Alaska Cruise

Our Alaska cruise was excellent!! We traveled on Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Sea.  It's gigantic and has rooms for 4,900 people.   Traveling with Tami, Rob, Mark and Jill is delightful…very easy– we all like to do the same things. We played pickleball, did karaoke, walked the track, chose stairs over elevators most of the time, spent time in the Solarium-in the pools and hot tubs. Ate a lot of soft-serve ice cream cones.

Enjoyed and shook our heads in confusion at all the shows and the live music. Participated in the different cruise games- trivia etc… and ate A LOT!  

We enjoyed eating at the dining room and getting to know our waiter and trying all of the different types of food…sometimes ordering as many as 4 appetizers and 3 main courses.  We were disappointed with the desserts on this boat.  They need to work on this, but otherwise the food was good…including the almost 24-hour pizza that’s available.    

 

We loved getting our picture taken by all of the photographers on the ship…not to have a serious one, but to pull faces, and shift our bodies in an effort to make the photographer laugh.  IT was a hoot…even if they didn’t laugh, we laughed a lot! 

Our group was NOT afraid of participating.  Wayne, Rob, Mark and Jill participated in the Pickleball tournament with Rob and Wayne making it to the semi-finals.  Mark and Wayne participated in the Ping Pong tournament – both got out in the first round. Wayne was beat by an over-80-year-old with a wicked spin.  Jill and I did Karaoke many times!  We sang at the piano bar and sang through the shows. We played a ton of games– mostly Kanasta, cards and marbles and  10-2-8-ohcrap!  

Rob was at a low stool at the piano bar..so he did this right next to the piano player and cracked the guy up.  It was so funny. 

 Our excursions were good as well.  We stopped in Juneau, Alaska, and did a whale watching boat tour along with going to  Mendenhall glacier and walking around.  We saw a lot of whale tails… no real whale breaches..but many tails– that was cool.   

Most photographed building in the USA.  10,000 snaps a day.  It was a gentleman's club built in 1898

 and you had to climb Mount  A and Mount B to qualify.

We stopped in Skagway for a railway ride to the top of the mountain… white trail/Yukon passage with incredible views- and then shopping around the town.  

 We got to go with the cruise ship up a Fjord to see the Dawes Glacier.  The day was sunny and glorious weather– The fjord up to the glacier was gorgeous…with blue skies and sunshine.  And so many little blue ice chunks floating in the water.

 We stopped in Victoria, B.C. for a city tour.  This city is gorgeous– so many flowers everywhere. 

I was here in 2011 with Monson's choir tour.  His choir sang in that Government building, it as really cool.

Wayne found a piano on the beach at Victoria so he played "the entertainer" in tune and outta tune, like he does.

One of the best parts for me was getting our room upgraded from an inside room with a virtual window- to a balcony room!  Totally worth it!  The guy whose room we took over ( we don’t know if he also got upgraded or if he cancelled last minute) –well,  we got his room and his Royal Caribbean perks– a blanket, and ice cooler filled with Diet cokes, and a drink thermo and cup set.  We got gorgeous sunset pics and full moon pics off our balcony.

I packed totally wrong for this cruise– too many long-sleeved, warm clothes– and not enough sunny weather / cool type clothes.  We thought it was going to rain every day– but we missed all of that.  Just a few misty sprinkles.  Tami, Jill and I got matching shirts and sweatshirts…and the boys got matching baseball caps. We can’t believe we forgot to make cruise shirts before we left– we saw many family groups on board wearing something like that.