Normally, in these weighty documents I describe in gory detail the trials and tribulations of getting from our home to the airport and then flying to our first destination. This time I will summarize in three words - I hate flying.
I will point out one thing - since we were once again leaving from JFK Terminal 4, we were able to have a late lunch/early dinner at the Shake Shack, instead of the crummy airline food (on this domestic flight, no actual meals were supplied - you had to buy expensive, horrible, stale sandwiches, which we didn't). The Shake Shacks (there are two) in Terminal 4 of JFK are the best thing about the airport.
We flew to Seattle Washington where we were to board the cruise ship. Because we no longer trust the airlines to not have delays and cancellations we flew in two days early, giving us a whole day in Seattle. We arrived at night Seattle time, very late New York time, so after taking a taxi to the hotel we went to bed.
We woke early of course, our brains still being on New York time. We had been to the city twice before, once for a couple of days in 2006 and once, also for a short visit in 2012. Not surprisingly, the city appears to have changed - there were a lot more skyscrapers for one thing.
We walked a short distance to one of the more popular tourist destinations - the Pike Place Market. We had been there before in 2006. It was much larger and more interesting this time, but a lot of the little shops and eateries were exactly the same as they were 19 years ago! One of the best features of the place is that they strictly enforce a rule that all the businesses be privately owed and not part of a chain, with one exception - the original Starbucks is there. This means that the shops still have the uniqueness of the old "mom and pop" stores of the past, which we love. I think a lot of the visitors love this also.
We wandered around the Pike Place Market for a couple of hours, had a seafood lunch at one of the restaurants in the market, with a waterside view, and then wandered around the market for another hour. We bought a bag of dried west-coast cherries and another bag of chocolate covered ones. There were a lot of other items that tempted us but we didn't want to carry more stuff around for the next six weeks. After the market we walked along the harbor walk, an extensive, attractive, waterside promenade with more shops and eateries. It had just been updated and extended. It made the waterfront a pleasant place.
We then walked to the Seattle Art Museum. We spent a couple of hours seeing the exhibits. It was a pretty eclectic collection except, to my chagrin, most of one of the floors had mostly "contemporary art", which I don't like. I won't bother explaining my reasons.
After a couple of hours in the museum we were tired so we walked a few blocks back to the hotel to chill for a while. In the evening we went to dinner at a Taiwanese Dim-Sum restaurant, part of a global chain called Din Tai Fung. We had been to one in Covent Garden, London earlier in the year and had liked it, so when we saw that there was branch near our hotel that became our choice for dinner. We enjoyed the meal and felt that the food in the Seattle one was even better than the one in London, although the Covent Garden location had a more upscale decor and was quieter. I really like Seattle.
We checked out of the hotel and got a quick taxi to the cruise terminal. From the time we exited the taxi to walking onboard the ship was only twenty minutes, which is not too bad. On earlier cruises this process has taken as long as several hours, although on a recent cruise it took only nine minutes.
Once onboard we went directly to the buffet for lunch, partly because our stateroom wasn't ready yet, but mostly because we were hungry. The buffet was crowded and a little chaotic, but the food was good. After eating we went to our stateroom to drop off our carry-ons. Our room, called a Mini-suite, which is just a larger balcony room, not really a suite, was quite nice. We also had a larger balcony than on previous cruises, but because of the weather we weren't really able to use it much.
Last Christmas and New Year’s we had booked a similar Mini-suite on the Enchanted Princess which this ship is virtually identical to and we liked the room so much that we booked one for this cruise.
We noticed that there were lots of Asian people onboard this ship, possibly the majority of passengers. At one point an Asian lady that Donnie chatted with at breakfast one morning told her that most of the Asians onboard were from Taiwan. Perhaps this cruise is a pleasant way for them to go home. There were also a lot of people from New Zealand and Australia onboard - probably more people heading homeward.
So, to avoid a long-winded, boring description of our day onboard, I'll just list our activities.
After dinner we went to the 9:30 show in the main theater. It was by a magician, comedian and singer called Naathan Phan (Yes, he spells it Naathan, with three A's) who was of Vietnamese descent but had a Scottish accent. He was very, very good, but most amazingly he had a beautiful singing voice, in addition to his other talents.
Before the performance he was dressed as an old-time movie theater usher with a flashlight and was showing people to empty seats. Nobody knew he was the performer until he walked up onto the stage. He then did a quick clothing change offstage and came back in a few seconds wearing a suit and introduced himself and did his amazing act.
After leaving Seattle harbor the ship started rocking a little. As the evening progressed the rocking got a little more noticeable, but nowhere nearly as bad as we had experienced on other cruises. It really wasn't a problem, except when we went to bed there was a very loud, almost continuous banging/creaking noise from the closet all night. It kept me awake all night. We also discovered a stupid motion activated light on the bottom of my nightstand, presumably for safety reasons. We had experienced a motion-activated light in the ceiling between the closet and the bathroom on a previous cruise on the Enchanted Princess. This room had that also. At our age, we both have to get up in the middle of the night to use the facilities, and the light would wake our partner. This time I was smart - I brought some aluminum foil and scotch tape and covered the motion-sensor. The same trick worked for the light at the bottom of the nightstand.
We set our watches and iPhones back one hour that evening. Since the ship was crossing the Pacific ocean, we did this many times during the cruise. Tokyo time is 13 hours ahead of New York time. Fortunately, going in the Westerly direction meant that we got an extra hour of sleep each time. If we had been cruising to the East, we'd have lost an hour each time.
We awoke early and dressed and went to the buffet for breakfast. We ran into Randy, our room steward and informed him about the banging/creaking closet. He said that he would notify the carpenters. The ship was still rocking some and the closet was still banging. Spoiler - they never fixed it. Later in the cruise we ran into a gentleman who experienced the same problem in his room. He couldn't sleep either.
More activities of the day...
We awoke at 6:00 AM to find Ketchikan outside. This was heartening since we were supposed to be there - nice work Captain. Donnie told me that there had been an announcement at 2:00 AM that said that there were Aurora Borealis visible off the port bow. She went out to look but said it was very faint and hard to see. I slept through the whole thing. Later we learned that there had been Auroras on four nights but they didn't announce them all because of the complaints about waking people up. I never saw any of them - drat.
The Captain had told us yesterday that, according to his Plan A, we would be docking about a fifteen minute walk away from town but he must have decided on Plan Z42-567/Q because we ended up docking right next to town, about a five second walk from the ship. The weather was cool and clear but the iPhone said cloudy. I strongly believe that the iPhone weather app is very accurate, but it is connected somehow to an alternate universe. Earlier this year we spent a week in London. The iPhone weather app predicted rain every day. It was sunny and clear every day.
We went out to see Ketchikan about eight AM. I was determined to do something about the noise from the banging closet. The previous evening we went to the convenience store on the ship and asked if they had ear plugs. The nice woman said "certainly" and started to reach for them only to come up empty - they were sold out - very interesting!
So we researched and found the downtown Ketchikan pharmacy on our iPhone maps and went straight there from the ship. Once again I asked about ear plugs, once again a nice woman said "sure" and walked down one of the aisles with us, only to discover that ... wait for it ... they were sold out. We asked if she could recommend a place that might have them and she suggested a health food store a short distance away. We thanked her and headed toward it.
I was skeptical that a health food store would carry ear plugs, but we went in and asked yet another nice woman about them, and she too said "sure" and walked us around some shelving and ... presto ... there was a whole bunch of those little plastic-bubble-on-cardboard containers hanging on hooks, each one containing at least a dozen ear plugs each, in different colors even - Ta Da! We purchased a box and had a nice conversation with the woman about Ketchikan and the weather there and went out to see the town.
We walked around in the old part of town, called Creek Street, which had a sort of boardwalk along the creek and some historic wooden buildings, which are now tourist shops and restaurants. We even saw several seals in the creek. Ketchikan was just as we remembered it but was less crowded this time. While I wandered around Creek Street taking pictures, Donnie had a very long chat with a local lady who has lived in Alaska for forty years.
On a previous visit to Ketchikan we wanted to visit two open-air museums, the Totem Bight State Park and the Saxman Native Village which were right next to each other. They both displayed totem poles and other native structures and we found out that they were a little outside of town. We could have booked an excursion through the cruise line, be we elected to take a local bus. It was interesting to ride the bus with the local people and we found where they really live, which looked a lot like the rest of America with strip malls and a Walmart. The two museums were fun and well worth seeing. Since we had seen them on our previous visit we didn't go this time.
Later in the morning it got cloudier and a little colder but not unpleasant. We walked around town for nearly three hours and got back onboard about eleven thirty and went up to the buffet to fill our coffee thermoses and stayed to have lunch. Out the window we caught a few glimpses of a small whale - just a bit of tail sticking out of the water very briefly.
Later, we...We went to an early breakfast in the buffet. We sat next to a woman from Taiwan. She talked to Donnie for over an hour in an accented broken English about her life history and Taiwanese history and much more and Donnie, who is too polite to not give her rapt attention, wasn’t able to eat her breakfast so her eggs got cold. Finally the woman wanted to go back to her stateroom to fetch her husband but she didn’t want to lose her seat so Donnie volunteered to hold her seat for her until she returned. I bailed out and went back to the stateroom to shower and brush some teeth.
We docked in Juneau about 9:00 AM and it was cold but mostly sunny. The weather app said it would be sunnier a little later and we were in no hurry to get off the ship so we decided to go out a little later and left about 10:30. We dressed in many layers because it was cold and windy early. Later it got too warm in the sun, but there was a clear blue sky with the sun very low in the sky.
Juneau is long but narrow - only two blocks wide in some places. We walked along the boardwalk which had many totem poles, created by local Native American artists. They were very attractive and all very different. After the end of the boardwalk we walked along the shore where there were a huge number of seagulls.
We had considered taking the cable car up to the nearby mountaintop, which we had done on our previous trip to Juneau, but we remembered that there really wasn't much up at the top except a gift shop and a restaurant, and the cable car was too expensive - $60 each, so we passed this time.
We walked back in the direction of the ship along another street which had thirty or more jewelry stores - yet another thing I don't understand. Many cruise ports seem to have a lot of jewelry stores. Even the ship had several and kept pushing jewelry. Donnie stopped to do some shopping in a large store called the "Alaska T-Shirt Company". I'll let you guess what it is that they sell.
When we got near the ship we saw that there was now only one gangplank open and a very long line to get onboard - at least a hundred people long. Not only that, the boarding line had to stop completely when a passenger with a walker, scooter, or wheelchair wanted to to get off the ship. They had to hold the line until the gangplank was empty, slowly help the disabled passenger go down, and only when they reached the bottom, let the line start up again - a very slow process.
We waited on a bench hoping that the line would get shorter but it didn’t. While waiting we watched the crew hoisting another gangplank into place, a very steep one with lots of stairs. It took quite a while and they never opened it while we waited on the long line. Finally we gave up waiting for the line to get shorter and got on the end. Then as we moved along slowly they checked our credentials three times along the line. The whole thing seemed very uncoordinated.
Later in the day we...
We were docked at Whittier, Alaska which is a cruise port because it is on the water and close to Anchorage. Whittier is a very very small town - population 272!. Everyone lives in one apartment building.
The town subsists mainly on fishing and tourism. It used to be an Army base. My suspicion is that when the tourist season ends, many of the 272 residents move to Anchorage.
It was quite cold and overcast early however the sun came out soon which helped. Whittier is surrounded by snow capped mountains and therefore very breathtaking scenery.
To get to the area called “downtown" we walked in a long tunnel made from corrugated culvert pipe under the railroad tracks, which bisect the town.
Whittier had more to see than we expected. The highlight: Donnie bought a refrigerator magnet at the "Lazy Otter Cafe". I didn't say anything even though our refrigerator has so many magnets on the door that I keep expecting it to topple over. We looked for the bagel store that was on our iPhone map but it wasn’t where the map said. We were really looking forward to Whittier, Alaska authentic bagels. Surprisingly we spent two hours in Whittier. From the research we had done before the trip we had expected to see all of Whittier in fifteen minutes.
Observation: There are almost no quiet places on the ship to sit - almost all seating areas are continuously used for music performances, sales pitches, “art” crap, game shows, pseudo-health talks, etc. Many of the lounge areas are right off the atrium and so are bombarded with the sounds of the numerous events in the Piazza at the bottom. We finally discovered that they allow people to use the Crown Grill restaurant during the day as a quiet "reading" area, but only between 9 AM and 3 PM. We used it frequently.
At one point in the afternoon we listened to a Russian pianist play in the Piazza. When he was done he indicated that had entertained us with some Russian music. It was stuff by some Russian guys - Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev. After dinner we went to the theater to see a singer/impressionist, Sean O'Shea. He was ok, not great.
Copyright © 2025 by Jeff Kravitz