To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we took an Alaskan Cruise in late June. Our anniversary wasn't until July 26th, but we had other things on our calendar in late July that prevented us from being able to go then. We chose a Royal Carribean cruise onboard the Ovation of the Seas. It sailed from Seattle, up the inside passage stopping in Ketchikan, Skagway, Juneau, Victoria, and then back to Seattle. We worried that we would have rain and colder temperatures, but all of our port days were unusually sunny and warm days according to the locals. It was in the low to mid 70's and sunny and beautiful. The only drizzly and cold days were the 2 days at sea. One of the days had such thick fog that we wondered how the captain new the path was clear in front of the ship. We left the kids at home on their own with neighbors and their grandparents on call in case there was an emergency. They all checked in on the kids often, taking them on outings, feeding them, and checking to make sure they were doing okay. This was such a relief to us, especially since there were full days at sea when we couldn't check in with them. Here are some of the pictures and things we did on the ship.
In the Seattle port with the city behind us.
We had the 5pm dining time in the dining room. The first night, we dined alone.
Most of the nights, we got to dine with Diane and Beth. They were childhood friends that are still friends and decided to go on this trip together. They were nice ladies, and we developed a friendship with them on the boat.
We enjoyed the animal creations in our room. Our room attendant, BJ was awesome and always said hi to us by name when we passed him in the hallways.
We went to a couple of the shows, but we weren't super impressed with the nightly entertainment on the ship. Most nights, we preferred to hang out in the hot tub, or on our balcony instead. We did see a musical type show that I had a hard time staying awake for and a comedian/unicyclist. He was fun.
This was our favorite spot on the ship, besides our room. The Solarium was an adults only area with 4 hot tubs, 3 pools, loungers, and a restaurant. We never ate there, but we did use the hot tubs a lot and sat in the loungers.
We watched the sun set from the solarium a couple of the nights. The sunsets were beautiful all week. We watched the sun set a lot of the nights. I guess we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
This ship, behind me, was our friend for most of the cruise. They sailed along side us while at sea and ended up in the same ports as us at the same time for a couple of the port days. It was a Celebrity Cruise and we joked that the captains were racing for the best port spot.
There were some interesting sites along the way. This one was so strange. The water was brown and murky and then had this definite line of switching to the turquoise blue color. So weird.
These waterfalls down the steep mountains straight into the ocean were so cool. We saw so many during the trip that they did not seem so unusual after the first day of it.
We went to some of the game shows throughout the week. The most popular was the Love and Marriage game show, I told Danny we couldn't go up on stage because I figured there would be some personal questions asked. I was right and we were glad we did not even try to participate. Some of the others we attended were the family feud, minute to win it, and scattergories. We didn't ever make it on stage to participate, but some of them were fun to watch. We got a kick out of this question during the family feud game which was obviously written by the Chinese host.
We played pool one time. The tables were usually occupied, but we got lucky one time and tried it out.
The soft serve ice cream was the biggest dissappointment when it came to food. It was only open between 11am and 6pm. With early dining, we usually felt like ice cream around 8:30 or 9pm and it was never open then. We did wait in the super long line on one of the sea days. I got 2 cones to make up for not getting to have it on any of the other days.
There were 2 formal nights for dinner. We only brought one set of formal clothes, though, so we just wore them both nights. We didn't want to have our picture taken by the photographers on the ship, so we took a photo on our balcony before dinner.
We also got one by the entrance to our dining room. It's a selfie, though, so the title of the dining room is backwards.
We spent some time in the sports complex of the ship. We played pickleball and volleyball. We had to change our expectations a bit after the first open pickleball play, when we only got to play for about 10 minutes against a lady that was clearly not at our same level. Fortunately her partner was, so we were able to hit back and forth with him. We decided to try out the pickleball competition instead, since it was 18 and older and was more of a tournament style. Danny ended up winning our side of the bracket. It would have been fun to see him play the winner of the other bracket, but they just declared 2 winners.
We also participated in the adult volleyball competition twice. All the best players kept signing up together though, so there was one clearly dominant team both times we signed up. After the second competition, there was an hour of open play where we played queens of the court. That was fun and good exercise.
This picture was hanging in the hall close to our room. We passed it multiple times a day and it always made me think of Ashley.
One of the channels on the TV in our room had these maps of our progress. They just show where we sailed. They also told us the current time and temperature and the sunrise and sunset times. Our favorite day was when we were in Skagway right before the summer solstice and the sun rose at like 3:23am and set around 10:45pm. It was so weird looking outside around midnight that night and still being able to see the land forms in the distance and the water.
We took this picture on the plane on our way home. Our flight was delayed coming home because they didn't have a copilot or something. They were estimating a 3 hour delay, but it only ended up being about an hour later. The worst part was when they loaded all the preboard people, then announced the delay and unloaded all of them. They then told us we had to go to a different terminal, so we all went over to the new gate only to find out when we got there that they had found a copilot to fill in and that our flight was now boarding at the original gate. So we had return quickly back to the original gate. And they were not close. It required a tram ride and a good amount of walking to get between the two. We were glad when we were seated and on our way home.
It was so good to see our kids and be home again. The trip was amazing and so relaxing, but we missed our kids and our home.
