Two weeks ago, Denise and I went on a cruise tour to Alaska to celebrate our 20th anniversary. Since I was not able to access my blog while on the trip, I thought it would be nice to use my Palm to store memories of the trip and then I post entries to my blog when I returned. Over the next 10 days or so, I'll post entries in my blog as if I were on the trip. The dates in the entry titles reflect when the events occurred, not when I post the entries. I hope you enjoy our trip.
First, let me give you some background. Over the last few years, Denise and I have talked about doing something special for our 20th anniversary. Our 25th would be while Alana is in college and we thought money might be too tight for us to something big then so we picked our 20th instead. We had both wanted to take a cruise and felt that Alaska was more our speed than some party boat to the Caribbean.
Denise started researching the different cruise lines and had narrowed it down to Holland American Line (HAL), Celebrity, and Princess. After examining the boats, land tours, shore excursions, dates, and other factors, we decided to go with HAL and the ms Statendam. We also wanted to take the McKinley Explorer glass top train through the Denali National Park and visit Mt. McKinley. Given June as the best time (Alana was out of school, Denise and my work schedules, etc.) we ended up booking the trip for June 13 through June 23 for our trip.
The basic cruise tour would involve flying to Anchorage from Raleigh, spend the night in Anchorage, take the train to Denali, tour Denali National Park, take the train on to Fairbanks, sightsee in Fairbanks, fly back to Anchorage, bus tour through the Kenai Peninsula to Seward, board the ms Statendam in Seward, sail to College Fjords, Glacier Bay, s top in Sitka, Juneau, and Ketchikan, and them sail through the inside passage to Vancouver where we would fly back to Raleigh.
We also wanted a nice room since we figured that we would spend some time in the room looking out at the scenery as we sailed. Also Denise liked some of the perks that suite passengers received so we ended up booking an outside deluxe suite on the land side (port side for south traveling ships). We booked our trip shortly after 9/11 so we got a good deal on the air fare. We also got a good deal on the cruise by booking early and paying up-front.
Next