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.


 

Melting into a ritual bath in Boca Raton, Florida

Boca Raton Resort and Club, on Florida’s East Coast, about an hour’s drive north of Miami, spreads out over 356 choice acres. Though the rules don’t require it, this is a dress-up place, where, uncommon for most of Florida, people tend to look as spiffy as the stylish furniture and wall coverings. Inside, men seem to think that neckties are resort wear, and even the skimpiest women’s attire at the beach appears as if an entire afternoon was invested in its purchase.

My goal was to get naked.

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.

A Grande slice of Gulf beach in Naples, Florida

Many of the newer condos and resorts lining the coast of Southwest Florida in and around Naples stand tall toward the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s toward, but not on the beach, because man, these days, no longer is stupid enough to destroy the mangroves, nature’s best beachfront protectors from the furious storms of the Gulf. Instead, vacation buildings near water’s edge sit behind the mangroves, which are low twisting trees with amazing root structures that live comfortably in and around the seawater.

One of my favorite activities on a Southwest Florida vacation is to play in the waters between the mangroves and the mainland, kayaking, for instance, near Fort Myers on ancient Native American paths now mapped out as the Great Calusa Blueway.

Farther south, in the Naples area, where private development sometimes makes beach reaching difficult, you’ll find easy access to the sands and a nice boardwalk for strolling through the mangroves off U.S. 41, near the venerable Naples Grande resort, which is  part of the Waldorf Astoria group.