travels, races, and other musings

Final Thoughts Wow. What a vacation. I’m really trying to come up with a way to accurately distill our vacation down into some final feelings about everything we saw and experienced. I did so much research, looked at all the options, read so many trip reports and nothing really prepared me for the unbelievable beauty and immense scale of the scenery. It was just so amazing. One of the really neat things about an Alaskan cruise is sailing the inside passage. The water, for the most part, is smooth and glassy. It’s not like being in the ocean at all. And often land is visible on both sides. Obviously, we had some fog and that caused some issues with scenery viewing, but when we didn’t, it was almost like you could reach out and touch the mountains. I was really happy with all the excursions we chose, our room choice and the choices we made in Vancouver. If I had it to do over again, the only thing I would do differently is book second seating (instead of main dining). The only time...

Vancouver As I mentioned earlier, we had second seating for dinner for our first two cruises and this time we went with main dining. One down side of main dining is breakfast disembarkation morning is early also. So instead of eating at 8:30 or 8:45, we had to be at Animator’s Palate for our last meal on board at 7:30. Ouch. Roger and I woke at 6:30 and got ourselves ready and then I woke Emmaline up at 7:15 and got her dressed and ready to go. There were more tears. After I picked up our photo CD from Shutters, we enjoyed our final meal with Nebojsa and Chanman. Our table mates skipped breakfast in the main dining room and Emmaline was sad that Katie wasn’t there to have breakfast. We reluctantly left and went to wait in the Promenade Lounge to wait for them to announce that our group could disembark (Green Tinkerbell). We had never been through this waiting time before since, with second seating, by the time we were done with breakfast, all the groups had already been called an...

At Sea Oh bittersweet day! Even though we lost an hour, I still woke up again at 6:30 AM and felt great sadness that we would have to disembark the following day, but also happiness at another day spent enjoying the ship and scenery. On our first cruise, I genuinely wondered what people did on sea days. Then on our second cruise, I was nervous about having two but we had so much fun! For this one, I wasn’t sure about having three! I needn’t have worried. There are so many great things to do. I didn’t even get to do all the things I wanted to! So it’s 6:30 AM and everyone is asleep. I quietly put on my running clothes and stumble up to deck four for another run. The weather is… yup, grey, drizzly, and foggy. The fog horn blows and I’m off for another nine laps around deck four. There are decidedly fewer people this day. I enjoy the little jaunt through the interior of the ship a the bow and stern. It’s always fun to see what the workers are up to. On my first run, the guys in yellow...

Ketchikan Another day dawned, you guessed it, grey and rainy. While I have been pointing out the weather, I don’t mean it to sound negative. It really didn’t phase us. We had the right outerwear and we just sort of went with it. It didn’t impact our enjoyment of the trip at all. We knew that going to Alaska we might deal with this weather so we were mentally prepared. We just let it roll off our backs. It did help that it was always pretty light. If we had constantly been in pounding torrential rains, it might have been a different story. I woke up earlier than my family again and went to have something to eat on deck 9. I had a croissant and some cocoa and grabbed some fruits and muffins to take back to the room. Everyone else slept in because we had a later arrival into port this morning. Once awake, Emmaline wanted to go to the Wake Up with Disney Jr. event in the Promenade Lounge at 8:30 so I took her to that after she ate a little food. Then at 9, Tinkerbell was greeting and w...

Juneau Another day of fog, drizzle and overcast skies. We woke up at 6:30 and headed town to Parrot Cay again for breakfast, once again forgetting our syrup. We’ll get it one of these times! We were off the ship around 8:00 and made our way over to the tiny little Juneau Car Rental Company shack. I had reserved a “mid size” car and we were handed the keys to an old silver ford focus with 224,000 miles on it. This thing had zero frills. Remember when you had to use a key to unlock doors? If it had power steering, it was low on fluid. But it worked so off we went to the Mendenhall Glacier in the rain. When we got to Mendenhall around 8:30, there was almost nobody there, which was part of the plan and one reason I decided against using the shuttle bus (the other reason being price, which would have worked out to be more money at $15 round trip/person). We made our way to the viewing area (“Photo Point Trail”) and viewed the glacier and waterfall. It was very different in appearance to...

Skagway I’m a wee bit of a planner. Okay, fine, I’m a huge planner. I spent countless hours planning this trip from excursions at ports, to hotels, to restaurants, what times to get up, times to be certain places, and more. There was a lot of planning. But I really love it. It’s part of the fun for me. I think it paid off, though and things went really well overall. We really didn’t deviate much from the plan at all. The plan for today was to wake up at 6:30, go to breakfast from 7:15-8:00 and then disembark at 8 to meet for our tour, booked privately with Chilkoot Charters at 8:15. So we woke up at 6:30, ate breakfast at 7:15 and walked off the ship at 8:00 and there we were, ready to board the bus that would take us out of Alaska, into British Columbia and up to the Yukon territory. On the bus with us were the Jarretts as well as several other families from our Facebook cruise group. Skagway was foggy with drizzle. I’m sensing a theme, Alaska. The driver/tour guide of our little ...