Alaska 2023

The last morning, people started to go their different ways.  Once again, luggage was handled without needing us to participate other than to confirm our bags were loaded onto the bus (because we’re suspicious like that!). Travel to the airport on the noon shuttle to catch our 2ish flight, which was the start of a very long journey – Anchorage to Seattle to Detroit to Charlotte.  A total of 16 hours from start to home. We hadn’t flown anything other than American in years, with Charlotte being a hub for them.  This trip, though, we learned that you can’t hardly get there from here so we were on Delta and were pleasantly surprised.  It felt like the staff was friendlier, the food was definitely better and overall things seemed to go more smoothly than on American. Anchorage and Detroit (surprisingly!) had extremely nice airports – well lit, clean, and even at odd hours there were services available.  Landing in Charlotte, and for the first time in years coming in...

Our last day and we are up and out of the room by 7:00.  Again, the tour company gets major credit for handling luggage.  There are no elevators in any of these places, we were always on the 2nd floor, but all you had to do was put your luggage outside the door by the appointed hour and it magically re-appeared in your room when you arrived in the afternoon. The train was fun.  Our group was all in a single car which was roomier and more comfortable than the bus.  It’s just like you see in the travel brochures, with a glass top so you have amazing views as you travel to Anchorage. The other advantages were that there was a “cruise director” – Sterling was his name – who had a great sense of humor and was excellent in pointing out things of interest during the journey (including 2 bear and 4 moose over the course of the trip).  Meals – lunch and dinner – were done on the lower level and we were seated at a table with a delightful couple who were originally from N...

Denali – If the Hubbard glacier was the high point of the cruise, this is the pinnacle of the land portion of the trip.  We were again fortunate to have spectacular weather.  Usually Denali (which those of us over 50 knew as “Mt. McKinley” before it was renamed a few years ago) is shrouded in clouds and the top isn’t visible.   Sometimes, apparently the entire range is enveloped in clouds and it’s a lot like riding through fog.  The Weather Gods smiled on us, though, and the vistas went on and on and on.  Words cannot describe how beautiful it was. As with most attractions, there was a Visitor’s Center that we stopped at first.  Those 10 minute “Encyclopedia Britannica” films about “Zinc in our Daily Lives” and “How Public Transportation helps us All” are great.  It gives an overview of who and what started the park and how it developed.  In this case, they had also obtained tons of historical photos and movies so the history was truly unders...

We have little recollection of what we did there....it is a tiny place reminiscent of Blowing Rock, NC -- but smaller.

So our cruise venture ended today, and 3 of our band head back to reality.  They have a train ride from the seaport to Anchorage, where they will catch their plane for a very long ride home. Celebrity has the exit process down.  Your luggage is snatched the night before and you have to be out of the room by 7(ish), you can get breakfast at the buffet and then wait in the lobby until your number is called.  For those of us going on to the land part of the trip, our luggage will magically appear wherever it is that we are going next. It's hard to get much smoother than that. We leave the ship today and begin the land portion of our trip.  Because the writing of these days is delayed, there may be some details that we miss.   We signed up for the land portion of the trip.  Most of this is done by “motorcoach”.  This is travel agent talk for “Greyhound Bus”, but the bus stops are cleaner and panhandlers aren’t usually coming up to bum a cigarette or c...

Hubbard Glacier – Wow.  This is the highlight of the trip, and it does not disappoint. This, like Antarctica, is one of those excursions where you don’t get off the ship.  Instead, the captain pilots us to within about a mile of the glacier (which, incidentally, sticks out of the water about 440 feet and goes into the water another 200 – 300 feet) and we cruise around looking for wildlife (primarily seals and sea lions, the whales having decided that dinner as a frozen smoothie is not especially satisfying) and looking at the glacier. If you are very, VERY lucky, the weather is just a little overcast but not raining.  If the sun is out, the glacier looks white but if there are clouds it looks blue, something to do with the way the light refracts through the ice of the glacier.  Long and the short of it, though, is that you get more visual color if it’s cloudy. We had perfect weather.  Cloudy but not raining, and the clouds were high and not fog.  To say tha...

Since exiting the ship on Friday we have been super busy going from place to place on the land portion of this trip -- on a bus.  Today we are moving from Denali National Park area back to Anchorage -- on an 8 hour train ride. More posts to follow....sometime....we're drafting them today and tomorrow.  Will post when we have internet access again.   Thanks for following along.

On Wednesday we had the final excursion scheduled for our cruise in the town of Skagway.  Take a town of 900 permanent and 300 seasonal residents.  Now drop the passengers from 4 cruise ships there on the same day (roughly 15,000 people).  Yeah, it was full. Fortunately, we didn’t stay in town long.  We were aboard the White Pass Railroad to follow a very small part of the route of the Gold Rush folks, who thought they were going to rush to Alaska between 1897 and 1899 and make their fortunes in gold. Unfortunately, they got there 9 months later to find out that most of the good locations had already been claimed so it was a lot of effort for very little financial return. Miners who wanted to go to the gold fields had to have one ton of supplies, since they had to pass through Canada and this was what the Mounties had decided was necessary to live for a year.  The logistics of that – carrying a ton of supplies – defies reason, but apparently that was the rule....

The first target of our tour on Tuesday started as many projects do, with a disaster.  We went to a site adjacent to Juneau to tour the Mendenhall Gardens.  Where’s the disaster?  Well, originally this location was the sight of a dairy farm.  From the pics, it looked like it could be a dairy farm just about anywhere.  Big round topped barn, muddy lots around it.  The difference, though, is that being in Alaska it was very close to sea level, so when they had a disaster of some type (can’t remember what it was – earthquake, flood, avalanche – all are possibilities in Alaska) that destroyed the dairy farm the owner decided it was time to retire to Florida so he closed up shop and sold the land. Being 1984 and a significant recession, though, it didn’t sell quickly.  In 1994 a local nursery owner thought he could expand his difference with a greenhouse on the site so he bought 6 acres.  Then, as with so many projects, he realized that he could, “… do...

Icy Strait Point Monday – Labor Day, for perspective – was scheduled for a whale watching tour.  We’ve done these before, and sometimes they are hit or miss.  It all depends on whether the whales decide to be cooperative.  This tour “guaranteed” that we would see whales, though, and have to say they did not disappoint.   It was also only 3 ½ hours, which was much more doable.  After that long, the whales had things to do and were tired of performing for us. This outing started with us gathering in the ship’s main theater, where we were assigned to groups / boats.  We actually liked this excursion better than the one the day before.  It really didn’t go far from the cruise ship – which was in the “cruise port” – which seems to consist of one berth and a metal gangway down to the smaller boat docs.  To say this location is primitive is a significant understatement!  There was hardly a point on the entire excursion where we could not see ou...

Ketchikan Our first “real” Alaskan stop was at Ketchikan.  We arrived early in the morning, which was good because for some reason we weren’t here long – we had to be back on the ship and ready to depart by 2:30, which meant there really wasn’t an opportunity to explore the area. This was also the first of our cruise excursions – the “Misty Fjords and Wilderness Explorer’.  Essentially, this means that we climbed on a smaller boat and rode around looking at the wonder which is Alaska. That’s not to minimize it.  The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful here.  You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting natural beauty in every direction.  In retrospect, though, 5 ½ hours was a bit much.  Maybe 3 ½ hours with a little time to explore the town would have fit better.   The Misty Fjords National Monument As we ventured deeper into the Misty Fjords, the scenery became increasingly dramatic. Towering granite cliffs, shrouded in mist, rose from the emerald ...

Our first day is a sea day, with no port or excursions.  We opted for breakfast in the Blu dining room rather than the buffet, which made for a nice experience although the food seems comparable (and excellent) either way.  It’s a slower pace, though, and you’re picking from a menu rather than walking through the line and making your selections.  It’s also much, MUCH quieter and less frenzied than the buffet and that is nice. After breakfast, we went to the main theater for something we experienced on our Antarctic excursion – Celia, the naturalist! She gave another amazing talk about the whales we would see (which was not the same talk that we got in the South Sea; apparently, these whales are another branch of the family and while they may visit back and forth, they have different habits and customs). She is scheduled to do 3 talks on this cruise, and we are looking forward to each of them. https://www.celiagarland.com/  After Celia we wandered around the ship f...

So, it’s the big day.  Today we depart to Alaska and all in our travel group were up early and doing final preparation with the normal excitement of departing on a cruise.  Breakfast was quick and easy – there were some scones from the market yesterday and a quick trip through the Starbucks next door gave us sustenance for the morning.  Bonus – we got to use Starbucks gift cards (which I continually forget to use), so breakfast was essentially free! Again, we can’t say enough nice about the Pan Pacific hotel.  They would pick up the luggage from our room and see that it got to our cabin in the ship without us having to touch it again – all for a “recommended” tip of $3.00 - $5.00 per bag!  We called the number (obviously, they were used to this process) and 10 minutes later someone was there to take care of it as well as give us detailed directions as to where we were to go. Our group met up in the lobby and we made our way down the hall to the cruise port (agai...

One thing we recognized is that Vancouver is a fun city – and we hadn’t had nearly enough time to explore. The only real “tourist” thing we did on Thursday was ride the “Hop on, Hop off” bus, which we tend to do any time we visit a new city. They give you an overview of the place and help you identify things you might want to check out (assuming you have enough time). It was a little frustrating at first. Instead of plugging headphones into the system on the bus as happened previously, you connected your smartphone to the App. The problem is that the persons selling the tickets weren’t very good at offering instructions, so we missed the narrative about the first 3 or 4 stops while we were trying to work that out (and getting increasingly frustrated with it). Eventually, though, the younger ones in our group (our de-facto tech gurus) got us hooked up and able to listen.