My First Cruise
I recently did two “firsts” related to my travel…first was a cruise and second was to visit Alaska. I am going to start by talking about my first cruise experience and next week I will talk about Alaska. I truly think that some locations may be best seen by taking a cruise, and I think Alaska is one of them (and if you didn’t read my blog on Mykonos, I talked about this as well as probably the best way to see the Greek Islands).
When the opportunity came up with a friend to do an Alaska cruise, I said yes as it had been on my travel list for a while. As we were discussing options, we chose to go on a smaller luxury ship so as not to experience a LOT of people on our cruise. We went with Seabourn Cruise lines, and I was not disappointed with that choice!
Seabourn offers an Alaskan cruise that is 14 days but can be broken into two 7-day cruises as well. The first 7 days are from Vancouver to Juneau (with stops in Ketchikan and Skagway) and then the next 7 days are Juneau to Vancouver (with stops in Wrangell, AK and Prince Rupert, BC). We chose the Juneau to Vancouver route.
Some of the things I absolutely loved about Seabourn was the level of service of the staff and that being on a ship with less than 500 passengers meant they knew who we were very quickly! The food was amazing with a buffet type restaurant plus 3 other restaurants on board with different menus each day. The other thing that I really enjoyed was that they had their own “adventure crew’ that ran the zodiac tours at the different stops and the fact that the crew also ran the lectures and were even able to sometimes join us for dinner was a great perk! It made it all feel more personal.
I think the thing I didn’t like was that there was a not a lot to do when you weren’t in one of the ports (and there were only the 2 port stops and they were quite small towns) and that most of the people on board were quite a bit older and maybe they liked the organized trivia and card games in the lounges, but that isn’t really for me. There was a great spa but how much time can you really spend there or at one of the bars or casino tables?
I have friends who went on an Alaska cruise during the same time period but on a Norwegian Cruise line ship. Of course, that ship had 5,000 passengers plus another 1,700 crew members and there were more things for them to do like a big casino etc., but even they said that being inside on the days it wasn’t nice outside meant there were a LOT of kids running around and that it felt crowded…at least we were on an adult only cruise!
I did like the smaller ship as we could go deeper into the fjords and more of the smaller channels than the bigger ship – meaning that we got closer to the action so to speak. My friends who were on the Norwegian cruise ship, said when they stopped in Skagway, they were over 7 miles from the port and had to tender that far to go into town! So, there are definitely advantages to the smaller ship.
Another tip is to think about the timing of your travel and your cruise departure and make sure that you account for potential flight/travel problems. We have friends who had a huge problem getting to their Greek cruise in Athens with a flight cancellation and they had to scramble to find another flight, spend several thousand dollars on that flight to barely make it a few hours before their cruise left. So even though they left the day before, a cancelled or seriously delayed flight can affect all your other connections and just one day may not be enough when traveling far!
So, what do I think? I still think this type of cruising is probably not my favorite option and I am sure I will NEVER choose one of the bigger ships if I cruise! I will have more to report on this later this year as we are taking a Viking River Cruise in Europe (which I hope is more like a floating hotel – because that’s what I told my husband to get him to go on that trip)!
Would I cruise to Alaska again, yes, I probably would but would plan to be more active and possibly even plan to do two “adventures” per day (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) when possible. I like to be active so that was my biggest “regret”. You may feel different about it, because there are definitely people who just want to lounge around, and that’s ok too. Make sure you do your homework when planning and even though they may be more expensive, the luxury cruise lines with smaller ships may have more perks that are worth the extra cost!
