Check your passport  Is it due to expire soon? You may be denied entry into certain countries if your passport will expire within three to six months of your ticketed date of return. Get it renewed if you’ll be cutting it close. Stash photocopies of important travel documents  Whether at home or abroad, anybody can experience unexpected problems from loss or theft. If you have a copy of a valuable document, it’s easier to replace the original. In fact, make two sets of photocopies of your passport and railpass or car-rental voucher. (For debit and credit cards, just record the numbers, rather than [ ... ]

Daniel Peebles for The New York Times For our annual U.S. issue, our theme is the open road. We asked a selection of national correspondents for their favorite routes, Guy Trebay discussed the joys of driving, and the Frugal Traveler shared his budget-friendly journey in the South. Now we want to hear about your favorite road trips. Share your favorite trips in the comments section below, or on Twitter, using the hashtag #faveroadtrip; we’ll collect our favorite tweets and post them on this blog.

A Virginia-based Piedmont Airlines pilot was arrested today at the Buffalo airport for trying to bring a loaded .357 Magnum aboard a LaGuardia-bound flight. Authorities said he had flown seven other flights since Wednesday with the gun in his bag, the Buffalo News says. Brett Dieter, 52, of Barbersville, Va., was charged after a Transportation Security Administration screener spotted what appeared to be a handgun concealed in his carry-on this morning. The bag apparently did not pass through X-ray screening Wednesday in Charlottesville, Va., where he piloted a flight to LaGuardia. Piedmont is a subsidiary of US Airways. Police at the Buffalo Niagara [ ... ]

JON CARAMANICA “We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 2,” the 2005 mixtape from the hip-hop duo Clipse, is all forward motion, dark, anxiety-inducing verses atop surging, snarling beats. It makes you feel as if you’re on the run — as good a reason to be in the car as any. NATE CHINEN Locomotion was always a guiding principle for the jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery, who had the Cadillac of rhythm sections on the 1965 club date that became “Smokin’ at the Half Note” by the Wynton Kelly Trio and Montgomery. The entire album [ ... ]

Looks like people are still heading to Las Vegas. According to the Las Vegas Sun, visitor volume is expected to grow in 2012, which would be the third straight year of increases. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority said this week that it expects to collect 5% more in hotel room tax revenue in 2013 than this year. “The increase is at a more moderate level than we’ve seen, but it’s still growth,” the authority’s vice president of finance, Rana Lacer, told the Sun. ALSO ONLINE:  Vegas: Sahara renovation plan gets financing VEGAS GUIDE:  How to plan the perfect trip Room tax collections rose 14% [ ... ]

CaliforniaRoute 1 The Pacific Coast Highway, which runs along much of the California coast, is probably one of the most iconic stretches of road in the country, memorialized in film, sought out by tourists. My favorite stretch is in Malibu, 25 miles or so of highway that will reward you with a sunny blur of California coast: beaches, mountains, ocean, wetlands and surfers. Driving north out of Santa Monica on Route 1 (or the P.C.H. as it known here), the highway’s charms are hidden at [ ... ]

MORE: A-list players share their favorite road cities SPRING TRAINING: Star players name favorite spots MORE: Expert picks and themed lists Fenway Park  Boston  Baseball’s smallest, oldest park celebrates its 100th birthday this season. Although modernized with the addition of bleachers over the Green Monster left field wall, and an HD video screen, it retains its historic atmosphere, Horn says. Many fans remember when pitcher Roger Clemens electrified the crowd by striking out a record-setting 20 players in 1986. 877-733-7699; bostonredsox.com Yankee Stadium  Bronx, N.Y.  Just 3 years old, the new Yankee Stadium already has seen milestone moments. In the first season in [ ... ]

But this is to be expected when you’re driving a small studio apartment, or, as I began to call it, my “rig.” One man in a rural California border town even called it cute. He said it reminded him of a Doritos delivery truck. The rig was a 19-foot-long, gleaming white, class-C motor home — an RV that I rented from Cruise America, the country’s largest recreational vehicle rental company; 800-RV-4RENT was prominently emblazoned across the exterior, as were colorful images of America’s national parks and natural patrimony. [ ... ]

The new sci-fi screen version of the popular board game Battleship may be awash in negative reviews, but its leading lady – the mothballed USS Missouri, now a museum in Honolulu – is making the most of her Hollywood turn. Starting this weekend, the battleship turned memorial that hosted the World War II surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay in September, 1945 will offer a 50-minute “Battleship the Movie Tour” that includes Broadway, Engine Room #4, Combat Engagement Center (CEC) and other key on-board filming locations. Tours are limited to 10 participants and cost $47 for adults or $23 for children 10-12, [ ... ]

Gabi Gaffron for Mister Kitchen Amsterdam The Weekend of the Rolling Kitchens will take place Thursday through Sunday in Amsterdam’s popular urban park, Westergasfabriek. Seventy-five mobile trucks will serve their own distinctive cuisines. A few will offer delicacies from geese to crayfish, the Breton sushi wagon will dish out sliced French galettes with raw fish, and Mister Kitchen’s Rabarcello Restaurant will serve three courses of rhubarb and fluorescent Rabarcello liqueur. Of course, there are trucks with more conventional fare like pizza and lobster. But food isn’t everything. Every kitchen is challenged to provide some kind of live, musical or theatrical entertainment. So on the [ ... ]

Frontier Airlines’ retreat from the hubs it inherited in its merger with Midwest Airlines is nearly complete. The most dramatic downsizing comes in Milwaukee, where Frontier’s latest round of cuts will leave it with just seven daily flights there by June 1. As part of that, Frontier is ending service from Milwaukee to Columbus (Ohio), Indianapolis, Nashville, New York LaGuardia, Omaha and Pittsburgh. Frontier’s wind-down of its onetime Milwaukee hub has happened with staggering speed. ALSO ONLINE:  Dark days at Mitchell: Frontier cuts mean higher fares, fewer flights (Journal Sentinel) The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes it was just in May of 2011 that “Frontier had [ ... ]

Mille Miglia Rome Four wheels, a classic body and beautiful countryside made a magical weekend back in the days of roadsters and romance. For those who love to relive the classics à la Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn in “Two for the Road,” Thursday through Sunday hundreds of vintage and classic cars will race through Italy in the Mille Miglia rally. The route is a 1,000-mile circuit from Brescia to Rome and back, the same as the original rally, which took place in 1927 and then became an annual event until 1957. Revived in the 1970s, the road race has become increasingly popular. [ ... ]

Passengers on one delayed Air Canada flight got an unexpected treat: an impromptu performance by a self-proclaimed “Balkan-Klezmer-Gypsy-Party-Punk Super-Band.” The CBC says the group’s performance came on a delayed Toronto-to-Frankfurt flight on Wednesday. “Our plane got delayed 20 minutes so we got out our instruments and played an impromptu 4 song set for the packed plane,” the group says in posting the video to YouTube. Lemon Bucket Orkestra says it was flying to Europe to go to Romania to play a gig in Bucharest. “We were right in our element,” the group adds in its YouTube post. “(A)ll the funds for our 14 [ ... ]

Friday 4 p.m.1. EVERY DAY IS MARKET DAY For an immersion in Napa’s decadent food culture, start at the 40,000-square-foot Oxbow Public Market (610 and 644 First Street, Napa; 707-226-6529; oxbowpublicmarket.com). Try the Sweetwater oysters on the half shell (from $15 for six) at Hog Island Oyster Bar (707-251-8113; hogislandoysters.com). Then order a scoop of the organic cardamom or lemon cookie ice cream at Three Twins (707-257-8946; threetwinsicecream.com) or pick up one of Kara’s Cupcakes (707-258-2253; karascupcakes.com), in flavors like sweet s’mores and peanut butter [ ... ]