• See where they went

If you pay attention to the surveys about where Americans are traveling, you'd have to assume that half the country is booking a trip to Las Vegas, Orlando or Honolulu this year. And don't count out the Caribbean, Mexico or Alaska.

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A seven-night stay in Antarctica, including a trip to a penguin colony, attracted William Speidel of Greensboro and his wife, Joan. Antarctica attracted several of the readers who wrote in.
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No doubt millions will flock to these top destinations. Europe's big three — London, Paris and Rome — remain popular as well. Cruises have never been hotter.

But some intrepid travelers eschew the vacation du jour. Here , they describe their voyages:

Take James Pope of Marietta, for instance.

"I want more from a vacation than checking into a time share or boarding a ship and plopping my butt down," he wrote in response to Travel's invitation to readers to share their off-the-beaten-path experiences.

"I want to find out how the people of a country live, conduct their daily lives, [earn] their yearly income and take with me ways to remember where I've been other than pictures, and if I can, learn something that changes my lifestyle for the better."

Other readers wrote of their thirst for adventure, for discovery and for self-enrichment.

To Chile instead of St. George Island

Linda Jennings of Trion and her family decided to forgo their annual vacation on St. George Island, Fla., last summer.

"We packed up our two children, ages 10 and 12, and spent five weeks in Chile," she wrote. "We rented an apartment for a month in the beach town of Iquique and enrolled the whole family in an intensive Spanish course. Though my children didn't speak a word of Spanish, they made friends the first day they were there through the common language of soccer and a lot of hand motions."

Solitary vacations

Robert Thornton of Atlanta loves to "head out with the one who shares all my travel fantasies — me. The best solitary vacations are long hikes, either alone or with strangers I meet along the way. The best destinations are remote places where the mind wanders and the accommodations make hard memories. This requires a sturdy backpack, serious diarrhea pills and at least a little danger or much discomfort. Almost any wilderness destination will do."

His favorites? The Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, Mount Kilimanjaro and Hadrian's Wall path in England.

Of course, one man's road less traveled might be a busy highway for another. While many readers headed to remote but well-trodden destinations like Costa Rica, Peru, Alaska, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota and popular national parks, others struck for more exotic places like Borneo, Tahiti, Slovenia, Slovakia, Thailand, Cambodia and even Siberia.

To the ends of the earth

A surprising number of readers beat a path to the ends of the Earth — Antarctica and the Arctic Circle.

Antarctica may not be in danger of becoming overrun with tourists, but its icy allure was compelling for readers including William and Joan Speidel of Greensboro; Candace Reynolds of McDonough; Linda Terrill and her mother, Marguerite Oberg, of Atlanta; Conrad Fonseca of St. Simons Island; and George Rooks of Hartwell, who travels with Millie Colvin of Holly Hill, S.C.

Since Hurricane Katrina, south Louisiana has become a pretty quiet place, at least in terms of tourism. Tina Evans of Marietta decided to take advantage of the calm. Her family lived within 50 miles of the Mississippi River, but they had never taken a riverboat cruise. So recently, Evans and her sister took their mother on a mini-vacation for her 60th birthday and did just that. After cruising on the Natchez from the New Orleans Riverwalk, they drove to nearby Vacherie, La., to visit two River Road plantation homes, Oak Alley and Laura.

"We could not believe there was hardly anyone visiting these beautiful homes," she wrote. "The owners said that it had not been the same since the hurricanes. These places were hardly touched by the hurricanes."

A little unpleasantness

Naturally, the bolder the traveler, the greater the likelihood of encountering danger: Ellen Nemhauser of Atlanta was tear-gassed when a labor demonstration erupted in Bastia, Corsica.

Others run into simply unpleasant hygienic conditions (and we don't necessarily mean in underdeveloped countries). Jeanie Franco Marx of Atlanta got a big surprise in a "very fancy restaurant" in Thessaloniki, Greece. "When I went to powder my nose, lo and behold, there were no commodes; there were only holes in the gorgeous tiled floor."

Pursuing their sport

Sports and recreation ignite wanderlust in some travelers.

Mack and Beverly Hines of East Point plan vacations around sporting events. They journeyed to Tokyo for the Atlanta Falcons-Indianapolis Colts preseason exhibition football game last August and stayed for some sightseeing. In September, they caught the Falcons-Buffalo Bills in Buffalo, N.Y., and visited Niagara Falls before heading to Toronto to see the Blue Jays-Kansas City Royals baseball game.

Mariettan Chris Chen and husband David Bowen use their vacation time to run marathons all over the country. "We ran in Elma, Wash., which is about 45 minutes outside of Tacoma near Puget Sound, where there was nothing but huge trees and old gas stations. The farthest off the beaten path for us was definitely the marathons in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Portland, Maine."

Certified scuba divers Amy and Greg Norris of Marietta have logged more than 1,000 dives in 24 countries and all seven continents. "We were featured on the Discovery Channel's 'Amazing Adventures' during our ice diving expedition to the magnetic North Pole," Amy writes.

Three days of kayaking in Maine hooked Dee Peters of Alpharetta on outdoor adventure. Since the Maine trip, she and her husband have taken a multisport trip in the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska and a three-day guided lesson in white-water kayaking in Colorado. Next, it was mountain biking and rock-climbing in Moab, Utah.

Writing about it

Some adventurers have so much fun they can't resist sharing the good times with others.

Suzanna Morris of Marietta most recently visited Sri Lanka and the Maldives. She's been traveling around the world (she's up to 87 countries) since she was 2, and now she publishes her travel journals at www.mytrips.com.

Keith Martin of Woodstock spent most of last year on a working vacation at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, followed by a month of backpacking on the South Island of New Zealand and "a meandering journey home for the holidays." He's heading out soon for a long-term backpacking trek through Mexico and Central and South America. You can follow his travels at www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/explorer_keith.

Niki Collins-Queen's vacations include "a five-month over 450-mile hitchhike on three different sailboats in the Bahamas and a 10-day 100-mile canoe trip on the Wilderness Waterway in the Everglades." Her journeys inspired a book, "Earth, the Forgotten Temple" (Impala Press, $12.95). Read more about her vacations at www.authorsden.com/nikicollinsqueen (under News).

Not just for the young

Taking the road less traveled isn't just for the young. Gloria Kelly of Lilburn is 79 and her husband, Thomas, is 80, and since 1993, they've traveled to Scandinavia, China, Russia, Iceland, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Turkey and Greece.

"What I want older people to realize is that you can still dream and plan and see parts of the world that you've always wanted to see," she wrote. "Do your research, ask for recommendations from friends and find a good tour operator and buy travel insurance and then open up your mind and go forward."

Although Glower Jones' illness slowed down him and his wife, Johanna, for a while, she says they're back to "traveling even more and with renewed energy to make up for the year we lost."

The Atlanta couple have traveled all over the world, taking the back roads and seeking out villages where tourists rarely set foot. "All this and more were dreams of children who loved geography when the fourth-grade book was all we thought we'd ever see," Johanna writes. "Next is Iceland this summer, just because it is there, and we have yet to drive across it."

Of course, with their name — Jones — they can never escape the Joneses. In fact, they went looking for them in Wales.

"Oh, once we drove all over Wales looking for ancestors, but they were all Joneses in Wales, and they thought we were crazy to be looking for Joneses."