Posts Tagged ‘cruise’

Basalt

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

Perhaps more so than on a cruise to, say, the Caribbean or around Europe, an Alaskan cruise really requires booking a few excursions. Most of the ports of call are tiny cities – Ketchikan does not even have roads leading to it – so getting away from the city to see the surrounding areas is a good idea. In comparison, walking around a city in Europe or lying on the beach in the Caribbean does not require special bookings.

The first excursion that I did on my trip to Alaska was in our first port of call – Ketchikan. As alluded to above, one cannot get to this city by road. Plane or boat only. That tells you that it’s pretty remote, though it’s also a big, big fishing city. So interesting place.

We decided to go on an excursion that took us by floatplane to a ‘dock’ then on a boat through the ‘Misty Fjords.’ Photos can be found throughout our Alaska flickr set , and this one and this one are among my favorites so far (we took a lot of photos’).

This is a short review, but click on ‘more’ to read the rest.

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Just this past week (August 29-September 5), my wife and I went on a 7 night cruise to Alaska on Royal Caribbean.  The cruise left from Vancouver and headed north, and we were aboard the Radiance of the Seas.  The ever-growing flickr set has the photos that my wife and I took during our trip.  Our itinerary was:

• Vancouver
• Cruising at sea
• Ketchikan
• Juneau
• Skagway
• Icy Strait Point (photo while there)
• Cruising at sea / Hubbard Glacier (not a port – just looking at it from the ship)
• Seward (just for disembarking, on a foggy pier)

It’s kind of hard to break this review up into usable chunks but I’ll do my best.  I’ll likely followup with some separate articles about specific topics, too.

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