The Warwick Hotel, 401 Lenora St., (800) 426-9280, 229 rooms in the middle of downtown. Expensive.

Many other hotels, grouped by location, can be found through the Seattle-King County Convention & Visitors Bureau, phone (206) 461-5800. You also can find out about discount programs through the Web site.

A clearinghouse for hotels, inns, bed and breakfasts and other accommodation is Pacific Reservation Service, phone (800) 684-2932.

For quick-hit dining advice try the Zagat Survey guide to Seattle and the Seattle Weekly's readers' "best of Seattle" picks for 1999.

I'm looking for a reasonable place to stay in New York in November. Any suggestions?

New York has plenty of hotel rooms, but at this time of year, conventions and the approaching holidays can make it seem like every one of them is booked, at least for business-class rooms, which are in greatest demand. If you wait until the last minute to book, you'll end up paying a premium and may not get your first choice of location. In fact, during November and December, there is not much discounting available even if you book well in advance.

The New York Convention & Visitors Bureau site has a search engine for selecting hotels by price range and location. You can also check with brokers such as Quikbook and Central Reservation Service.

The CVB also promotes a Peak Season Hotel Hotline at (800) 846-7666 designed to help people find lodging during the fall and holiday seasons. When using that line, though, callers should know that it's operated by Hotel Reservations Network, the biggest online hotel broker, which promotes itself as offering rooms at a discount. A story in the August 1999 Consumer Reports Travel Letter reported on a test of several brokers, including HRN, and found that HRN sometimes charged more, not less, than if you called the hotels directly.

However, brokers such as HRN sometimes have blocks of rooms available even after a hotel reports being fully booked, so they can be worth checking even if the price is not discounted. They also can save you the effort of calling many hotels looking for a room. (Always ask whether a broker charges a booking fee or cancellation fees.)

Another holiday twist is that many of the better New York hotels have minimum booking requirements -- at least two days, sometimes more. I monitored this last year and discovered that single-night bookings do become available at the last minute if they haven't managed to fill all their rooms.

Friends have invited me to the Apostle Islands of Wisconsin. What can you tell me about that area?

The Apostles are a cluster of islands in Lake Superior at the tip of the Bayfield Peninsula in northernmost Wisconsin. They supposedly got their name from an early French missionary who'd spotted a dozen of them, but actually there are about 21 islands in the group. They are undeveloped and are frequented by boaters and nature lovers. Among the group are half a dozen lighthouses and about a dozen docks.

The biggest of the islands, and the one that gets the most tourists, is Madeline Island. It has fewer than 150 year-round residents at La Pointe and is about 20 minutes by ferry from Bayfield, on the mainland. It has its own airport. Madeline Island offers golfing, camping, hiking, bicycling and a number of historic attractions, including an Indian burial ground and the Madeline Island Museum, commemorating its fur-trading past. The area is designated the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Free national park primitive campsites are provided on 18 of the islands; Madeline Island offers some rentable campsites with hookups, too.

From June through October there are narrated boat excursions of the Apostles that leave from Bayfield.

For further information, contact the Apostle Island National Lakeshore Headquarters, Route 1, Box 4, Bayfield, Wis. 54814; phone (715) 779-3397.

The lakeshore is open all year. The headquarters visitor center is open daily from May through October from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Memorial Day to Labor Day) and Monday to Friday November through April from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.

Revisiting a previous Travel Advisor Q&A:

An earlier column addressed the question of whether London tourists could routinely go up into the Tower of Big Ben (the answer is no). But reader Mike Morley in Toronto once made it into the tower courtesy of a relative who worked for a member of Parliament. Here's his account:

There is no "lift" in the tower, so we ascend a narrow, winding staircase stopping every 20 steps or so for breath and snippets of history from our guide, an entertaining old Cockney fellow who has conducted tours there for years. The inside of the tower is stone, as you might expect, and lighting is provided by small windows cut into the brick and by electric lights.

Toward the start of the climb, you pass through a small cell in which prisoners have been kept from time to time right up into this century. Leaning over to gaze down the center of the tower as you ascend farther, you see only the spiral of iron railings about the stairs you've just climbed, and a rope (used for raising and lowering lunch, according to our guide) disappearing into the darkness.

The clock faces are reached first, about twice the height of a man and made of numerous translucent panes of German glass in an iron framework in a chamber below the clockworks and bells. Behind each face, on the opposite side of the aisle, is a large iron frame and reflectors for the electric bulbs used to illuminate the clock face at night -- four in all. The arms of each clock face are driven by long shafts protruding from the center of the tower and connected to machinery descended from the next level up. The bells (there are five if I recall correctly, including Big Ben) are in a room behind the clockworks, and are accessible by a catwalk. This is where we stood to hear the chimes.

Tours comprise about eight to 10 people at most. We were sternly warned to keep silent for two full minutes at the hour, owing to the BBC microphones positioned about the room, and we were informed, as we stood about the clockworks, of how they had shattered and sprayed the room with shrapnel in the 1970s when a 5-ton counterweight fell unrestrained to the bottom of its shaft and spun the works out of control. It was amusing to see old English coins (threepence and such) being used to "trim" the pendulum so as to keep the clockworks accurate. According to lore, an extra set of old coins is kept on hand as spares. The view of London and the river from the tower is terrific; shooting photos inside the tower is forbidden.

All in all, this was an enjoyable experience. Nevertheless, for those who are interested in time and famous timepieces, there is an even more engaging date to be had (so to speak) at the Greenwich Observatory in east London. (Though I suppose many would disagree merely because the Tower is off-limits, and therefore forbidden fruit.)

At Greenwich, one can view the very clocks engineered and constructed in the 18th century by John Harrison, who solved one of the most vexing and costly scientific problems of past ages: how to keep accurate time at sea to enable the calculation of longitude. (Harrison's life is chronicled in the engaging and easy-reading "Longitude" by Dava Sobel.)

The observatory is situated on top of the Prime Meridian; one can step from the east to the west side of the earth in a trice. The Docklands Light Railway and a quick trip through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, London's oldest foot tunnel under the Thames (an experience in itself), make this a simple outing from anywhere in the city. Greenwich offers as well a lovely park, the Maritime Museum and the Cutty Sark (in dry dock) close by. Engineering and science buffs like me also enjoy the fact that the trip back out of Greenwich on the Docklands line takes you down one of the deepest tunnels of the London Underground.

Sir Isaac Newton labored at the observatory, as did astronomers Flamsteed, Maskelyne and a host of others, and of course the observatory itself was originally designed by Christopher Wren. Having been to both, if I had to take my choice again, I'd take Greenwich over Big Ben -- not least for the odd little wooden chair/bench, still intact and unassuming as ever, upon which Newton himself reclined to observe the heavens.