Travel Maven Blog ...... David Molyneaux posts from TheTravelMavens.com

Riding AquaDuck on a Disney Dream cruise

Like nearly every other passenger on the new Disney Dream cruise ship, I rode the AquaDuck water coaster during a recent preview sailing.

The Duck was fun, wet, and easy. I liked it so much I did it twice.

You sit on a raft similar to an air mattress, with pockets for one or two riders, front and back.

The raft is propelled by jets of water through a tube that drops, twists, turns, and then, ingeniously, glides along a clear, enclosed path above the pool deck so you can wave to your friends and family below – and if they are quick, they can take your picture, above.

The AquaDuck is destined to be the signature activity on the 4,000-passenger Disney Dream, which begins cruising this week on a regular schedule out of Port Canaveral, Fla. The port is about an hour east of Disney World and Orlando.

Baseball, numbers, fantasy, poetry

Like travel, baseball is one of my passions, which I satisfy in my midlife years with shared season tickets to watch the Cleveland Indians -- and a franchise in a cerebral game called Rotisserie.

Ours, I'm sure, is the only Rotisserie baseball league in the country with a Poet Laureate.

Every April, a group of 12 otherwise sane adults -- each with some relationship past or present to the Cleveland newspaper called The Plain Dealer -- gathers the weekend after opening day of the real baseball season to auction off all the players in the American League, as if they were for sale. Each of us begins the day with $260. By the end of the auction, we are out of money, but are owners for a season of a fantasy baseball team.

For the next 25 weeks, we fantasy general managers will begin the morning with an Internet look at how our chosen players performed the day before and where our team lies in the Plain Wheeler Dealer standings.