Day 01 - 08/20/25 - Alaska 2025

 This year's Alaska cruise is a semi repeat of what we did last year. We're starting in Vancouver and sailing north for three days on the Zaandam with a stop in Juneau and getting off the ship a day later in Skagway. From there we will board the White Pass & Yukon Railway to Frazier BC where we will be transferred to a bus that will take us to Whitehorse where we'll overnight. The same bus will then take us another day to get to Dawson City where we'll spend a couple days before flying to Fairbanks. In Fairbanks we will overnight and do a special tour before being bussed down to Denali, where we will spend a couple days, including one day on an excursion out to see Mount Denali, and various animals.  After Denali will be on a day long train ride down to Anchorage and will spend a couple days and do something special that I'll disclose later before getting on the Nieuw Amsterdam in Whittier and sailing southbound for seven days back to Vancouver.  During the trip, I will be celebrating my 80th birthday and have something special planned on that day.

Day One found us at the Tukwila Marriott Courtyard hotel, where we boarded a motor coach, which drove us to the ship in Vancouver. We had a little bit of a glitch in that I forgot my phone and so I had a friend pick me up and drive me back home to pick up the phone and I got back with about 15 minutes of time to spare. The border crossing into Canada was very easy and the embarkation process was quite fast as well. It's good to be back on the Zaandam which is a ship that we have spent many days on with the longest being a 73 day cruise around South America. The ship has a capacity of around 1200 but because its prime Alaska cruising season, the ship is sailing at around 1500 people.  We are berthed in Vancouver at Canada Place with the Coral Princess and a smaller luxury cruise ship, Regent Seven Seas Explorer.  It's a beautiful, mostly sunny blue sky with a few clouds. 

Following the Captain's safety speech, the ship departed just before 4 o'clock and was the first of the three ships to leave the port. It was pretty interesting to see us pull away from the berth and head toward the channel. All the while seaplanes were taking off and landing beside us.  We enjoyed most of the sailway from a nice spot in the Crow's Nest, which is on deck nine forward. As we approached the Lions Gate bridge we went out and up to deck 10 where we would be out in the open air and we passed under the bridge. It was quite scenic. The ship's bow was also open for those who wanted that view.

With this being such a short cruise, I've booked specialty dining reservations for the first two nights. This night found us in the Pinnacle Grill. While the food was excellent, the service was extremely slow. It was an hour and 20 minutes before we received our main course and we weren't certain we'd be able to make a 7:30pm show but all worked out in the end. I did comment to the matre di that it seemed extremely slow service and he made note of it. The evening entertainment was the onboard repertory company of eight singers and dancers performing a medley of songs focused on the 70s called Solid Gold. It was energetic and well received by the audience. It was the dance company's first performance, and they are from the UK. Right afterwards, we were walking to another event when whales were spotted off the port side of the ship and we watched orcas. This is the soonest we've seen whales on a northbound cruise out of Vancouver.

Our last entertainment for the evening was to watch the movie, Alaska, which is about a pilot who crashes his airplane and his two children set out to try and find and rescue him. It's sort of a cheesy story from 1996 involving the use of a polar bear cub as a guiding force in the search effort. Following this, we returned to the stateroom and did a small partial unpacking of our suitcases and straightened up the stateroom before retiring for the evening. It had been a long day since waking up at around 5:30 in the morning and making our way north to Vancouver and boarding the ship and getting familiar with it. But it was really good to be on The Zaandam once again and headed north.