TRIPPING THROUGH 1998

In my den, 1998 will be the year of the Italian snow dome, the Iranian paisley embroidered thing, the Laura Ingalls Wilder salt-and-pepper shakers and the Mexican wire scorpion.

Over the 74 days I spent on the road for the newspaper this year, I gathered those souvenirs along with more than a few others--postcards from the National Portrait Gallery in London, melted Mardi Gras beads from New Orleans and a generic red tie (for cruise-ship dining) from the Frankfurt airport.

I guess I’m cheap. Aside from gifts for others, I can’t remember buying any trinkets that cost as much as a single month’s basic service from Century Cable. Yet these pieces hold great value, even the ones my wife quickly conceals in kitchen drawers. These artifacts keep past trips from slipping below sight in the dim swamp that is my memory. My accumulation may be larger than the average curio trove--in almost seven years as a professional tourist, I’ve logged 479 road days and slept in 261 different lodgings--but we all want to keep such memories alive.

Compiling a year-end best-and-worst list of my travel experiences, happily, has the same effect. Like souvenirs, lists are tools for preserving that sense of discovery and adventure that travel ought to yield. The longer you can keep an adventure alive, the less time you waste kvetching about your cable bills.

I have only meager material evidence--two tiny bottles of fancy tequila--from the most comfortable hotel room and sleekest swimming pool I found all year, about 800 miles south of Los Angeles at the Ventanas al Paraiso in San Jose del Cabo, Baja California. But not everyone at home should try it: This was also the most expensive room of the year--normally $475 per night, on discount at $275 during my off-season visit.

To remind me of the year’s best view, I have only photos: the snowy molars of the Bugaboo Mountains, as seen on a summer morning from the Bugaboo Lodge outside Banff, Alberta. That trip (which I wrote about last March) featured helicopter drop-offs amid glaciers, lakes and stony slopes--some of the most enjoyable hiking I’ve ever done, even if some people think that being flown in makes it cheating.

I have no tokens at all to remind me of 1998’s most squalid lodging, a vermin- and lizard-occupied cinder-block box in Tabas, Iran. I spent one night there, bags zipped up tight, shoes elevated and inverted, with an empty desert on the horizon in all directions. This was not far from where the U.S. helicopters were shot down in their 1979 hostage-rescue attempt. (At $10 nightly, it also was my cheapest lodging all year.)

But let me get back to the physical evidence. I like the Italian snow-dome because it’s the perfect antithesis to what I loved about the island of Capri: Here is a rocky green island off Naples that would be striking if uninhabited, but it is all the more remarkable for holding the well-tended homes, shops and gardens of Europe’s rich and famous. If you look beyond the crowds, it’s the most sure-fire honeymoon destination I saw all year. To remember it, I have, along with a bottle of locally made Limoncello (lemon liqueur), this piece of tacky plastic depicting snowfall in the Blue Grotto.

The Iranian paisley thing, an embroidered doily of red and green and purple, is not tacky at all. It is, like the towering, detail-rich mosaic mosques admired by the U.S. tour group I followed around that country in May, a marvel of patience and nimble finger work. Wandering the bazaar around Esfahan’s 18th century main square, surrounded by carpet merchants and sacks of spices and miniature paintings and banging coppersmiths, was a singular adventure. And the workaday Iranians there and elsewhere proved the most hospitable hosts I encountered anywhere. And this includes the genial staffers at the Homa hotels in Mashhad and Shiraz, which boasted the year’s catchiest hotel slogan: DOWN WITH USA, in foot-high brass letters above the lobby entrances.

The salt-and-pepper shakers purchased in Pepin, Wis.--possibly the sleepiest little town of the year--came after an unexpected discovery by my wife, Mary Frances: The Laura Ingalls Wilder Birthplace Museum, a shrine to the author of “Little House on the Prairie.” Mary Frances spotted the museum about 10 minutes after 5 p.m., as the clerk was closing up. Mary Frances, suddenly bubbling over with childhood “Little House” flashbacks, talked her way in the door, and soon we were $40 poorer and the gift shop’s inventory was substantially depleted.

The wire scorpion cost $3 in Loreto, Baja California, at the end of a January kayaking trip mand the year’s happiest camping--two nights on a small sand-and-mangrove island. Stepping out of our tents in the morning, we found paw tracks all around our campsite. With fresh water rare and campers fairly frequent, the local coyotes had learned to creep up on campers in the wee hours and lick the dew from their tents.

Best reading on the road: “Longitude,” Dava Sobel’s historical account of timekeeping and marine navigation (consumed during my trip to Greenwich, England, the global capital of timekeeping); Sandra Cisneros’ “Woman Hollering Creek” (tales of Mexican American life that I read a few miles from the border in Arizona); and Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm,” a true story of death amid 100-foot waves and 100-knot winds off New England (which I read on the Baja kayak trip amid 6-inch swells and 5-knot winds).

The most miserable moment--actually several moments--was in Naples, at approximately 9 p.m. on April 21, on an elevator in the Jolly Ambassador Hotel downtown. The trouble began on the 30th floor (dining room) and persisted through the 19th (my room). While I was going down, my dinner was not, and I really wish there hadn’t been people waiting at the elevator doors on the 24th and 23rd floors.

Places I need to see again: Barcelona (in one day, I managed a once-over of the Picasso museum, a climb around the unfinished Gaudi cathedral, a few tapas and a promenade down the great pedestrian way of Las Ramblas, but there’s so much more); Bisbee, Ariz. (I had only a few hours in this former mining town gone Bohemian, but it looked like a great headquarters for a southern Arizona desert exploration); coastal Ireland (in two quick visits over the last decade, including one in September, I’ve never gotten free to see the south or west coasts); and California’s northernmost coast (in a four-day survey of redwood country, I got only the briefest glimpse of the dramatic shoreline north of Arcata).

To remind me of that Northern California trip, by the way, I have a plastic pen with a little diorama scene of a car and a tree. Upend the pen, and the car drives through the tree.

Worst time to be in a great city: A 90-degree June day in Florence. The city center and principal sights were gridlocked with tourists on foot, including 1,750 (among them myself) who had been bused in from a cruise ship at Livorno and given about six hours to do the town. The humidity was close to 100%. The wait to see Michelangelo’s David was hopeless. I climbed the several hundred steps of the bell tower overlooking the red-tiled Duomo. The climb was exhausting, but at least the crowds at the top were a bit thinner.

Libation of the year: tequila and Tang on a remote Baja beach at dusk. My favorite appetizer was an apres-ski, three-mushroom (chanterelle, shiitake and oyster) appetizer on a November night at the Tamarack Lodge in Mammoth Lakes. Favorite dinner: ravioli Caprese at La Campannina on via le Botteghe on Capri in April. Most excessively trendy dinner: nouveau pub cuisine at the North Pole, in Greenwich, England, with a goldfish circling above us in a water-filled chandelier. Loudest meal: Terence Conran’s enormous and American-filled Mezzo restaurant on Wardour Street in London’s West End. Most humiliating meal: black coffee and dry cereal at 7 a.m. at a campground in Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, following the midnight theft of my milk by a skunk.

Places I don’t need to see again: Tombstone, Ariz. (here’s the theme park, but where’s the town?); downtown Cabo San Lucas (time-share hustlers, American drunks, escalating prices and minimal infrastructure despite high hotel taxes); Monte Carlo (if you’re not gambling and you’re not driving a funny little car at life-threatening speeds, you’re probably glancing at your watch a lot).

The grandest travel moment: Naples, early June. The Grand Princess, the largest cruise ship in the world and just-completed product of Italy’s Fincantieri shipyard, was tied up at the port. Most of its 2,600 passengers were at the rails on the top decks. Mt. Vesuvius loomed just beyond the city, and the recorded voice of tenor Andrea Bocelli soared over a stately rhythm. A few hundred Neapolitans had come down to the docks to see the handiwork of their countrymen. They stood on the docks of the historic sea-faring city, and when the ship finally lurched toward the open sea, they burst into applause.

It’s a fine memory. To help preserve it, I have a plastic see-through paperweight from the Princess public relations team. It features a little Princess ship inside, bobbing in artificially blue water. Upend the paperweight just so, and you can make the little ship point skyward, just like the Titanic in its final moments.

All right, so maybe that’s not what the Princess public relations folks intended. But that’s what makes travel endlessly interesting: You can plan all you like, but you’ll never know all the possibilities waiting out there in the world.