense of solidarity with the place. Point Reyes itself is a traveler. Attached to the northward-shifting Pacific plate (we're on the North American plate), it's been creeping inexorably up the California coastline for eons. It was once attached to Mexico; a million years from now, it'll border Alaska. What's a millennium to this sluggish piece of geology? Chopped liver, that's what.

The plan is simple. At the stroke of midnight, we will perform a collective New Year's ritual. Each of us will receive a party "loot bag," containing a single 100-watt light bulb. In the tradition of Jewish weddings (and the shattering wine glass at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey"), we will stomp on the bags and explode the bulbs -- symbolizing the technological superstitions of Y2K and our wedlock with the new millennium.

At some point we'll retire to the house we've rented. Then we'll spend 1/1/00 hiking our favorite trail. It's bound to be spectacular. Point Reyes is lonesome and foggy and wild; there are often more pelicans than people. This suits me, as I often prefer pelicans to people. The best part is, the world could stumble right into the Y2K abyss -- and we'd be utterly oblivious.

That, truly, would be something to celebrate.

Jeff Greenwald is a frequent contributor to Salon Travel. His books include "Shopping for Buddhas," "The Size of the World" and "Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth."

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