Travel Maven blog

Cruising to Carnival's private Caribbean beach, Roatan

Cruises often include a popular day at the beach on a private island. Carnival Corp. now has a private beach on a public island, Roatan, off the Caribbean coast of Honduras.

At Mahogany Bay, cruise passengers can walk off the ship, shop at a private village, then choose a boating excursion or head to Mahogany Beach. The beach is a 10-acre private enclave with lounge chairs, cabanas for rent, floats, a beach volleyball court and watersports.

You can walk to the beach -- it is less than a 10-minute stroll on new pavement -- or, for $10 for the day, take a ride on what Carnival calls the Magical Flying Beach Chair.

CLICK for more on Mahogany Beach

Mahogany Bay photos

Cruising Celebrity Eclipse’s newest restaurant, Qsine

Thanks to the unrelenting ash of Iceland, I will miss inaugural festivities in Southampton, England, this weekend when godmother and yachtswoman Emma Pontin will do the naming honors for the new Celebrity Eclipse.

What I really will miss is a chance to taste cruising’s newest restaurant, Qsine.

While the Eclipse is Celebrity’s third in the Solstice series -- following the Solstice of 2008 and the Equinox of 2009 -- this is the first ship where Chef Jacques Van Staden, Celebrity's culinary chief, has been deeply involved in the design of the galley, and the first ship with his own restaurant, Qsine. (His brother will be head chef).

Physically, Qsine will take the place of Silk Harvest, a specialty restaurant on Solstice and Equinox.

The style will be unlike anything from Celebrity’s past.

Celebrity Eclipse cruises on rescue mission

Celebrity Cruises newest ship, the Eclipse, has yet to be christened -- the official naming is Saturday in Southampton, England -- but already she is on a rescue mission.

The 2,850-passenger ship is loading Spanish travelers, trapped in England by the volcanic ash that has disrupted air traffic all over Europe, and delivering them to Bilbao, Spain, where some 2,000 stranded United Kingdom travelers await transport back to England on Thursday.

Baseball, numbers, fantasy, poetry

Like travel, baseball is one of my passions, which I satisfy in my midlife years with shared season tickets to watch the Cleveland Indians -- and a franchise in a cerebral game called Rotisserie.

Ours, I'm sure, is the only Rotisserie baseball league in the country with a Poet Laureate.

Every April, a group of 12 otherwise sane adults -- each with some relationship past or present to the Cleveland newspaper called The Plain Dealer -- gathers the weekend after opening day of the real baseball season to auction off all the players in the American League, as if they were for sale. Each of us begins the day with $260. By the end of the auction, we are out of money, but are owners for a season of a fantasy baseball team.

For the next 25 weeks, we fantasy general managers will begin the morning with an Internet look at how our chosen players performed the day before and where our team lies in the Plain Wheeler Dealer standings.