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

Cruise picture of the week from 2012 London Olympics

Sea Cloud in London

 I am flying to Scotland tonight for a quiet Friday in Edinburgh, while most of the world has its eyes on another part of the United Kingdom, the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London.

Terrific place to be, London, especially if you've got a place to sleep for the night, such as Silversea’s Silver Cloud. This week, Silver Cloud sailed under London’s Tower Bridge where the 2012 Olympic Rings are prominently displayed. The ship tied up alongside the HMS Belfast.

What’s new, what's not on a Carnival Magic cruise

If you cruise on the new Carnival Magic, what you will see is:

Carnival’s first Italian restaurant, first Caribbean pub, first draught beer labeled just for Carnival, first ropes course, a host of family deck games, and three flashy production shows.

New interior designs make the ship brighter and more cheerful than its sister Carnival Dream (2009). There are more outdoor activities than on Carnival ships past.

What you won't see, says Carnival president Gerry Cahill, is a ship that is more luxurious than the vessels Carnival passengers are familiar with.

The best Carnival ship ever built? Yes. Highfalutin? No.

Walking the ropes course on Carnival Magic cruise ship

Carnival Cruise Lines has introduced the first ropes course on a cruise ship. The 230-foot course on the new Carnival Magic, now cruising in the Mediterranean, is so well planned that anyone of moderate athletic ability will be able to get around. Yet, if you want to tackle the course at a different pace and style, you can get a serious workout.

Station by station, I worked my way around the ropes course on the Magic's sports deck in about 15 minutes, stopping to chat with others along the course. It had been a while since I did a ropes course – since my days in the U.S. Army – but this one is not terribly difficult, and no drill sergeant will be yelling at you to pick up the pace.

There are two courses, side by side, each in a circle, one inner and one outer, above Carnival’s new play area that includes such games as ping pong and foosball.

Riding AquaDuck on a Disney Dream cruise

Like nearly every other passenger on the new Disney Dream cruise ship, I rode the AquaDuck water coaster during a recent preview sailing.

The Duck was fun, wet, and easy. I liked it so much I did it twice.

You sit on a raft similar to an air mattress, with pockets for one or two riders, front and back.

The raft is propelled by jets of water through a tube that drops, twists, turns, and then, ingeniously, glides along a clear, enclosed path above the pool deck so you can wave to your friends and family below – and if they are quick, they can take your picture, above.

The AquaDuck is destined to be the signature activity on the 4,000-passenger Disney Dream, which begins cruising this week on a regular schedule out of Port Canaveral, Fla. The port is about an hour east of Disney World and Orlando.

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.