On her 50th birthday, Diane Czapor sat in the Las Vegas Excalibur Hotel & Casino at 3:30 in the morning, enjoying one last go-round with a one-armed bandit before her early flight back to Pittsburgh.

When she slipped her Player's Card into the Get Lucky nickel slot machine, it greeted her with: "Happy Birthday, Diane!" She smiled, sipped her mimosa and thought, "Turning 50 isn't all that bad."

We don't tend to treat birthdays between 21 and 50 as any more special than a comfortable pair of old shoes. However, once we reach a benchmark birthday, we increasingly have the wisdom, relative wealth and good sense to celebrate right, with great fanfare and flourish.

Whether sharing a farmhouse in Tuscany with friends for a few weeks or flying family to Ireland to spend a week in a castle, birthday travel is on the rise.

"Between birthdays and 25th wedding anniversaries, I've seen an increase in that type of travel in the past two years," says Vicki Abel, president and owner of Odyssey Travel Inc. in Murrysville.

Ms. Czapor took the trip with three friends -- Karen Bowling, Cheryl Maholage and Jodi Muchow. They had decided years earlier to go somewhere together before they were 50. For three days each year -- Jan. 5-7 -- the four women are the same age. So they planned their Vegas trip for Jan. 4-8, during which time one of them would turn 49, two of them were already 49 and one of them would turn 50.

"It was wonderful," says Ms. Czapor of North Huntingdon. "I hit for $149 the day I left. ... There's no better way than spending your 50th birthday with friends."

The ladies enjoyed the dancing fountains in front of the Bellagio; the neon glitz of the Vegas Strip; the architectural wonder that is Hoover Dam; the tastefully erotic and entertaining all-male revue, the "Thunder from Down Under"; insulting waiters at Dick's Last Resort; and champagne brunches at the castle-shaped Excalibur.

They even took in the Jan. 6 Steelers playoff game at Play of the Day Sports Bar & Grill, a Las Vegas Steeler Nation bar.

"It was packed with relocated Steeler fans," says Ms. Bowling of North Versailles. "That was a blast."

The four ladies researched their trip online back in the fall, then booked it through a travel agency. Now, they're thinking about planning a trip for their 60th.

"I can't tell you what we had to leave there," says Ms. Bowling, who played the You Can't Lose quarter slot machine. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, after all. "We had a great time. ... I'd go back in a heartbeat."

Some plan out-of-the-ordinary or extravagant birthday trips for themselves, and some have such trips lovingly and sneakily thrust upon them.

A little more than 10 years ago, Nancy Garvin took her husband, Bill, out to dinner one Saturday night in July at The Nest in Jeannette for his 50th birthday. Once seated, she sent him back to the car to get her eyeglasses. When he returned and opened his menu, he found two plane tickets to Bermuda.

"When are we doing this?" he asked.

"Tomorrow morning," she said.

"Nancy, I can't do this. I have to schedule a vacation."

"It's all been taken care of."

Six months earlier, she had arranged with his supervisor for him to have the week off.

"What are we going to do?"

"We're going to play golf."

The next morning, she whisked him off to the airport, complete with suitcases she already had packed for him. The airline ticket agent, who learned Mr. Garvin knew her husband years ago, upgraded their seats to first class in honor of his birthday, and off the couple flew to the Fairmont Hamilton Princess Hotel, a luxury resort in Bermuda.

Mrs. Garvin arranged for a special birthday cake and flowers in advance. The maitre d' and servers were in on the secret. When Mr. Garvin ordered a shrimp cocktail, they served him a dinner plate full of 50 shrimp. They sang "Happy Birthday" when they delivered his birthday cake, aglow with candles.

In addition to sightseeing and moped riding, the Garvins played a different golf course each day, and she had the tee times already arranged when they arrived at each course.

"It was a lot of fun but a lot of stress planning it," says Mrs. Garvin, 57, of Greensburg. "It was too long to hold a secret."

Mr. Garvin was impressed and amazed with his wife's covert, detailed planning. He was completely surprised.

"It was quite a vacation ... the top of them all," says Mr. Garvin, 60. "It was such a rush. .... I was just grinning from ear to ear. It was spectacular. I have a very special lady in my life."

The birthdays that most commonly get the big travel treatment are 50 and 60, travel experts say.

Older people tend to be working and have pretty good cash flow, says Paul Busang, owner of Gulliver's Travels in Shadyside.

He recalled planning a 60th birthday trip to Paris for a client, complete with a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel George V and a car and driver for side trips to Normandy and the Champagne region. He also has coordinated an 80th birthday trip to Ireland and a 70th birthday trip to Egypt for clients.

"One of the ones we did, a guy who turned 50, he took a bunch of friends to the Ritz-Carlton in San Juan and they had a ball," Mr. Busang says. "He started planning that thing in earnest about 18 months in advance."

And that's his biggest advice for anyone planning such a trip.

"The further out you can start making those reservations, the more rewarding the experience is going to be," he says.

Advance notice gives people in the group ample opportunity to make airline reservations and plan side trips before or after the birthday event.

For group travel, hotel rooms can be reserved almost two years in advance and flight reservations can be made up to 11 months in advance, says Odyssey Travel's Ms. Abel, who has planned luxury birthday getaways to Royal Hideaway Playacar in Mexico's Riviera Maya and chateaus in the south of France for clients.

She strongly recommends people plan the trip they want, then invite others along. Avoid planning a trip to accommodate others, who may back out.

And make sure to have a passport, she adds.

Although far from middle age and lacking the budget of the older set, Tim Sams, of Jupiter, Fla., and his childhood friend, Erin Shaw, of Falls Church, Va., in November took a four-day, three-hour car trip up the West Coast for his 30th and her 29th birthdays.

They met in San Francisco, visiting Coit Tower atop Telegraph Hill and traveling the switchback curves of Lombard Street. They drove across the Golden Gate to Napa wine country, then headed up the Pacific Coast Highway.

"The [California] coastline -- it was so agrarian," says Ms. Shaw, who grew up in Butler. "It just got more and more beautiful the farther north we went."

They saw the larger-than-life statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox in Klamath, Calif., traveled through Redwood National Park and up through Portland and Tillamook, Ore.; Aberdeen, Wash. -- posing with a 30-pound salmon along the way -- and into Seattle.

"Everywhere we went [in Seattle], the place was alive with activity," says Mr. Sams, who also grew up in Butler. "We stayed downtown, went to dinner, saw Taj Mahal at Jazz Alley."

They walked from the stadiums to the Seattle Center and had dinner near Pike Place Market. They took in a Steelers-Jets game at Floyd's Place, a mostly Steeler Nation sports bar in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood.

"The Seattle fans were belligerent drunks, and they were trying to pick fights with us," Ms. Shaw says. "They were chanting 'JETS.' "

With the exception of the bad football blood, they enjoyed the Emerald City. He took a red-eye flight back to Florida on a Sunday and was back at work the next day.

"It was a great trip and completely worth it," he says. "I'd never been to the West Coast. It's beautiful."

Those interested in birthday travel, with a small "t," may want to take a page from Patty Mackiewicz's playbook.

She's planning a six-hour adventure on the Pittsburgh Party Bus for her 50th birthday in March. There will be mandatory singing, homemade party hats and lots of picture taking. Following dinner at her Shaler home, the bus, loaded up with 40 friends, will visit places around Pittsburgh that have special meaning for Ms. Mackiewicz. In lieu of gifts, she asks people to pay it forward, doing some charitable act. The evening will end with birthday cake back at her house.

"Sometimes, traveling around the area can be just as much fun," she says. "When you're 50, you have to be creative."