TRAVEL Q&A
Opryland in recovery Q We are driving to Florida this fall. Can you tell us how Nashville is doing after the flood this spring? We hope to stop by Opryland Hotel and the Grand Ole Opry. Are both up and running?
A At the moment, those venues are not open, but they will be soon -- and perhaps in time for your trip. Unfortunately, the two you mention did not. The Gaylord Opryland Resort, which is still recovering from a deluge of 10 feet of water, will reopen Nov. 15. The Grand Ole Opry will reopen for tours Oct. 3 (www.opry.com; 1-615-871-6779). By the way, the Ryman Auditorium is going strong, as is the Country Music Hall of Fame; neither was damaged by the flood.
If you do go late enough for an overnight at the Opryland Hotel, be prepared for a Christmas extravaganza. Decorating for the holiday has already begun, even as restoration of the building continues. The resort's popular "A Country Christmas," features 2 million tea lights, gingerbread houses, visits with Santa and several shows, including "Radio City Christmas Spectacular," starring the Rockettes.
Answers to travel questions appear weekly in Travel and at startribune.com/escapeartists; send your question by e-mail to travel@startribune.com.
KERRI WESTENBERG
TRAVEL Q&A REVISITED
E-mailing from overseas With a Kindle, Amazon's electronic book reader, you can e-mail friends back home for free. That was the experience of Lori and Mark Ellison of Elbow Lake, Minn., who have recently returned from a European vacation. "Our family found the Kindle to be effective for e-mail. There were many places throughout Germany and the Netherlands that we were able to use the 3G without any charge," Lori wrote in an e-mail after reading the Travel Q&A of August 29. (I'd suggested Internet cafes might be the best, cheapest way to stay connected via e-mail.) Lori explained that Kindle updates books through a 3G network and also has an experimental setting for basic web browsing. "Although a little cumbersome to use, it did provide basic access to our Internet service provider's web mail page. There is no monthly fee for using the Kindle and no login required. We were not expecting this to work and were surprised when we were able to connect," she wrote.
KERRI WESTENBERG
SURVEY SAYS ...
Crybabies aboard Want to sit next to a crying baby on an airplane? Skyscanner, a travel search site that compares airline ticket prices, posed that question to more than 2,000 people after one Florida woman sued Qantas Airlines, claiming that a screaming baby on board a flight from Australia made her ears bleed. Fifty-nine percent of the respondents said that they would prefer a "families only" section onboard flights. Not surprisingly, non-parents liked the idea more, with 68 percent voting in favor. Fewer than one-third of parents were in favor. Ironically, 45 percent of parents said that they didn't want a families-only section because they didn't want to sit next to "other people's horrors." Mary Porter, Skyscanner's spokeswoman, offered a not-so-novel solution to the problem: a new fee. "If passengers are prepared to pay extra for child-free flying, perhaps the solution is a premium adults-only section, rather than a pre-allocated families section, giving airlines yet another extra they can charge for," she said.
