AP Features, March 12th, 2007
The National Trust for Historic Preservation's 2007 list of a "Dozen Distinctive Destinations" ranges from the town where Monticello is located to Hillsborough, N.C., cited in part as the home of a 1949 NASCAR speedway.
The organization recognizes 12 places each year for their dedication to historic preservation and recommends them as vacation destinations.
While New Orleans was not on the list of 12, the National Trust also commended the city for "exemplary achievement in heritage tourism."
"Almost immediately after the hurricane hit, the people of New Orleans realized that it would be impossible to imagine America without their hometown. Some places are just too important to let go," Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation said in a statement. "New Orleans' rebirth as a tourist destination is the untold story of the year."
The Distinctive Destinations list included Charlottesville, Va., home to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and James Monroe's Ash Lawn-Highland, along with Hillsborough, a picturesque North Carolina town with interesting historical connections to the Revolutionary and Civil wars that is also home to "an original, rare NASCAR speedway from the inaugural 1949 season."
Also among the National Trust's Distinctive Destinations:
_Chatham, Mass., a coastal fishing town noted for its "architecturally rich walkable downtown" and "unspoiled" beaches.
_Chestertown, Md., an 18th-century port on the Eastern Shore with numerous well-preserved 18th- and 19th-century homes, along with boating, biking and hiking on the Chesapeake coast.
_Durango, Colo., commended for its "charming Victorian downtown," preserved Puebloan ruins and scenic location in the red sandstone bluffs of the Animas River Valley.
_Ellensburg, Wash., a "wonderfully preserved Victorian town" that is also home to Central Washington University and a place with opportunities for great fly-fishing.
_Little Rock, Ark., home to the Clinton Presidential Library, a World War II-era submarine, and Central High School, which this year marks the 50th anniversary of its landmark integration by the Little Rock Nine.
_Mineral Point, Wis., described as "an architectural treasure trove" with Cornish rock houses, Craftsman bungalows, log cabins and neoclassical homes.
_Morgantown, W. Va., cited for its vibrant downtown, Riverfront park and miles of paved rail-trail.
_Providence, R.I., home to many landmark buildings, a Victorian park and four centuries of history.
_West Hollywood, Calif., cited as a "quirky yet sophisticated urban village" with diverse architecture, designer boutiques and unique people-watching.
_Woodstock, Ill., a village known for its town square, historic district, Mozart festival and "a Victorian Christmas right out of Dickens."
For details, visit http://www.nationaltrust.org.
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Zero Gravity to launch commercial flights in Las Vegas
LAS VEGAS (AP) _ Tourists familiar with the ups and downs of gambling will soon be able to experience the real thing high above the Nevada desert.
The parabolic flight company that is giving physicist Stephen Hawking his first experience with weightlessness in April has decided to set up a base in Las Vegas and take paying customers on the ultimate thrill ride.
"This is not a New York-New York roller coaster ride," said Peter Diamandis, chief executive of Zero Gravity Corp., referring to the venerable attraction on the Las Vegas Strip. "We've really made it a high-quality Vegas-like experience."
Zero G will pipe in music and add a post-flight champagne party for its offering for $3,675 including tax, he said. The company expects to fly more than 100 times in its first year in Las Vegas. It also flies out of Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The company has taken 2,500 passengers on about 100 missions since it was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2004 during its "beta-testing" period, Diamandis said.
The company takes a modified Boeing 727 to 32,000 feet at a sharp angle and then plunges 8,000 feet so passengers can experience 25-second snippets of zero gravity during the descent. As the plane climbs, passengers experience 25 seconds of being pushed down hard, as they feel 1.8 times the normal pull of the Earth. This is repeated 15 times.
The company plans to market its Las Vegas flights, mostly on the weekend, through local hotel concierges, via a nationwide retailer and on major Web sites.
The first commercial flight from McCarran International Airport is set for April 21 following a week of promotions.
"We have to have a floating Elvis," he said.
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Cumberland Island mansion being restored to century-old grandeur
CUMBERLAND ISLAND, Ga. (AP) _ A historic mansion on Cumberland Island is being restored to its Gilded Age grandeur.
Work crews have found severe damage from termites and rust in support beams in both the kitchen floor and two large porches at the Plum Orchard mansion on Georgia's largest and southernmost barrier island.
"It would have been a serious issue. It was getting pretty fragile on the two back porches," Jerre Brumbelow, superintendent for Cumberland Island National Seashore, told the Florida Times-Union newspaper. The Carnegie family, which built the mansion in 1898, donated it to the National Park Service in the early 1970s.
The termite damage to the kitchen floor made it unsafe for a large group of people to stand there, Brumbelow said.
The $3.2 million project on the 22,000-square-foot home should be completed sometime this summer. Then, visitors will be able to glimpse some of the original decor that was lost with age.
Colors will be much livelier, such as a bright yellow on the wooden railings on the staircases leading upstairs. Some of the 1950s wallpaper has been removed and the original wallpaper, damaged by water leaks and cracks in the walls, is getting a facelift.
Sue Nash, a former Park Service employee and expert in restoring old wallpaper, plans to spend more than five months repairing the wallpaper damage so that it will show the character and the elegance the builders intended at the turn of the last century, she said.
Repair crews have also made a few discoveries, like several old blown-glass Edison light bulbs with the filaments still intact that will be on display once the work is complete.
Eventually visitors will see parts of the mansion never offered on public tours before, like the dungeon-like basement with its winding, 4-foot concrete walls.
There, visitors will see how the Carnegies used what was at the time the most modern technology, including a generator started by a large hand-crank, a wooden icebox, the main electrical panel and a water-powered elevator.
Much of the original furniture, including some that has never been on display, will also be returned to the rooms.
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Back to the future: Underground salt mine to host tours again in Kansas
HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) _ A new museum that pays tribute to an underground salt mine in Kansas will reinstitute a local tradition when it offer tours to the public.
The Kansas Underground Salt Museum opens for tours May 1.
Hutchinson was settled in 1871 and became the seat of Reno County in 1872. Salt was discovered in Reno County in 1887 and two dozen different processing plants were built in the area, according to the museum's Web site. Tours of the mine were offered to the public from 1923 until 1965.
The new tours will take visitors 650 feet down in an elevator, then aboard a tram to explore the inner workings of the mine.
The Greater Hutchinson Convention and Visitors Bureau is expecting an increase in visitors from people touring the underground museum along with the nearby Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.
In April, a contingent of officials associated with the new museum and surrounding area will tour similar attractions that have been successful in Europe, including the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland, which attracts more than 1 million tourists visit a year, along with the Salzburg Austria Salt Mines and the Bex Salt Mines in Switzerland, according to The Hutchinson News.
For details about the Kansas Underground Salt Museum, visit http://www.undergroundmuseum.org/index.php.
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Oregon already seeing influx for Shakespeare Festival
ASHLAND, Ore. (AP) _ The 73rd season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival began in late February and although the festival doesn't hit high season until the end of May, the town is already making seasonal adjustments in response to the influx of visitors.
Parking lots in downtown Ashland are no longer free; hotels are starting to fill up and increased rates are on the horizon.
Frank Sunderland, front desk manager at the Best Western Bard's Inn Motel and Restaurant on North Main Street, told The Ashland Daily Tidings that the hotel sold all of its available rooms the opening weekend. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival saw its theaters fill to 80 percent capacity in its opening week, media associate Eddie Wallace told the paper.
William Shakespeare's "As You Like It," Tom Stoppard's "On the Razzle" and Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" all opened in February, bringing critics and tourism industry representatives. August Wilson's "Gem of the Ocean" opens April 17 and Moliere's "Tartuffe" will be staged beginning late July.
For details on the festival, visit http://www.orshakes.org.
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Mid-Michigan village readies for big names, big crowds
FARWELL, Mich. (AP) _ The mid-Michigan village of Farwell _ population 855 _ is getting ready for the big names and crowds that will accompany June's Mountain Country Music Festival.
A former ski resort will become the grounds for the four-day event, scheduled to include singers Carrie Underwood and Gretchen Wilson as well as comedian Jeff Foxworthy.
"Things are going to be jumping," village President Steven Grim told The Saginaw News. "We've always been the quiet area, where you go up to your cottage on the lake, and the biggest event is the fireworks on the Fourth of July.
"We welcome the challenge, the excitement that's coming to our old ski hill."
The festival will run June 21-24 at the former Silver Ridge ski resort a mile south of Farwell, which is about 140 miles northwest of Detroit.
The festival's managing partner, Philip Coultrip, said he has spent nearly four decades organizing festivals around the country. The Midland native was drawn to the natural amphitheater on the site and said Farwell is in the "dead center" of the state with major highways passing through or nearby.
He said the Michigan event is aligned with a similar festival in Wisconsin, so the performers already will be in the Midwest.
Coultrip said he expects about 11,250 people in the first year, with 6,000 camping sites and 3,750 seats in a VIP and reserved area. An enclosed, permanent stage is being built.
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Details unveiled for Jackson Hole resort tram
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) _ A wider loading platform and glass on three sides are some of the architectural details planned at the base of a new main tram at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.
The tram is expected to open for the 2008-2009 ski season. It will replace a well-known, bright red tram that carried people to the top of Rendezvous Mountain for 40 years and was retired last fall amid concern about rising maintenance costs.
Stone-faced buttresses and wood siding are some of the other details planned for the base station for the $25 million replacement tram.
"Nobody in our industry has been through this," said Jerry Blann, resort president. "This is the biggest, largest, the most money spent on a tram in North America."
As with the existing structure, the new base will have a clock tower.
The new tram's cabins will have wider doors and will be able to carry 100 passengers and an operator, compared to 62 passengers and an operator on the previous tram cabins.
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Port of New Orleans still plans third cruise ship terminal
NEW ORLEANS (AP) _ The decision by Carnival Corp. to delay indefinitely the arrival of its 2,758-passenger Triumph vessel to the Port of New Orleans will not affect plans to erect the city's third cruise ship terminal, the port's head says.
But with fewer cars using the port's new garage, the state agency is bracing for a blow to its bottom line, port president Gary LaGrange said.
Carnival had planned to begin cruising from New Orleans in August. But earlier this year, the company moved the vessel to Miami, saying advance bookings had been slower than expected.
The decision means that New Orleans will have three homeported ships, instead of the four it had before Hurricane Katrina. Only one of those _ Carnival's Fantasy _ will sail year-round.
But the port is still planning to spend up to $13 million to convert a cargo shed into the port's third passenger terminal by 2008, LaGrange said. LaGrange said the agency initially struggled with the question of whether put off the project, but that the "general consensus is to move forward."
The third terminal was proposed while New Orleans was one of the country's fastest-growing ports _ a pattern that was washed away with the storm. LaGrange said he is personally calling travel agents and travel writers to encourage them to promote cruise travel from New Orleans.
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Museum attendance in Sweden down now that you have to pay
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) _ Sweden's state-owned museums have seen visitors drop by more than one-third since the new government scrapped a free-entry policy, news reports and museum officials said.
The 19 museums previously did not charge visitors and were able to survive on state subsidies of about $14 million a year.
But the center-right government that took power in October cut the annual grants in half and told the museums to introduce entrance fees if they needed more money. The changes took effect Jan. 1.
In January, the state museums saw the level of visitors drop an average of 35 percent, according to a survey by daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
The Museum of Architecture in Stockholm was worst hit. It received 4,480 visitors in January, an 83 percent drop from 26,147 in the same period in 2006, museum spokeswoman Bitte Nygren said.
But she noted it was not yet clear that the $7 entry fee was to blame.
"We have to wait and evaluate the numbers for the first quarter to see how we're really doing," she said.
Maria Dupont, a spokeswoman for Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, defended the new system, saying "nothing is for free." Instead of relying on subsidies funded by taxpayers, state museums now have to "keep up the quality and make sure that their exhibitions attract the visitors," Dupont said.
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Town prepares for Lincoln bicentennial celebration
HODGENVILLE, Ky. (AP) _ The town square in this small central Kentucky city is being transformed into a circle to accommodate as many as a million visitors next year when the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial birthday celebration begins, according to The News-Enterprise newspaper.
Construction crews in Hodgenville have begun work to create a roundabout in the downtown to ease traffic woes. The project also will replace deteriorating sidewalks, get rid of overhead electric and telephone lines, add early American-style street lamps and create an area for visitors to use to photograph statues of Lincoln.
The nation's 16th president was born in 1809 in a one-room log cabin near what is now Hodgenville, and that's where the national bicentennial celebration will begin on Feb. 12, 2008. President Bush has been invited.
The bicentennial will continue until February 2010 with other events planned in Washington, D.C., and well as in Illinois and Indiana, where Lincoln also lived. Other Kentucky events are planned between 2008 and early 2010.
The construction project is expected to be completed by Oct. 14.
