Travel Plans

With the return of live racing and pleasant weather, Delaware Park was crowded yesterday on the first of 137 programs scheduled this season. Although the eight thoroughbred races included only 45 starters, the featured $75,000 Sweet and Sassy Stakes offered a blanket finish won by extreme long shot Travel Plans. Owned by the Liberty Stable and trained by Sandra Slivka, the 23-1 Travel Plans held off repeated challenges down the stretch to prevail by a neck under Kendrick Carmouche.

Some members of a North Philadelphia church think their travel agent got a Mickey Mouse sentence for cheating them out of a trip to Disney World. Others said they realized they weren't living in a fantasy world, and were satisfied that Common Pleas Judge Victor J. DiNubile Jr. was trying to get their $14,713 back from Nathaniel Logan. Logan, 41, operator of Logan's Travel, Dickinson Street near 17th, saved himself a trip to prison yesterday by working out a better deal with the district attorney's office than he gave the 60 church members.

The Tredyffrin/Easttown Youth Soccer League is starting a travel team program for boys and girls this fall. This marks the first time in the league's 12-year history that teams will compete in travel leagues. "It's a natural outgrowth of the program," said Jim Bierman, president of the league, which has more than 1,500 children in the youth soccer program. "It will provide additional soccer at a more competitive level for kids who want it. " But Bierman stressed that it would not replace the Saturday League soccer that has been played in the community since the early 1980s.

Rosenbluth Travel Agency Inc. received the largest account in its history last week when it was awarded the right to plan $90 million a year in travel for Unisys Corp., a travel industry official said yesterday. The Unisys account, plus a new account with the Stroh Brewing Co. of Detroit, probably will make Philadelphia-based Rosenbluth the nation's third- largest travel agency, with total billings of about $500 million a year, said the travel executive, who asked not to be identified.

Community Voices asked readers how the latest terror threat was affecting their packing and their travel plans, short-term or long-term. John Chambers Lansdowne The latest terror alert is not impacting my travel plans. I have not flown since Sept. 11, 2001. Security procedures are too restrictive. I am not a criminal. If the airlines and my country plan on treating me like one, I choose not to fly. I was taught that we were the country of citizens that were free and brave.

Watching tears well up in the eyes of his 16-year-old daughter, Kristin, Bill Monge was heartbroken as he forbade her to fly to Florida for a heavily scouted field hockey tournament over Thanksgiving weekend. Lately, he said with resignation, nothing about life seems fair. "If I let her go, and something would happen, I would not be able to deal with that for the rest of my life," Monge of Upper Merion said. "Especially knowing that there's an increased risk of something happening now. " Across the region and the nation, parents and school administrators are rethinking travel plans since the Sept.

Getting Americans to take European vacations this year already was a tough sell, the tour operator was saying, given the airfare bargains available at home and the fact that the U.S. dollar just doesn't buy as many souvenirs as it did a year ago. But Charles Mest, the vice president for sales at Wainwright's Fling Vacations Inc., one of the East's biggest operators of charter-airline flights, finally articulated in a few words the real problem facing...

Wayne Cashman, a leading candidate to replace the fired Terry Murray as coach of the Flyers, is expected to meet with general manager Bob Clarke today in Pittsburgh, the site of Saturday's NHL draft. Cashman, an assistant coach with the San Jose Sharks, is said to have changed his travel plans in order to to arrive in Pittsburgh this morning rather than tomorrow. Clarke has not commented on his search for a new coach. People in Tampa, Fla., where Cashman lives, said the former captain of the Boston Bruins had virtually gone underground this week, refusing to answer his phone or return calls and backing out of social engagements.

An hour after Boston College crushed Notre Dame, 30-11, nine days ago, Mark Nori called his former mentor, Germantown Academy coach Bill Caum. Nori, BC's 6-foot, 4-inch, 286-pound right guard, had just been in the biggest game of his life, and he wanted to share a personal moment with the man who had helped mold him as a player and a person. "I called Mr. Caum because I knew he was supposed to be here," Nori said. "I called to hear his voice, to hear what he had to say. " Caum's failure to attend the game with his wife, Carol, was as painful to him as the torn, herniated disc that ruptured the plan he made last March, when he decided to step down after 23 years of coaching.

It seems that every time you turn around in this National League championship series, there's another fish story to gut and clean. For some reason, the Florida Marlins have made bending the truth a major part of their arsenal as they try to unseat the Atlanta Braves as NL champions. The latest fish net in which the Marlins have become entangled involved ace pitcher Kevin Brown's travel itinerary from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Atlanta. Marlins general manager Dave Dombrowski and manager Jim Leyland said Brown, who will pitch the potential series-clinching sixth game tonight, had traveled with the club after Sunday's 2-1 win. In fact, Brown boarded Delta Flight 1168 at 9:05 yesterday morning.

Passing Love?By Jacqueline E. Luckett?Grand Central Publishing. 320 pp. $14.99 paperback??Reviewed by Karen E. Quinones Miller Going to Paris was a dream Nicole-Marie Handy had cherished all her life — or at least since age 9, when she'd secretly opened the cedar trunk in her parents' bedroom and discovered an old French dictionary, along with other keepsakes from her father's stint in World War II. Now, at 56, she's decided to make...

Despite a debt crisis in Europe and uncertainty over the global economy, travel demand from businesses and consumers is holding up. Airlines reporting 2011 and fourth-quarter earnings in recent days - generally beating analysts' estimates - said 2012 was starting off strong. "It appears that the underlying economy is better than the macro headlines would lead you to believe," US Airways Group Inc. president Scott Kirby said. The second week in January is typically the busiest booking week of the year, Kirby said, as leisure travelers start planning spring-break and summer vacations, and business travelers return from the holidays and plan their initial trips in the new year, Kirby told investors.

NEW YORK - Top negotiators for the NBA and players association met last night in perhaps the last chance to avoid canceled regular-season games. Commissioner David Stern has set today as the deadline for a new labor deal to be reached before the first 2 weeks of the season will be canceled. No meetings had been planned since he set the deadline Tuesday, before the sides agreed to talk yesterday. Stern, deputy commissioner Adam Silver, owners Peter Holt (Spurs)

With gasoline prices teetering at nearly $4 a gallon, pain at the pump is crimping some Memorial Day travel plans. The auto club AAA is projecting that 34.9 million Americans will take trips at least 50 miles from home over the holiday weekend, an uptick of 0.2 percent - or 100,000 travelers - over last year's 34.8 million. But soaring gas prices are a deterrent, causing travel to be relatively flat, despite a better economy. "I am not going away this weekend, and it's due to the price of gas," said Yvonne Corbin, 38, a West Philadelphia mother of three who works as a medical-billing coordinator.

Although gasoline prices have fallen from their near-record highs in early May, big increases at the pump this year have forced many Americans to cut other spending and have pushed some out of their cars altogether. U.S. highway travel in March was down 1.4 percent compared with March 2010, marking the first time in 13 months that the number of miles driven declined year-to-year, the U.S. Transportation Department said. As the Memorial Day weekend approaches, many people may find their holiday budgets cramped by fuel costs, according to a recent survey by AAA. Forty percent of travelers surveyed said rising gasoline prices would affect their travel plans, and median spending for Memorial Day vacations is expected to be down 14 percent from last year.

The Rev. Rafal Walczyk, director of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown, says Pope John Paul II remains a daily source of inspiration. "He gave me a really, really good example how to live, how to cooperate with people, how to treat people," said the 36-year-old native of Poland, who relishes the memory of the small audience he and fellow seminarians had with the pontiff in 1999. This weekend, Walczyk will be in Rome for John Paul, part of an expected throng of two million Catholics who will celebrate the first Polish pope's beatification, a giant step in a record-quick march toward sainthood for the spiritual icon who died six years ago. Walczyk will take with him a group of 34 equally enthusiastic followers from across the Philadelphia region.

Villanova's and Drexel's basketball teams wandered off to play in the winter weather and did not come immediately home. The Wildcats lost at Providence on Wednesday night. Because of the weather, they decided to bivouac overnight in Rhode Island. They practiced yesterday morning at Brown and took a charter flight home. They were back on campus by 4 p.m. The Wildcats are home tomorrow - well, the Wells Fargo Center - vs. Georgetown at noon. Drexel is a different story.

IWannaGoThere.com makes building a personalized plan easy. - Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times

VANCOUVER - With winter stymied in the great Northwest, suffocating snowstorms back East have made the journey from Philadelphia to Vancouver a little more trying for Olympic ice dancers Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, who train in Delaware County. Their flight scheduled to depart yesterday morning was canceled, Belbin said via Twitter, further jeopardizing their participation in tomorrow's Opening Ceremonies. "Still hoping Philly can get us out in the aft though. C'moooon PHL! I really need you this time," she wrote.

Eddie Ferenz, 74, the Phillies' traveling secretary from 1970 through 1999 and a resident of Collingswood for 50 years, died of natural causes Saturday in Yardley. Mr. Ferenz, who was in charge of the team's extensive travel plans, spring-training ticket sales, and whatever else the Phils could talk him into, was by all accounts always quick with a joke and a smile. "Eddie Ferenz was one of the nicest human beings I've ever met," Larry Bowa, a former player and manager for the Phillies, said in a statement.