Guest Senior Correspondent Jack L., Chicago IL: The restaurant is inside the elegant Paris resort on the Las Vegas Strip. There are two levels, with a large, sweeping staircase leading to the upper dining room. There’s also a bar, surrounding lounge and private dining rooms.

My appetizer was the bouche colcannon, an Irish traditional dish, with red wine braised cabbage croquettes. Next was beets, roasted with house-made ricotta cheese, lettuce, oyster mushrooms under a champagne vinaigrette, plus pumpernickel bread.

Guest Correspondent Marian McF., Fresno CA: We fly mostly on Southwest and buy the cheapest tickets. Because SW is a no-seat assignment airline, it takes a bit of strategy. At check-in, SW clerks assign passengers before flights to waiting lines marked A, B, C and D.

It’s advantageous to book boarding passes on line from 24 hours before the flight. If you’re late to get your online boarding pass just an hour before flight time, your chances are that it will be a B, C or last-to-board D pass holders.

Passengers with A passes are boarded first. If the SW flight originates in your city, A passes allow you to choose just about any seat you want. If your city is a stop-over. and passengers already aboard, as an A ticket, at least you'll have first choice of the best available seats.

Looking for something different, consider spending travel nights in strange and exotic places. Instead the traditional hotel and motel rooms, try snoozing surrounded by ice, high up a tree, in a grounded jet or locked in a former political prison.

Latvia: Karosta Prison is in Liepaja. When built in 1900, the prison and naval port base were in Imperial Russia. Then, from the 1920s it was operated by the Soviet Union until 1990. The imposing structure on the Baltic coast gives guests a taste of imprisonment.

Before going to luxury hotel rooms, they experience dank cells that are sparsely equipped with bunks or floor mattresses. Adding to the prison atmosphere, hotel employees are dressed in vintage Russian military uniforms. Arriving guests are marched to their cells.

Thoughts of my first visit to the 104-year-old Beverly Hills Hotel (9641 Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills CA) go back more than six decades. Following two years of active duty after being recalled by the Navy during the Korean War, your travel4seniors.com editor settled in Los Angeles in 1953.

Reporting at a local newspaper then didn't go much beyond paying rent and other basics, but did have benefits. One was covering events at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It had been the site of many elegant events since its opening in 1912 at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Drive. Famed movie stars of that era and the present have slept there in its luxurious suites and dined at its elegant eateries.