Four-star Maui on a two-star budget

Condo by the beach with pool and ocean view: $129 including taxes.

Late lunch at the ritzy resort next door: $10

Kona coffee, beach towels, beach chairs, parking. Priceless. As in free.

Even on Maui, one of Hawaii's priciest destinations, affordable luxuries await those skilled in the art of penny-pinching without pain.

Forget McDonald's and cheap motels. Four-star Maui on a two-star budget was my mission. To up the ante, I zeroed in on West Maui, the island's most expensive resort area, beloved for its calm waters, cool trade winds and beaches for snorkeling, surfing, swimming and people-watching.

With a little creative financing, it's possible to dine, sleep, swim and tour in style, without blowing the bank account or trading valuable beach time for high-pressure time-share offers.

A check on Biddingfortravel.com showed savvy travelers using Priceline's name-your-own-price scheme to score rooms at four-star resort hotels for $150 — not bad, considering Maui's average daily room rate was $226 last year, the highest of the four major islands. Still, with taxes, resort fees and parking fees pushing the average winning bid closer to $200, I decided to look elsewhere.

My heart soared when I saw a one-bedroom condo on Kaanapali beach — West Maui's signature beach with three miles of white sand and a paved waterside boardwalk — for $129 a night on the vacation-rental-by-owner site HomeAway.com. But an exchange of emails with the owner revealed extra charges, including an $85 cleaning fee.

Then I scored: Among the HomeAway listings was a unit at the family-friendly Napili Village, one of a string of low-rise, 1960s-style resorts in the residential community of Napili, a few miles north of Kaanapali. A newly renovated second-floor studio with an ocean view was $129, including taxes, with no cleaning or parking fees.

Well-tended gardens surrounded a sparkling, oval-shaped pool ringed by individually owned units. Ours came with a king bed, pullout sofa, TV, dining room, full kitchen and balcony overlooking the pool. It was just my husband, Tom, and me, but the room could easily have slept four, given a handy room divider that made the unit feel more like a one-bedroom than a studio.

Best of all were our neighbors:

—Snorkel Bob's, where we rented snorkel gear and boogie boards for $6, half what the big resorts charge.

—The Kapalua Resort, West Maui's ritziest neighborhood, home to the Ritz-Carlton and two world-class golf courses. The resort maintains extensive nature trails on the former Honolua Ranch and pineapple plantation. By law, Hawaii beaches are open to the public, and there are public showers, restrooms and parking at Kapalua beach.

—The Napili Kai resort, where room rates start at $250 per night. The resort's classy beach-side restaurant on tranquil Napili Bay became our home away from home for $7 Hawaiian sweet bread and French toast breakfasts and $5 happy-hour drinks and appetizers.

A colleague dropped by my desk, shaking his head at the $365 price he found for a weekly rental car at the Maui airport. I urged him to cancel his reservation and book at an off-airport rental office.

For the price of a $10 taxi ride (rental-car companies with off-airport offices can't pick you up), I snagged a weekly rate of $239 on an economy car through Enterprise's location two miles from Kahului Airport, versus $472 at the airport. (Prices can be higher in peak season.)

The surprise: Except for taking the car on some scenic drives, we left it parked most of the time. Everything we wanted to do was within a short walk or half-hour ride on the $1 Maui bus, the county-operated transit system with 12 routes and hourly service.

A shopping center filled with luxury stores seemed an unlikely place to hunt for bargains, but the bus stops at Whalers Village, a megamall fronting on Kaanapali beach. After a quick look around the free Whalers VillageMuseum, we happy-hour-hopped our way along the oceanfront boardwalk, assembling a movable feast of cheap drinks and appetizers at fancy restaurants where dinner for two can run $100 or more.

The best people-watching was at Leilani's, a beach restaurant near the Westin and Hyatt hotels. High hedges blocked views of the water, but the $4 margaritas and five kinds of sliders made for a budget-friendly early dinner.

Duke's Beach Club near Black Rock, a favorite snorkeling spot by the Kaanapali Sheraton, was quieter and more elegant. Happy hour here was on a shaded deck with a clear ocean view.

Most of the restaurants have live bands at happy hour. Whalers Village sponsors free nightly outdoor jazz concerts and dance performances by students from local hula schools, easier on the wallet than the expensive hotel luaus.

Lazing around, swimming, snorkeling and surfing sound appealing, but almost everyone eventually looks beyond the beach. We hiked in style along the Kapalua Coastal Trail, a 1.7-mile path that's part of the trail system maintained by the Kapalua Resort Assn. The trail skirts sand dunes, a seabird sanctuary, four beaches and ancient burial sites.

Guidebooks often recommend a trip to historic Lahaina in the evening to watch the sunset, but after making several trips there on the bus, our favorite time was morning, when the temperatures were cooler and the crowds smaller.

Using a free walking-tour map, we explored art galleries, small museums and historical sites recalling Lahaina's history as a 19th century whaling and trading port. Memorable were the Wo Hing Museum, a Taoist Chinese temple built in 1912 from a Sears Roebuck kit, and an abandoned prison, where townspeople were once jailed for crimes such as "furious riding."

travel@latimes.com

View the original article here

Airlines attempt to raise fares for 1st time since summer

SAMANTHA BOMKAMP AP Airlines Writer

12:41 p.m. CDT, October 19, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Holiday travelers may want to lock in airfares now, because they're going up.

At least two U.S. airlines are raising prices for the first time since late summer and others may follow.

Delta Air Lines Inc. raised one-way fares by $4 to $10 across most of their U.S. routes late Tuesday, according to Rick Seaney of Farecompare.com. Soon after, United Continental Holdings Inc. matched the increases. It's the first widespread fare increase attempt since early August and the 17th try this year.

The increase may not stick. Airlines often roll back fare increases if enough competitors don't match them. A recent attempt to raise prices in smaller cities met resistance, Seaney said.

Of the 16 previous attempts to increase prices this year, half of them failed. The eight that succeeded have brought average fares up by $58 to $70, said Citi analyst Will Randow.

The current fare hikes come as airlines begin reporting third-quarter financial results. While higher ticket prices annoy travelers, they send a positive signal to airline investors because it's a sign of strong demand.

Still, higher fares weren't enough to prevent another loss at American Airlines parent AMR Corp., which blamed it on high fuel costs. On Wednesday AMR reported it lost $162 million in the third quarter — its fourth straight losing quarter. Southwest Airlines Co. is set to report results Thursday morning.

Some travelers may avoid higher fares by taking advantage of fare sales. Many airlines recently matched a winter fare sale from Southwest that runs through Thursday. It excludes most peak travel days around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

_____

Follow Samantha Bomkamp on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/samwilltravel

View the original article here

Amtrak sets record of 30 million passengers in past year

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amtrak trains carried more than 30 million passengers in the past 12 months, the most in one year since the passenger railroad was created four decades ago, railroad officials said Thursday.

Ridership during the budget year ending on Sept. 30 was 30.2 million passengers, up 5 percent over the previous year. Ticket revenue was up by more than 8 percent despite significant weather-related disruptions in much of the country.

Amtrak has set ridership records eight out of the last nine years. A decade ago, it carried 21 million passengers a year.

"Amtrak is fulfilling its national mission and is part of the solution to meet America's growing transportation and energy needs," Joseph Boardman, Amtrak's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Despite its success in attracting riders, Amtrak's critics in Congress are squeezing the railroad's federal subsidies and trying to take away its most valuable routes in the rail corridor that links Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

The House Appropriations Committee's transportation subcommittee last month approved a budget that sharply reduces Amtrak subsidies. In June, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica, R-Fla., proposed soliciting bids from other railroads for the right to service the 456-mile Northeast Corridor, which is the heart of Amtrak's operations. He said it was taking the railroad too long to achieve consistently high-speed service equivalent to trains in Europe and Asia.

Amtrak has proposed its own plan to upgrade its Northeast Corridor track and trains and to eliminate bottlenecks so that trains can travel up to 220 mph. Trip time between Washington and New York would be reduced to 96 minutes and between New York and Boston to 93 minutes. But the plan would be phased in over 30 years and cost $117 billion to implement. The railroad is seeking private investment to pay for some of the cost.

"Americans are returning to the rails in record numbers, yet Republicans are pulling out all of the stops in their rush to auction off Amtrak's assets to the highest bidder on Wall Street," Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, top Democrat on the transportation committee, said. "It makes no sense to tear apart a railroad and its workforce while they are succeeding at their jobs."

Amtrak was created by Congress in 1971 after passenger railroads failed in the face of competition from airlines and interstate highway travel. With the U.S. population expected to exceed 400 million people by 2050, nightmarish congestion is forecast for the nation's already crowded highways and airports.

View the original article here

'Picasso to Warhol' exhibition at Atlanta's High Museum

ATLANTA (AP) — With bright, bold colors, varying formats and iconic images, a new exhibition at Atlanta's main art museum allows visitors to experience dozens of modern art masterpieces and to explore the relationships among the artists who created them.

"Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters" at the High Museum of Art brings together more than 100 works by 14 influential 20th-century artists pulled from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and shown together for the first time in the Southeast.

"We wanted to create 14 intimate, immersive situations for people so they could feel like they had both met these artists and walked through the history of modern art," said High director Michael Shapiro.

On display are examples of artists using traditional subjects — portraits, landscapes, still lifes — in ways that were new, innovative, and sometimes shocking, at the time. They used new styles, like Cubism, and experimented with a variety of media, including mobiles, collage, film and silkscreen.

True to its title, the exhibition opens with paintings and etchings by Pablo Picasso and finishes with pop art pieces and a film by Andy Warhol. Works are clustered by artist, giving visitors a chance to see multiple works by a single artist together to get a more complete look at each artist's career, said MoMA's Jodi Hauptman, lead curator of the exhibition.

"The biggest revelation is the relationships between these works that you can't see in our galleries" because the works aren't displayed together at MoMA, Hauptman said. "Instead of being told about these connections, you actually see them."

Arranged in long, open vistas, the exhibition allows visitors to focus on a single artist but also to get a glimpse of what's to come and to consider the dialogue between the works, Hauptman said.

Standing in front of the opening piece — Picasso's brightly colored, large-format 1932 painting "Girl Before a Mirror" — the visitor can look to the left and see "Two Acrobats with a Dog" from 1905, during Picasso's Rose Period, and then turn to the right to see Henri Matisse's "Dance (I)" in the next part of the gallery.

After considering familiar artists like Picasso and Matisse in the first two galleries, visitors move on to lesser-known but still important artists. Sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and paintings and drawings by Piet Mondrian offer objects or settings stripped down to their bare essence — with Brancusi's streamlined bronze sculpture evoking a bird and Mondrian using grids of horizontal and vertical lines to represent a seascape, a church or a busy city square.

In a side gallery are works by Marcel Duchamp, whom Shapiro describes as probably the most radical artist in the exhibition. Most striking, perhaps is a wood and galvanized iron snow shovel hanging from the ceiling that the artist bought in a hardware store in 1915, then signed, dated and titled it "In Advance of the Broken Arm."

In "Dutch Interior (I)," painted in 1928, Joan Miro uses a Baroque painting of the same name as a model but recreates it as an abstract work. Jackson Pollock's "Number 1A" showcases the artist's well-known drip painting technique, his personal involvement with the painting stamped onto one edge in the form of handprints in paint. Mobiles by Alexander Calder in a side gallery "defy one of the basic rules of sculpture, which is that gravity is in charge," Shapiro said.

In "Map" from 1961, Jasper Johns, the only living artist in the exhibition, blurs the borders of the states in a giant, colorful map of the United States, using brushwork but also clearly identiying each one by name in bold, stenciled letters. Also by Johns are several works featuring numbers, which further illustrates his desire to present traditional, familiar subjects in a new way.

Across one wall of the final gallery are Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans," painted canvases that correspond to the varieties of soup sold by the company in 1962. In the center of the room are more works inspired by commercial products, including "Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box" (1963-64), "Campbell's Tomato Juice Box" (1964) and "Brillo Box (Soap Pads)" (1964).

Also included in the exhibition are works by Fernand Leger, Giorgio Chirico, Louise Bourgeois and Romare Bearden.

A free iPhone and Android application allows visitors to interact with the exhibition using their smart phones. By using one of those phones to take a picture of a piece, visitors can pull up more information, chat electronically with other visitors or pose questions in real time to museum staff.

___

If You Go...

PICASSO TO WARHOL: Through April 29 at the High Museum of Art; 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta; http://www.high.org, 404-733-4444. Open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sunday noon-5 p.m. Adults, $18; students with ID and seniors 65 and over, $15; children 5 and under, free.

View the original article here

Arrested plane passenger distraught over dying brother

Reuters

10:17 p.m. CDT, October 14, 2011

DENVER (Reuters) - An airplane passenger accused of a drunken rage that forced the diversion of an American Airlines jet said on Friday that he was drinking because he was distraught about his dying brother.

Varoujan Khodjamirian, 43, arrested on Thursday night when the plane landed safely in Denver, appeared the following day in federal court on a charge of interfering with a commercial flight crew.

A U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest Khodjamirian, a Long Island resident of Ukrainian descent, was a terrorist.

An FBI arrest affidavit said Khodjamirian had consumed several alcoholic drinks and became loud and disruptive about 90 minutes after takeoff on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, as he started to kick the seats in front of him.

According to the affidavit, flight attendants tried to calm Khodjamirian down, then moved him to the rear of the plane, but he struck one attendant in the face and began yelling threats.

Members of the crew ultimately managed to restrain him with flexible handcuffs, and two attendants sat on him until the plane arrived in Denver, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for Colorado.

Speaking through an interpreter before a U.S. magistrate, Khodjamirian acknowledged drinking alcohol on the plane and added he had been drinking because his brother was dying and had just two days to live. "That's why I had alcohol."

The judge ordered him to remain in custody at least until next Tuesday, when he is due to return to court to determine if he is eligible for release on bond.

(Corrects flight route in paragraph four)

(Reporting by Robert Boczkiewicz; Editing by Steve Gorman and Jerry Norton)

View the original article here

Missed connection runs up phone bill

I've been haggling with Travelocity for almost three months about a flight, and I need your help. I recently booked flights from Newark, N.J., to Madrid, Spain, via Continental Airlines and on to my final destination of Barcelona, Spain, via Iberia.

The outbound trip was completed without issue. Unfortunately, the return trip through Brussels was less successful. The itinerary left me just one hour to make my connecting flight in Brussels to the U.S., but I had to claim a bag, go through customs, and then back to get my boarding pass.

When I arrived at the empty Continental ticket counter approximately 35 minutes before my flight, a Continental customer service agent refused to check me in because it was too late. She also told me the next flight was the following morning.

When I tried to dial the Travelocity number for assistance outside the U.S., it wouldn't connect. I tried multiple phones in the airport. I collect called my fiancee in the U.S. and had her call the domestic Travelocity telephone number, and after more than 30 minutes of international telephone calls, I was booked on the flight for the following morning.

I incurred a telephone bill of $378 to correct this situation. Travelocity won't refund my phone bill. Any ideas?

— Jeffrey Grim, Boston

A: Travelocity shouldn't have allowed you to reserve the itinerary that you did.

If your flights were connected on the same itinerary (which they appear to be), then the system should stop you from reserving a flight that doesn't meet the minimum connect-time rules. Something appears to have gone wrong, because you obviously didn't have enough time to transfer to your overseas flight in Brussels.

Travelocity also should have provided you with a number that worked from Brussels. I think you did your best to contact the online travel agency through normal channels before resorting to an expensive collect call.

And yes, calling Travelocity was the best option, since this was an immediate concern. Had it been something less urgent, I would recommend sending an email.

But I think you could have prevented this from happening too. Did you take a moment to read your itinerary after you booked your tickets? If you had noticed the short connection times you could have asked Travelocity to fix it long before your trip.

You had a second chance to fix this when you experienced a tight connection on your inbound flight.

It's unusual for an online travel agency to refund a phone bill, but in this case, I think it should consider doing so, at a minimum. I contacted Travelocity on your behalf. It apologized and agreed to refund your phone bill.

Christopher Elliott is the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and a co-founder of the Consumer Travel Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for travelers. Read more tips on his blog, elliott.org, or e-mail him at chris@elliott.org.

View the original article here

Sex-starved stags tangle with tourists at London's Bushy Park

BUSHY PARK, England (AP) — They call it the Beast of Bushy.

For the past week, this massive, short-tempered stag has been charging into British headlines, goring a man in the middle of a picnic and chasing one woman through the brush.

The stag's rampage has cast a shadow of fear over Bushy Park, a quiet suburban expanse of tree-lined avenues and ponds popular with retirees and stroller-pushing parents some 13 miles (21 kilometers) southwest of central London.

"I've been in and out of the park for 20 years, and this is the first time I've heard of people being attacked in such quick succession," said Robert Piper, a sports and wildlife photographer whose dramatic shots of the angry deer have kept it in the headlines.

The beast didn't seem so fearsome Wednesday, when it was seen lazing in the mud and long grass across from the park's model boat pond.

"He's had a rough couple of weeks," joked Piper. But as he inched forward to take a few last photos, the stag lifted a pair of sharpened antlers into the sky.

"Let's not push our luck," he said.

Bushy Park holds 320 deer, which roam freely across a 445-hectare (1,100-acre) area of meadows and forested areas that look much as they did when King Henry VIII used to hunt there.

They are generally gentle creatures — until fall's rutting season.

"Every year there's the odd incident," says park veteran Dick Hill, a 64-year-old retiree with binoculars dangling from his neck. "There have been quite a few of them this year."

Hill said a shortage of female deer could be to blame for the aggressive behavior, although a park official said the unseasonably warm weather — which drew large numbers of visitors at the height of the rutting season — was the deciding factor. The official asked not to be named.

Whatever the cause, this year's stag attacks have produced some dramatic photos. One showed a middle-aged man being bowled over by a charging deer in a picnic area. Hill, who was there, said the man emerged covered in blood.

Another incident, this one witnessed by Piper, showed a woman racing for her life, with the stag so close that its antlers lifted up her black leather jacket. She managed to escape after Piper distracted the animal.

"It was a happy ending," he said. "But it could easily have been a goring."

London's feisty press have traced the path of the stag's rampage under articles bearing names such as "Stag Fright."

Hill said the fuss was a bit overdone, and in any case, the Beast of Bushy's days may be numbered.

The park's deer are regularly culled.

View the original article here