Got ¤? Want that Euro symbol to show up when you type? On Windows machines key in Ctrl+Alt+4 and on the Macintosh it's Opt+Shift+2

Reporter Alice Furlaud bids adieu to the franc, the beloved currency of France, on NPR.

The Eurotrash web site keeps track of the day to day details of living with the new Euro currency, like this one:

Tuesday, December 18, 2001

Euro shrinks Gummi Bears
Gummi Bears, a.k.a. "Bärlis," now cost 10 pfennig each in Germany. A Bärli will cost 5 euro cents next year, which is 9.8 pfennigs. So Haribo, the manufacturer, is making them a little bit smaller to keep up the price-weight ratio without raising prices. But in France and some other countries, the bears will get bigger.

Where's George? Track those mysterious dollar bills wherever they go.

Where's Willy? Track those Canadian bills, too.

E D I T O R I A L

Passages, and three moronic travel stories...

B O O K  R E V I E W

Mercifully underwrought, love of the Arctic shines in the magnificent Rowing to Latitude.

Shoestring travel is fine, if one has actual shoestrings. We put Peter Greenberg "the Travel Detective" to task on a last minute ticket, leading to the minute-by-minute diary of the expedition to get a last minute cheap airfare to San Francisco.

F E A T U R E S

Attracting a mate? Don't ask the diminishing Western grebe for tips on cool moves as McBee investigates the theme of "Do You Think I'm Sexy?" Uhhh...

Likewise, don't ask the pigeon for dating tips because we can tell you how that will turn out....

Gail retires her famous and well-traveled shoes. It's a poignant day, indeed.

So you think flying is bad? Dave McBee finds something so much worse.

Jeremy Hart's honeymoon trip to Morocco and Spain discovers through his new bride that people who claim that they don't like to travel light probably haven't ever tried it.

There are several ways to experience the Grand Canyon. From the rim, or the highly regulated downriver, or... Mike McCrea does the Grand Canyon Solo (and Backward)

Hal Streckert heads for Mt. Blanc Madness.

A L M A N A C

New ways to freeze stylishly, and a truly dopey way to blow $885.

L E T T E R S

A reader from American Samoa takes exception at the erroneous reference to "Soccer Hooliganism," and the good people at Landmark Trust respond to last issue's book review.

T H E  C A S U A L  C O O K

Luncheon for Two at an Airport Near You

E D I T O R I A L

ICE - MAKE MINE A SINGLE

We're always looking for unique destinations here at Get Lost Magazine and the weirder it is the better we like it. However, we at Get Lost Magazine aren't any more recession-proof than the rest of the country, and so regretfully cancelled our upcoming trip in February to Quebec City's Carnaval and a side-trip to skate in Ottawa. Perhaps this wasn't the best year, even Quebec is experiencing an unusually non-cold winter.

Recession or not, lots of people will descend on these Canadian cities to enjoy what's there of winter. In the course of our research, we ran across something that made us flinch in recognition that we're getting older and creakier and less tolerant of capricious experiment: The Ice Hotel. There's one in Sweden (with heavy Abolut Vodka sponsorship overtones) and there's one in Quebec (with heavy Abolut Vodka sponsorship overtones). From all descriptions they're beautiful, blue, glistening, transparent, dazzling, bringing to mind the splendors of the frozen house in "Dr. Zhivago." The drinks at the Ice Bar (like a bilberry thing served in an icecube, pictured above) seem wonderful and certainly worth a trip to experience. But sleeping at the hotel is another thing. The reality of trying to sleep on a great platform of ice suitable for a cryogenics lab, no matter how well insulated, is probably hard going. The indignity of paying $180 CAN each for the privelege is just... lunacy. Proof? In the Ice Hotel picture gallery is a family, Mom and Dad and toddler, which says it all. The family is wrapped up in fur rugs sitting on their ice bed in a crystaline-white ice chamber, and the adults look happy and the child looks justifiably dismayed, picture after picture. The child is probably wondering how one sleeps while breathing air at 20F.

Here's my plan: Pay heed to the child's healthy bewilderment, get plastered at the Ice Bar, sit in the sauna, then hie back to charming Quebec City to a historic hotel (at a fraction of the price) made of non-melting material and wallow in goose down and linen and croissant and hot chocloate - and watch the maniacs rolling in the snow from the window. Our advice: Enjoy the Frozen North. Just don't get all weird about it. And if you do, Please, oh please send us pictures.

AND WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN? LOST?

You may have noticed we'be been missing for a while. It's not so surprising that from time to time we all fall into life's crevasses (sometimes dragging a whole string of trekkers along into it). Winter's good for that, especially here in Seattle where the dark and the rain and the rain and the dark can drive the cheeriest disposition into a funk. Team the grim weather with the second highest unemployment in the US, and you end up with a perversely motivating climate. One can mope around a bit (which we did quite stylishly) and one can also realize that it's time to move, change jobs, dump the old, embrace the new, and so on. It's easy to overdo the dumping part, and it's the sort of fun everyone should indulge in once in a while. One day I am looking at a blank week in my organizer, and next thing I know I'm putting a line through both pages with the cryptic note to "prepare to vanish." Next day the Salvation Army scores a ton of good stuff, the recycling guys get hernias, the trash collecting guys earn their wages, odds and ends mysteriously appear on the doorsteps of friends, and there I am with not much more than a change of clothes and a bunch of empty furniture.

THE TRAVEL VIDEO STALKER

One of the things I decided to feng shui from my household was a box of unsold "The Road to Pullman" video tapes, a road trip odyssey crossing Washington state from Seattle to Pullman, the home of Washington State University. I thought that it would be better and faster to give them away than to try to sell them. The lovely Jean Robb, star of said video, told me that she had dropped a copy in her local neighborhood public library drop box, and it showed up in the system, and whenever she checks into it, discovers that the video is frequently checked out, which means lots of people are watching it. If they'll watch one tape, I calculated, think of how many people would watch, say, 30 tapes. So the ever-ready Marcia Tapp volunteered to put the remaining copies of the tape into the trunk of her car, and help me hit every city and county and college library in the greater Seattle area dropping tapes into drop-boxes.

We put tapes in a local video store drop box, left one sitting on a bus shelter bench, and then went to the library drop. The sign there said that it was not for unauthorized use, probably meaning no stink bombs, drink cups, hamburger bags, or unwanted hamsters. After the heady experience of dropping videotapes into about a dozen library drop boxes Saint Nicholas-style, we were driving to yet another one and found ourselves at a stoplight behind a red mini-van with a "Cougar Mom" sticker, a WSU themed license plate, and a similarly enthusiastic license plate frame. "Follow her!" I told Marcia, and we did, right into a grocery store parking lot. We waited for her to go into the store, then left a tape on her windshield.

- Leslie Strom Your Ici Editor-in-Chief

STAFFERS' NOTABLE TRANSITIONS

Martha "Mom" Strom's Casual Cook column has been picked up in a slightly more dignified form in the Flathead lake weekly newspaper.

Talia Soghomonian is at the New York Times in Paris and will reappear next issue with more on her fair city.

Ilan Bernet retired from the reserves in Israel and he and his family plan to move to England for a few years.

Paul Izbicki has moved from Boston to Knoxville, and seems to like it pretty well. We persist in hounding him for barbecue recipes.

Marcia Tapp nearly convinced several of us to go to Thailand. She may succeed yet.

John Burdick (of Long Beach fame) launched his very first Dumb-Ass trip last month with a fast drive to Vancouver to take a single photograph of a single building, then drove all the way to Los Angeles to show it to some people.

Photographer Cheryl Conlon and her husband had a baby girl and moved to Germany.

Your Editor's article on the Long Beach Kite Festival was picked up by 2Camels.com.