For the benefit of those who have not gone on a cruise, or are curious about Alaska, this post is for you.

Planning: Booking the cruise - How?
Cruises can get complicated, so if you have a travel agent, use them. If you don't have one, then you can figure out yourself. You can try to find bargain cruises, but those are really only good if you can leave under short notice (45 days or less sometimes). vacationstogo.com had some deals and there were other web sites, but for long-term planning (6 months to a year out), these sites aren't that great. I went with americanexpresstravel.com based on a recommendation from a co-worker. Costo Travel had similar prices but I went with AMEX. I found the cruise and the cabin that I wanted on their web site but had difficulty booking so I ended up calling in. I enjoyed talking to the agent "Chris" since he was able to get things done. I would rate them 4.5 stars, but for some reason he didn't go beyond booking the cruise, maybe since I only called in to book a cruise they respond with just doing that. I learned later that I wanted to try to book flights and ground transfers (airport to ship and back) through them, but I ended up booking the flight online (I used AMEX travel still, but you could try any method) and then providing that information to the agent. I think there may be different types of agents, some that will do the whole sha bang and some that only handle bits and pieces. I was able to figure it out though, so no big.

Planning: Booking the cruise - What?
I chose the cruise based on time frame and convenience. The cruise left and arrived during a school break for myself and Eileen, so that worked well. You could leave from Seattle and go one-way, you can do a round trip to Seattle, or you can leave from Vancouver or Anchorage with the same options. Round-trip from Seattle did not seem to get you as far up into Alaska so I nixed that idea. One way from Vancouver seemed cool, but I'd rather arrive and leave from the same airport instead of leaving from anchorage. So we chose round-trip from Vancouver, but if we were to do it again we'd do a longer (10-day instead of 7-day) and do a cruise tour that travels inland. We travelled on Royal Carribbean which seems to have a fairly decent reputation. I hear Holland America has more of a senior-type crowd and Princess was a bit older as well (and more expensive). I have heard some good things about Norwegian and they do this "free-style" cruising thing so that you do not have assigned dining times and formal/smart casual/casual nights. Royal had a decent  mix of age groups, but I did wish there were more people in their 20's (Alaska in general is not that type of desitination though).

**If you are flying in the same day that you will be departing on the ship or flying out the same day you arrive, look into a ground transfer, it makes transportation too and from the airport a lot easier. Since we had transfers, we were zipped through customs in Vancouver and all of our luggage was at a waiting area at the airport when we were leaving. There is a thing that Royal was doing about checking into your flight on the boat itself, which seems cool for you have your final boarding pass on the boat, but there can be too many miscommunications that I wouldn't bother with it.

Planning: Booking the Flight

Depending on what time the boat leaves and arrives is when you should plan on arriving at the city. My ship the "Serenade of the Seas" left around 5PM but they advised to get in town before Noon. My ship arrived around 7am but they advised to have flights that leave after 1pm. You can also arrive a day early and leave a day later so that you are not rushing or if you want to explore the city.

Planning: Passports

We flew into Vancouver so we needed passports. It is also recommended that you have your passport if you leave form Seattle in case the ship needs to stop in Canada.

Planning: What to Bring?

This is from a spreadsheet that we had, we generall packed two outfits per day (kind of overkill), but you need something to hang out indoors in the ship, something for dinner for non-casual night, and then outdoor fits (long sleeves, maybe light jacket) and then a port fit (may be wet, windy, cold, or in our case sunny and in the 70s). Make sure to have a really large check-in, if you can afford the extra charge, two check-ins. I checked-in an extra bag (I bought my tickets early so I didn't get charged) just for the souvenirs, I regret not making it a larger bag though (it was a carry-on sized bag). So two check-ins for me, one for Eileen, one carry-on roller each, and then my backpack (which held all of my electronics and documentation). Inside of the carry-on we had a change of clothes, our bathing outfit, and one semi-formal outfit. They actually drop off your check-in luggage outside of your stateroom by 8PM or so the first night, so you need to have enough clothes to get by. One person we talked to actually had misplaced luggage from their airline, so we were glad we got all of our luggage. I did buy this travel wallet that hung aorund my neck, which was cool since I didn't have to bring my wallet, but I think I could've gotten away with a regular wallet instead of that thing, plus I looked like a straight tourist.

Planning: Reserving excursions and Check-in

I was able to log on to royalcaribbean.com using my reservation number and see information about my cruise. More importantly, I could book all of my excursions through the web site. I highly recommend doing this early for it gives you a lot of time to research what you want to do. Some people figured it all out on the boat, which works out, but you are spending your cruisin' time figuring that out. If you do book things while on the boat, do it early. We booked our Musher's Camp on the boat and were limited to certain times. One person told me that you could get excursions for cheaper on shore, this is true for some places, but the convenience of booking it through the cruise company is hard to beat. The cruise company coordinates all of the transportation and the timing of the excursions so that you get there and back in a timely manner. Very small ports such as Icy Straight Point only do reservations through the tour company. You can buy when you get on shore, but that may be too late. Larger ports have more options, Juneau seemed to have a lot of tour operators camping out willing to sell you an excursion while Skagway did not. If you could figure out what operator is running the tour ahead of time, you may be able to contact them and book directly.

You need to check-in online around two weeks or so before you leave. This makes things a lot faster when you get to the boat. The same check-in papers are in the booklet you receive, but online is always good. You will need to know the passport numbers of everyone in your party as well as birthday and address. I setup a credit account that would resolve to my AMEX at the end of the cruise at this point.

Traveling to Vancouver:

We had a layover in Seattle where we got on a propellor plane, I didn't know these things were even used anymore! The overhead cabin bins are A LOT smaller so they have thing thing where you can have your larger carry-ons put into the holding area right as you get on the plane and then it will be taken off right as you get off the plane and returned to you.

Eye making a funny face in front of our small propellor plane

Customs in Vancouver:

As I mentioned before, if you arrive the same day and have a ground transfer, you can zip through customs (for Vancouver at least). The program is called US Direct, they have their own customs officer just for cruise folks and they transfer your checked luggage directly to the port.

Getting on the boat:

If you checked-in previously, you will already have a Set Sail pass or equivalent which will speed up your processing. They will confirm you identities, passport information and credit card information, take your picture (for securit purposes), issue you "Sea pass" cards which have your name, boat, cruise sail date and basically serve as your ID and charge card for the trip. Unfortuneately they take a portrait type picture of you as you get on the boat, not the prettiest thing after a day of travel, but memorable nevertheless. Be prepared for that one! Going up the ramp they welcome you, make you use some Purell and then scan your Sea Pass to log that you came on the ship.

Our ship the Serenade of the Seas:

When we boarded the ship, we were told that our stateroom would be available after 1pm (it was 11:30pm). So we went to have lunch at the Wind Jammer cafe (buffet style place).

Some cool fruit carvings:

The food there was good, above a Home Town Buffet at the minimum. Right before we entered there was a guy selling the Soda Packages. Knowing about this ahead of time, I got one (about $50 including tax) and put the sticker on my card. You also get a tall drink "mug" that you can use to put soda in. They do not really check the name on the card, so Eileen could flash my card with my sticker and get a soda. If you are ordering a soda at a bar or a lounge, you may want to have multiple soda cards if you want different sodas at the same time. Eye and I usually just got a Diet Coke, so we had no trouble.

What to do on the boat?

Once we got into our stateroom we unpacked everything for easy access. This was a 7-day cruise, so we couldn't just pull stuff out of the suitcase. Also, Royal Caribbean does not have ANY irons in the staterooms for fire safety. If you need something ironed or washed you can have it sent out the first night and returned to you the next day. The prices were not too bad, but Eye wanted to try some wrinkle release and I heard about this shower steaming method.

 In the stateroom is a daily newsletter type thing that talks about what's going on as well as an itinerary for the day. The itinerary is how you figure out what to do, it lists all of the different happenings like time for meals and times for events such as Bingo or pool times. We spent the first day exploring, checking out where the pools were, figuring out how to get from deck to deck. Some of the things weren't open yet (such as the shops and the Casino) but there was plenty of other places to explore.

Our favorite past time was Bingo, it's not cheap, but it's really fun and entertaining:

Port: Icy Straight Point/Hoonah:

This is a small port, but it has a number of cultural and scenic excursions as well as a hella cool ZipRider.

First-Person video of Eileen going down the ZipRider

There's also an old Salmon Cannery there:

They were making a killing selling crabs, the Asians were all over that crab!

My crab and I:

That night we ate at Chops Grille, a speciality restaurant that costs extra but had excellent food and service:

Next Stop: Hubbard Glacier

This one was kind of a let down, the weather wasn't good so we could not get close to the glacier and could barely see it. It was wet and cold!

Port: Skagway

Skagway is a small town that had it's roots in gold mining. We went on two excursions here: Musher's Camp where you a team of dogs pull you on a summer sled and you get to see husky puppies and then a Helicopter ride to the Mead Glacier.

Our Helicopter:

On the Glacier: 

Me grabbing some glacier water:

Last Port: Juneau

Juneau seemed to be the most livliest, it had different tours and lots of shops. Unfortuneately we were not there longer. The excursion we went on here was the Whale Watching Tour

Humpback

Orca:

I wish there were closer whale shots, but no dice. It was fun though, and the Orca got fairly close.

I have some other photos of us going home and some stuff from the ship and the different ports here:

http://s44.photobucket.com/albums/f10/ikiris/Alaska%202008/

Thanks for Reading! Don't worry, I won't be posting for a while...

So I received three comments about bringing Xanga back, and you know what? I didn't even say it. I got an e-mail from Xanga saying that they were doing some spring/summer cleaning and would close my account if I didn't post again. So I said yes I want to keep Xanga, and you know what it did? Posted that one-liner about bringing Xanga back..cracks me up.

So what's been new in Chua-Land? Not much really. I am work, Video Editing, Sleep and Eileen..and somewhere in there is school. MK PCN DVDs have kept me hella busy, I'm actually reviewing the master copy right now and I found a flub..WTF!!!! I could just say F*** it and just roll with, it's only one flub in the first two hours..but I'm a perfectionist damn it and I have a rep to keep. That means I have to re-export and re-encode all of Act 1 (It would help if these acts weren't two hours each). So I'll be here for a while....

Next week should be a focus on SCU PCN, hopefully that's a slam dunk as it is very straight forward. I just need to have the edited video to me..ahem Moonyoz....

Work has been kind of blah..I'm supposed to be finding a new position within my company soon (managed move kind of deal) so I've been trying to roll everything else off. That's been going OK, but day-to-day I really don't want to do anything. I'm getting LAZY which is bad because last year I had a great year. Other than that, working for Big Oil is great..Sell out you call me? Yes Sir, I work for THE MAN. And thank you all for buying gas and paying my salary, jk. I have argued a lot with my UOP classmates about gas prices so I won't rehash that here..but to summarize..oil price has risen at least ten times faster than gas prices have..gas station profits are WAY DOWN. First quarter chevron profits were down 256 MILLION dollars. They only made 4 million dollars last quarter. But where is that $5.2 billion??? Upstream, finding oil and gas and selling it to US and overseas interests. Our gasoline stations buy oil at the same price as everybody else and since our US Dollar has been inflating, oil price goes up.

EHHH..enough of that. What else...My teeth feel friggin weird. My braces (for those of you who don't know, I got my lower grill hooked up) kind of hurt and i've been wearing my upper retainer so it's all off.

SOOOO I'm outty...Hope ya'll enjoyed my latest Xanga post!

Kwik-E-Mart in Mountain View!

Ralph with a popsicle

The chief guarding the pink doughnuts (there weren't anymore to buy though )

Eye mackin' w/ Homer (I think he's eyein the Squishee in her hand though)

'

The Squishee Machine

Sorry I didn't rotate this! Me enjoying my Squishee