We had a successful vacation! For a full week! And everyone had fun and Jack did great back home and everyone was safe! I'm still in shock. Between how little he had to plan (and subsequently how little the chance of something going wrong was), and the nice balance of exploring and relaxing and stuffing our faces, we might have to become basic cruise people now. We cruised to Alaska on a Princess cruise ship. My first cruise experience was everything I dared hope it could be. Our fellow passengers were about 90% retirees, so the on-board activities were mostly shows and bingos with a sprinkling of hot tubs mixed in, but that was actually perfect. There was just enough going on to keep things interesting, but if we ever got "bored" we could go rest in our room and read with the balcony doors wide open to the ocean. (We were able to upgrade to a balcony for real cheap because the cruise wasn't nearly at full capacity due to covid constraints.) Exactly the type of vacation we were hoping for. We decided not to spring for the on-ship wi-fi, even though it was pretty cheap, which was an amazing call.
To keep the photos to a manageable level, I'll split our trip into probably 3 posts--one for each port of call we visited. Hopefully I'll get them all posted this week. We took off from Seattle, which was of course perfect because we were able to drop Jack off with Jared's parents and have Papa Lambert drive us to the dock. We spent the rest of the day exploring the ship and sampling as much of the food as we could. By the end of the trip I was getting sick of "cruise ship food," but really it was mostly pretty good. Jared lived his best cruise ship life and made sure we ate 6 square meals a day. Definitely got our money's worth from food alone.
Day 2 was a day at sea, getting us up to Alaska. We sampled more food, watched a production by the ship's talented singing/dancing group, read our books, and watched a movie. Our favorite on-board restaurant was their pizzeria--Alfredo's. I've become a bit of a pizza snob since I've taken up making neopolitan pizza on my pizza steel, and this was absolutely the real deal. Delicious Italian-style pizza, made by Italians in a pizza oven. The hundreds and hundreds of workers on board came from all around the world. Our waiter at the pizzeria, Harold, knew us by name after our first visit, and seated us at the same table and had our order memorized every day we ate there thereafter. Pretty impressive considering how many thousands of cruisers were there.
^^Taking off from Seattle--you can see the space needle on the left.
^^Jared's favorite cruise meal--ramen on the top deck.
^^They took their mask and hand-washing protocols seriously, and everyone on board had to provide proof of vaccination and a negative covid test before boarding. With Princess's older demographic, I think these measures are key to being able to keep their cruise line going.
^^Most of our days were spent cruising through Alaska's inner passageway, so backdrops like this were the norm.
On day 3 we pulled into Juneau. What a beautiful town! It sits inside Alaska's inner passage, up near lots of fjords. It's only accessible by boat or plane--the mountains surrounding Juneau are too rugged for any type of roadway to be built there. The waters are rich with life. Humpback whales from Hawaii migrate to Alaska in the summers to feed for 21 hours every day on all the krill. Jared and I lucked out when we took a nap and didn't wake up until an hour after everyone else had left the ship to explore. We got off the boat just as a local bus was making its last trip of the day to a whale watching excursion, and scored a ride at half of what the cruise ship was charging. So happy we spontaneously hopped on--whale watching was the highlight of our trip. Our boat spotted several whales off in the distance, and we arrived just in time to see a humpback whale breech (jump) completely out of the water! Apparently this is pretty rare. Our guide couldn't contain his excitement and started yelling and whooping from excitement. It was off in the distance so you can't get a real idea for how enormous the whale was from these pictures (maybe you can by comparing it to the double-decker boat to its left), but this is the first picture I took right off the boat. I think I was the only passenger lucky enough to capture it:
Such a cool experience to see these guys up close! They usually travel on their own, so we got lucky to stumble on about a dozen feeding in this area. We saw so many blowholes and diving tails, I get excited just thinking about it.
Toward the end, a mama whale and her calf came riiiight up next to the boat. The captain said it was probably 50 yards away, but it felt like half that because they're so enormous. Boats are actually only allowed to approach up to 100 yards away, but if a whale happens to come closer to you while your boat is standing still, you're a lucky duck. We got lucky. I forgot to bring my camera's zoom lens, so what these pictures show are real distances.
^^Oh, I almost forgot about this! My favorite part of the trip, other than the whale breeching out of the water. There was this adorable sea lion (or maybe seal?) that was legit playing with these whales. It was like jumping over them and around them, and splashing them. So cute and funny.
^^The mama and baby whale (I can't remember which is which--probably the baby in back and the tip of the mom's tail in front).
Whale watching in Alaska has to be one of the top 3 travel experiences I've ever had. And this was likely the best whale watching we'll ever do. There were some locals on board celebrating a birthday, and they said that between the sunny weather and how many whales there were in one place, it was the best whale watching they'd ever done even.
After whale watching we walked around downtown Juneau a bit and then got back on board to have dinner and do some hot tubbing up top while the sun set, before pulling away to head to our next stop--Skagway.
^^Juneau behind us.
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