Travel Maven Blog ... posts from The Travel Mavens.com

River cruising, new Viking vessels in Europe

For river cruisers in Europe, this will be a year for boning up on stories about Viking gods, goddesses, and heroes.

Viking River Cruises, largest of the many companies that operate long and low vessels on the busy rivers of Europe, is introducing six identical boats this year, all named for famed Vikings.

You might recall that Odin is the god of wisdom, Freya the goddess of love and fertility, Njord the god of wind, Aegir the god of the sea, Idun the goddess of youth and rejuvenation, Embla the mother of the human race.

Vikings Odin (pictured above in Kinderdijk, The Netherlands) and Idun floated out of Amsterdam this weekend on their inaugural voyages.

Cruising safety standards re-examined post-Concordia

Two months after the Costa Concordia sinking, leaders of some of the world’s major cruise lines spoke in public for the first time last week about the impact of the cruise disaster and the safety record of their industry.

At an annual conference and trade show in Miami, the leaders’ moods alternated between uncommonly serious, when emphasizing safety on their vacation products, to upbeat, about the public’s future plans to spend their holidays on the cruise world’s ever expanding fleet of ships.

Though it hardly ranks with the infamous Titanic sinking – fewer than three dozen people died on Costa Concordia, while thousands were rescued – the image of the ship disaster will not die soon. Modern cruise ships are not supposed to sink, and until January both cruise crews and passengers were confident that the horrors of the Titanic were merely an old and unrepeatable story line.

This story, however, will not go away easily, as questions about competence, responsibility, training, and panic remain.

Springing forward at Florida's Disney World

You know you're in a Disney hotel when the bedside clock magically changes time while you sleep.

Woke this morning at Disney World near Orlando, Fla., to a new time, Daylight Savings.

The clock in my room at Disney's Board Walk had handled the one-hour change forward without my help.

I asked a man at the desk: Are all the clocks wired for changing the time  in spring and fall?

"We send an elf to each room during the night," he said.