Flights resume to gulf areas

AS floodwaters caused by Hurricane Rita receded early last week along the Texas-Louisiana coast, airlines resumed flights to Gulf Coast-area airports.

Southwest, Continental, Delta and American, resumed service to Corpus Christi, Texas; Houston; and New Orleans, although carriers said services and lodgings remained limited in the Crescent City.

As of the Travel section’s deadline Tuesday, cruise lines were still coping with fallout from storms. The Port of Galveston in Texas reopened to cruise traffic Tuesday.

Royal Caribbean, which had delayed arrival of its Rhapsody of the Seas to Galveston for three days, shortened the seven-day Sept. 25 sailing to four days.

Carnival made many changes to its Gulf Coast sailings. The Holiday and Ecstasy have been chartered to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house relief workers. All four- and five-day cruises of the Holiday from Mobile, Ala., have been canceled until March 27. The Ecstasy will begin sailings from Galveston on April 8. The return of the Sensation, which sailed four- and five-day cruises from New Orleans but is now in FEMA service, will be delayed until Oct. 26, 2006.

Other Carnival changes:

The Carnival Conquest, moved from New Orleans to Galveston because of Hurricane Katrina, has resumed sailings that were disrupted last week by Hurricane Rita.

The line has canceled the Elation’s seven-day cruises because the ship will take over the Ecstasy’s four- and five-day cruises through early April. The ship will leave from Galveston through its April 3 sailing, after which it will be moved to Miami and Port Canaveral in Florida.

In Texas, hotel occupancy was still higher than normal, said Scott Joslove, president and chief executive of the Texas Hotel and Lodging Assn.

“A lot depends on the area,” he said, because some lodgings in the state were still housing people evacuated from Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas, hit hard by flooding, and New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

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Ancient treasures in two troves

IF HBO’s “Rome” has whetted your appetite for the ancient world, new exhibits opening in Chicago and Houston may be just the ticket.

The Field Museum in Chicago will take a detailed look at Pompeii in 79 AD, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in a cataclysmic explosion that buried the ancient Roman city and several others along Italy’s Bay of Naples. The exhibit, “Pompeii: Stories From an Eruption,” which runs Oct. 22 through March 26, includes 450 items.

The Field Museum is at 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago; (312) 922-9410, www.fieldmuseum.org. Admission to the exhibit is $19 for adults; $14 for students and seniors; and $9 for kids 4 to 11 years old.

“Mummy: The Inside Story” was to have opened Friday at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Through computerized tomography, the exhibit gives visitors an inside-out view of the unopened mummy of Nesperennub, a 2,800-year-old priest, as well as pieces from the Temple at Karnak, where the priest worked, and a replica of the Rosetta Stone, which helped archeologists decipher hieroglyphics.

The exhibit runs through Feb. 12 at the museum, 1 Hermann Circle Drive; (713) 639-4629, www.hmns.org. Admission is $15, adults; $12 for children, students, seniors.

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Airliner

notes...

LOW-cost airline Independence Air is discontinuing service between four West Coast cities and Dulles Airport in suburban Washington, D.C., five months after it began the routes. A spokesman for the financially troubled airline said the move was driven by higher fuel costs, not because the routes were unpopular.

LAX flights were to stop Saturday; service to San Diego is to end Nov. 1; and to San Francisco and Seattle, Dec. 1.

The airline also will drop service to five other airports, including New York’s John F. Kennedy, but plans to add routes between Dulles and New York’s LaGuardia airport and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

-- Compiled by

Times staff