Travel briefs

Travel briefs

Film contest on why Orlando makes you smile

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Why does Orlando make you smile?

If you’re between the ages of 13 and 18 and can show the answer on film, you’re invited to take part in a competition sponsored by the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau, the Florida Film Festival and an organization called KIDS FIRST!.

The contest theme plays off the destination’s marketing slogan, “Orlando Makes Me Smile.”

A second contest category invites filmmakers 19 and over to submit short films on the same theme.

Submissions may not exceed three minutes and can either be live action or animation. Entries must be received by Jan. 11 and require a $25 entry fee. Complete contest rules and forms can be downloaded at www.kidsfirst.org/Orlando.html.

Winners will be announced in late February. The winner in each category receives a family vacation for four in Orlando, complete with airfare, lodging for three nights, rental car, theme park tickets and full filmmaker passes for the 19th annual Florida Film Festival, April 8-19, in addition to having their short film premiered at the festival.

‘Most affordable’ resorts from Ski.com

DENVER (AP) — Ski.com has come up with a list of what it calls the ‘10 most affordable ski resorts’, including Whistler-Blackcomb, site of the Winter Olympics. They are:

—Keystone, near Denver, with lots of lodging and flight options and moderately priced condos. Ski.com specials include The Lodge at Keystone, which the Web site describes as “the nicest property at Keystone.” Also, a Keystone lift ticket is valid at Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin and also offers some limited access to Vail and Beaver Creek. The resort also offers night skiing, which is included with the lift ticket, on day of arrival with airline boarding pass. If you stay in a Vail Resorts-owned or managed property, you receive The Adventure Passport for free.

—Steamboat, also in Colorado, described as having a “great selection of moderate ski-in, ski-out condos” and a ski-in, ski-out Best Western; for each adult five-day or more lift ticket, one child 12 and under skis free; and 50 percent off rack rate with Ski.com offers, including discounts during the holidays. You don’t need a car, thanks to a town shuttle and private shuttles run by most properties. The ski-in, ski-out lodging even means you can make your lunch at home and eat it there.

—Crested Butte, Colo., which is offering numerous ski free-stay free packages, early season free lift tickets and lots of 25 percent off lodging specials, plus a deal in which the third airline ticket you buy is free.

—Winter Park, the closest major resort to Denver, described as catering to a “moderate demographic, no luxury properties,” with many lodging selections, some so close to the mountain that you can walk or take a shuttle.

— Jackson Hole, Wyo., which offers great deals on lodging, especially in the town 12 miles from the resort; and in Teton Village, at Hotel Terra and Snake River Lodge.

—Whistler Blackcomb, described as having “fantastic specials trying to lure people there before and after the Olympics … normally a pricey destination but you can find killer deals during January,” with reasonable airfare to Vancouver and lots of lodging inventory.

—Banff, Alberta, in the middle of Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies, where winter is low season, so prices are lower. Ski.com is offering Banff Springs Hotel rooms at about half-off summer rates.

—Lake Tahoe, with good flight options to Reno and decent lodging away from the mountain, especially on the South Shore, where casino hotels are well priced because winter is low season. Deals include fourth night free at Village at Squaw, Jan. 3-Feb. 11, and specials at Resort at Squaw Creek, Jan. 3-Jan. 14.

Ski.com says there are also good values to be had in the East, especially if you can ski Sunday-Thursday, since the market is mostly a weekend-drive-to crowd. Lake Placid, N.Y., offers lots of lodging options, a charming picture-postcard town with great restaurants, and a $29 Olympic Passport that offers admission to all the venues built for the Olympic games that were held in Placid. Lodging options in Stowe, Vt., includes The Golden Eagle Resort, $90-$148 a night through Ski.com (jumps to over $200 at the holidays).

Charleston launching ‘South of Broad’ tour after Conroy book

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — A new walking tour is being offered in Charleston based on places featured in the new Pat Conroy best-seller “South of Broad.”

The two-hour tour is available Tuesday-Saturday, departing from the lobby of the Mills House Hotel at 115 Meeting St., and ending outside the Gibbes Museum of Art at 135 Meeting St. Both places are mentioned in the novel.

Tour stops linked to the book include St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, where characters Chad Rutledge and Molly Huger were married; Legare Street, one of Charleston’s most elegant streets and part of protagonist Leo King’s paper route; Water Street, where characters in the novel ride out Hurricane Hugo; and the Dock Street Theater, visited by Leo’s parents the night of a family tragedy.

The tour is $25 a person, which includes admission to the Gibbes Museum of Art and choice of a cocktail or dessert from one of Conroy’s favorite Charleston restaurants, named Slightly North of Broad.

Tickets for the walking tour must be reserved in advance at 843-568-0473 or www.oldcharlestontours.com/southofbroad.html.

Winter Trails day will offer free snowshoeing and cross-country Jan. 9

McLEAN, Va. (AP) — Winter Trails will celebrate its 15th year Jan. 9 at locations throughout the U.S. with free snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.

The annual event is designed to offer kids and adults who are new to snow sports a chance to check them out with free equipment and trail access.

You can register online for your preferred location at WinterTrails.org. Most locations offer snowshoeing and cross-country but some only offer snowshoeing. Venues include alpine resorts, Nordic centers, state parks, National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service land. Details can be found on the Web site. You can also register onsite at each location.

Winter Trails is part of “Learn a Snow Sport Month,” set for the entire month of January to raise awareness of skiing, snowboarding and snowshoeing. Information about other snow sports learning programs can be found at WinterFeelsGood.com and individual programs are described at LearnaSnowSport.org.

Da Vinci mode: Shows about art, invention around the country

NEW YORK (AP) — Several cities around the country are in da Vinci mode with shows about Leonardo da Vinci’s work.

In New York, “Leonardo Da Vinci’s Workshop: Inventor + Artist + Dreamer,” opens Nov. 20 at the Discovery Times Square Exposition and runs through April 4. The show offers full-scale, interactive models of da Vinci’s inventions, including his ideas for the airplane, automobile, robot knight and mechanical lion.

In Baltimore, “Da Vinci — The Genius: A Traveling Exhibit” at the Maryland Science Center through Jan. 31 features some of his inventions, anatomical drawings and writings, plus “secrets of ‘The Last Supper’ and the ‘Mona Lisa’ revealed in 3D animation. “

In Atlanta, an exhibit of sculptures and sketches by da Vinci and his contemporaries is at the High Museum, including some never before seen outside of Europe, borrowed from the Vatican’s art collection, the Louvre in Paris and the royal collection at Windsor Castle in England.

The exhibit will be at the High until February, when a modified version of the show travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The centerpiece is a nearly 30-foot recreation of da Vinci’s destroyed horse statue, which towers over the plaza outside the High. Inside the museum are the meticulous drawings and anatomical notes he made of horses in hopes of perfectly capturing the animals’ motion. The work was never completed because the bronze intended for the statue was used to make cannons, and a plaster model was destroyed by soldiers.

Most roads closing for winter in Yellowstone

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) — Roads into the interior of Yellowstone National Park have closed for the winter, limiting access to Old Faithful, Canyon, and Fishing Bridge until the snowpack is cleared from the roads in the spring.

The roads will reopen for guided snowmobile and snowcoach travel beginning Dec. 15.

Outside the park, US Highway 212 is closed east of Cooke City, ending travel for the season over the Beartooth Highway to Red Lodge and over the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway to Cody.

The road from Gardiner, Mont. through Mammoth Hot Springs to Cooke City, Mont., is open to wheeled vehicle travel all year.

Chestnut tree sapling from Anne Frank house Idaho-bound

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A human rights memorial in Idaho’s capital city will receive a sapling grafted from the chestnut tree that grew outside the secret annex in Amsterdam where Holocaust victim Anne Frank hid from the Nazis.

The 3-foot-tall sapling is to be quarantined at a Boise tree nursery for two years before it’s planted at the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, located just south of downtown along the Boise River, according to the Spokesman-Review newspaper.

The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, in cooperation with the Anne Frank Center USA in New York, took applications from dozens of U.S. institutions interested in getting a sapling from the 150-year-old chestnut tree.

In all, 11 U.S. places are getting them, including the White House, the World Trade Center site in New York, and Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., where forced racial integration was carried out in 1957. One sapling also will go to Seattle’s Volunteer Park, not far from the location of a fatal 2006 shooting at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.

Amy Herzfeld, executive director of the Idaho Human Rights Education Center in Boise, visited the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam in 2007 with a group of Idaho schoolteachers. She says she remembers the big shade tree that Anne Frank mentioned in several entries of her famous diary.

“It was beautiful,” Herzfeld told the Spokesman-Review newspaper. “It was very striking.”

After her family’s hiding place was discovered in 1944, Anne Frank died in a German concentration camp at age 15.

In February 1944, she wrote in her diary, “The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak.”

And in May 1944, just three months before she and her family were captured, Frank wrote, “Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.”

Boise’s Anne Frank memorial was dedicated in 2002, after thousands of individuals and corporations donated to help build it and schoolchildren across Idaho collected coins to fund a $42,000 life-size bronze sculpture of Anne. She’s depicted peering through an attic window in the hidden annex where she and relatives sought shelter during World War II.

Work begins on Donald Trump’s controversial Scottish golf resort

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Workers are clearing rocks and other debris from the site where a controversial golf resort is to be built by Donald Trump.

The work began in late October after planners at the Aberdeenshire Council granted permission.

Grass will be planted from November to March on an environmentally sensitive stretch of sand dunes to stabilize the beach for development into a championship golf course.

Trump was given permission last year to build the resort featuring a five-star hotel, 1,200 homes and two international-standard golf courses north of Aberdeen.

Some local residents opposing the project have threatened legal action, claiming violations of environmental laws and planning procedures.

New small cruise ship plans trips between Juneau, Ketchikan, starting in 2011

KETCHIKAN, Alaska (AP) — A new small-ship cruise line will start weeklong voyages between Ketchikan and Juneau in 2011.

InnerSea Discoveries is a new brand created by the owner of American Safari Cruises, which has operated luxury yacht cruises in Alaska since 1997, according to the Ketchikan Daily News.

InnerSea has acquired the 80-passenger Wilderness Discoverer and the 66-passenger Wilderness Adventurer. The shallow-draft vessels were last operated by Glacier Bay Cruiselines during the 2005 season.

American Safari vice president Tim Jacox says the vessels will explore Prince of Wales Island plus the Baranof and Kuiu islands area, Frederick Sound, Admiralty Island and Endicott Arm.

Ancient world springs alive at expanded UM museum

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Long-hidden art and artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean are on display for the first time in years at the University of Michigan’s newly expanded Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

A 20,000-square-foot addition to the museum, funded by an $8.5 million gift from the late Edwin and Mary Meader, has just opened.

“As an undergraduate in the 1930s, Edwin Meader saw rare artifacts, pottery and sculpture, excavated by U-M scholars in the Mediterranean and Near East, being delivered to what was then called the Museum of Classical Archaeology … and said to himself, ‘These things deserve a better place,” university spokeswoman Maryanne George wrote on the school’s Web site.

In 2003, the Meader estate made the gift for what has become the William E. Upjohn Exhibit Wing. It’s named for Mary Meader’s grandfather, who founded the Upjohn pharmaceutical business.

The museum itself bears the name of the late Michigan professor Francis Kelsey and holds more than 100,000 ancient artifacts. Many are materials excavated from Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East in the 1920s and ’30s.

Items include art, toys, burial items, pottery and jewelry.

“Professor Kelsey was a man ahead of his time,” museum director Sharon Herbert said in a statement. “He understood the power of objects to connect today’s people with people of the past.”

But for decades, the space limits prevented many of the objects from going on public display.

“People have no idea what we have here,” said Elaine Gazda, the museum’s curator of Hellenistic and Roman antiquities. “People will be stunned by the richness and depth of collections.”

Details at www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey.

(This version CORRECTS 5th item on da Vinci shows to delete reference to Birmingham exhibit, which was last year. )