Travel Maven blog

Cruising on Disney's newest Fantasy

Fourth ship in fleet offers new twists

Imagine your drawing dancing on a wall

A child's makeover fit for a princess

The 80-year-old man had not drawn a picture of himself since childhood. That’s what his son said.

Aboard the new Disney Fantasy cruise ship, instructions made it easy: Here’s a magic marker. Imagine how you look.  On the paper placed at your table in the dining room, scribble in the white spaces, on the face, chest and tummy, shirt sleeves, trouser legs, and feet.

As his son tells the story, the old man sighed and acquiesced. He drew a simple line for a mouth, circles for eyes, some hair of which he had little, dots on the shirt, stripes on the pants. Finished quickly, he concentrated on his family in the Animator’s Palate dining room.

Then came the magic, and his eyes twinkled into a full grin.

To the music of a whimsical cartoon, the old man’s picture began to dance across the dining room walls, along with several dozen other characters from other tables.

Oasis of the Seas rescues stalled fishing boat

Oasis of the Seas has resumed cruising toward Cozumel Wednesday afternoon after rescuing a fishing boat from the Caymans that was dead in the water with an engine that would not start.

Captain Trym Selvag stopped the Oasis, sent two engineers to fix the problem (after a security team checked out the fishing boat). The Captain said Oasis crew provided the fishing boat with a fresh battery, fresh water, and got the engine working again.

That’s what we do at sea, said Captain Selvag, in an announcement to the passengers, who lined the starboard decks to watch the rescue.

The rescue will not impact a Thursday arrival to Cozumel, as Wednesday is an easy sea day, between Falmouth, Jamaica, and Cozumel, Mexico, on Oasis’ western-Caribbean run, which is the Royal Caribbean itinerary every other week out of Fort Lauderdale.


 

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.

Walking Wellington, comfy cruise port for eating, gazing, shopping for short pants

When travel offered me a second shot at visiting Wellington, I wasn’t going to miss a morning at Te Papa, a lunch of green-lipped mussels (right), and a pair of three-quarter pants that are all the rage in New Zealand and Australia.

Checking out the gannets of New Zealand

I’m not much of a birder. I love to watch the Great Lake Erie birds swoop by my porch on the north coast of Ohio, especially the eagles that have returned to the marsh near Old Woman Creek. They dive for fish in the waters outside my window.

But I am a dunce when it comes to remembering names and markings, so I can’t tell you all the species that I’ve seen in Ohio or in my frequent wanderings around the world.

I won’t forget the gannets, though, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, where they nest on the edge of a cliff at Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand.

My trip to see the gannets was a shore excursion off the Celebrity Century at Napier, New Zealand, where thousands of people flock every February for the Art Deco Weekend, a celebration of Napier’s Art Deco heritage and history.

If you want to see more about the birds, take a look at Nesting with the wild gannets, my post at Checking In Checking Out, a new website with a theme of amazing places to travel, eat, and play golf.