patrick66
Well-Known Member
Just returned from an eight-day cruise to Alaska. The beauty of coastal Alaska is simply paralelled! The only issues I had with it all was too many people (4,000 passengers and 1,200 crew), too short of time available in the particular ports (average 4 hours!), and airport layovers to/from Seattle. The great thing? Besides the obvious natural beauty of the Alaska panhandle - Near-zero cell coverage! NO Internet...unless you wanted to pay $150 for the ship's connectivity! Screw that! I loved being disconnected from the news and everything else!
Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) Norwegian Bliss - The food choices were amazing. Crew attitude and helpfulness were fantastic. Incredibly clean and tidy, all over the place. Very efficient boarding/disembarkation at each port. Tours/excursions were pretty good and informative. Everywhere you looked, photo opportunities abounded! In fact, several of my pics are going to become wall prints for my living room.
Cons - No opportunity to do more than one thing per port. Time ashore was minimal. Just so you know, many of the shops (especially the jewelery shops ashore) are owned by the cruise lines. Everything was rushed.
And worst of all was the air connections to get to and from. The layovers were absolutely nuts! BTW, hanging out overnight at Denver's DIA absolutely, positively sucked ***. For all the people stuck in a place like that between midnight and 5am, you'd think there would be at least ONE vendor open for food of some kind? Nope. Even the vending machines ($4.00 for a 16-oz bottle of water or soda!) were inoperative.
I'll post a few pics later on. I slept all day Sunday after I landed. The air portion really sucked the life out of me - nearly 30 hours between waking up on the ship, getting ready to depart, to the time I actually got home. Not fun.
Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) Norwegian Bliss - The food choices were amazing. Crew attitude and helpfulness were fantastic. Incredibly clean and tidy, all over the place. Very efficient boarding/disembarkation at each port. Tours/excursions were pretty good and informative. Everywhere you looked, photo opportunities abounded! In fact, several of my pics are going to become wall prints for my living room.
Cons - No opportunity to do more than one thing per port. Time ashore was minimal. Just so you know, many of the shops (especially the jewelery shops ashore) are owned by the cruise lines. Everything was rushed.
And worst of all was the air connections to get to and from. The layovers were absolutely nuts! BTW, hanging out overnight at Denver's DIA absolutely, positively sucked ***. For all the people stuck in a place like that between midnight and 5am, you'd think there would be at least ONE vendor open for food of some kind? Nope. Even the vending machines ($4.00 for a 16-oz bottle of water or soda!) were inoperative.
I'll post a few pics later on. I slept all day Sunday after I landed. The air portion really sucked the life out of me - nearly 30 hours between waking up on the ship, getting ready to depart, to the time I actually got home. Not fun.
