Your Life - Travel

Saturday, Nov. 07, 2009

Travel briefs

Travel briefs

Film contest spotlights Orlando

ORLANDO, Fla. — 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 enter 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 marketing slogan “Orlando Makes Me Smile.” A second contest invites filmmakers 19 and over.

Entries must be received by Jan. 11 and require a $25 entry fee. Contest rules and forms are at www.kidsfirst.org/Orlando.html.

The winner in each category receives a family vacation for four in Orlando and full filmmaker passes for the 19th annual Florida Film Festival, April 8-19, and will have their short film premiered at the festival.

New small cruise ship plans Alaska trips

KETCHIKAN, Alaska — 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.

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 said 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 museum

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — 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.

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

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

“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 http://www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey.

—From wire reports