Overall, a great first cruise for our honeymoon! Great experiene!
Embarkation
5 out of 5
Everything was superb! It was fast and simple to check-in and took us 5-10 minutes to get on the ship! We chose the earlier check-in of 1:30 PM when we were scheduled to take off at 8:00 PM. Best decision ever!
Ship experiences
Food and Dining
5 out of 5
I can't speak for the specialty restuarants, but the main dining room was amazing! A three course meal and each and every one of them was top of the line delicious! We didn't feel the need to spend the money at a specialty restaurant when the main dining room was as superb as it was!
Onboard Activities
5 out of 5
We did a lot of the trivia events and art auctions. We used the fitness center once. We enjoyed watching the activities from the main landing of each floors around the centrum. We had a great time doing just that and relaxing on the top deck on the many lawn chairs that are provided.
Entertainment
5 out of 5
All the performers were fantastic! They kept the energy up at every performance and we thoroughly enjoyed them all!
Children's Programs
We don't have kids.
Service and Staff
5 out of 5
Every single staff person was extremely pleasant. We don't have a single complaint of any of them. We had many waiters during our trip but Fe, Frederick, Vanisha, and Rasika are the ones that come to mind. Our room steward was Adi and he was so great! He brought us an extra blanket and made sure we had everything that we needed.
Ship Quality
5 out of 5
As I have said, everything was amazingly clean and well-maintained. It was easy to get around and easy to remember where everything was. Even if you didn't, there were electronic maps on every level.
Cabin / Stateroom
5 out of 5
Our room was better than we could have imagined! We had a huge window, the pillows were amazing, easy to get around as it wasn't too small, bathroom was on the small size but useable for my husband and I. Only thing I would want to point out is the water gets around the curtain very easily so we always got out with water on the floor. Maybe attach the curtain on one side so water can't escape but at the entrance.
Ship tip
Use the app! This saved us from having to pull out the paper itinerary each time we wanted something to do. Also, the wifi that's free only lets you use the app. No messaging, no maps, nothing else except their app.
Small and quaint town. Very cute for what it is. Get there a day early before you embatrk (if it applies) and spend the full next day to explore a bit. We walked around the boat dock and got an ice cream cone at the Harbor St Creamery.
It was really cool to see everything. Even though we could get closer to it due to a crash in a previous cruise before ours, I was able to see everything with my telephoto lens.
A small town but very nice and a bright and sunny day! We did the Mendenhall Glacier/Whale Watching Photo Safari through Royal Caribbean. It was cool to see everything that we did. From a photography stand point, this excursion is more for a beginner photographer. They tour guide helped people with settings and their cameras and such. I am personally a professional photographer so most of that didn't mean much to me. We hiked through Tongass National Forest and took photos of different things that she would point out (or if you looked around and something caught your eye). We got to see Mendenhall Glacier from different viewpoints. Afterwards, we took a boat out and went whale searching. Our first spot we saw a couple of no very active (one was logging/asleep). We moved spots and was soon surrounded by 4-5 whales. This made the excursion worth it! We were very lucky to see that many and get so close to them.
Skagway was a great port to visit, was smaller than what I was expecting. We did the White Pass Scenic Railway excursion through Royal Caribbean (2 hr 45 min one). We did the early morning one as I knew the lighting would be less harsh as we had a clear blue sky that day. It was beautiful and we enjoyed every minute of it!
We were only here for 2 hours as one of the railway excursion trains broke down and we had some cruisers on it. It is a small town, we didn't walk downtown at all as it was a walk from the ship and didn't have time without rushing around to see everything so we stayed at the beach and enjoyed the scenery and sounds of the waves.
This was by far our favorite port! We walked around the whole town, the trail through the trees, and the beach. We found tons of starfish as the tide was really low (which allowed me to play with my GoPro to capture underwater photos and my husband and I flew our drone for a little bit. We shared a whole dungess crab for lunch at The Crab House, which was pretty good!
I was excited to stop at this port as I've been planning photography opportunities at each port and for Ketchikan it was the famous Creek Street. We walked around the shops for a few hours for souvenirs and walked to the Totem Heritage Center (we didn't know there was a free shuttle to take you around the town). There is a creek that flows by the Totem Heritage Center and there were salmon in it so I got some photos and videos of the salmon underwater, which was cool! It doesn't look like there were any fish, but as soon as you put your GoPro underwater, there were so many!!
So apparently, the inside passage goes north of Ketchikan. So our cruise day of "cruising Inside Passage" was nothing but open water. We completely missed the inside passage portion, which I am extremely bummed about. Since we didn't have wifi to look it up and use our maps app to find it, we didn't see any of it. I'm pretty sure we went through it all over night so we couldn't' have seen it anyway.
Our cruise ended here. Since we docked at 8:00 AM and our flight was at 3 PM, we decided to do a tour of the city on their bus system calledd Hop On/Hop Off. It allowed you to hop off and any stop and hop back onto any bus within the program to see different parts of the city. Without any hop offs, it would take someone rough 1.5 hours. We hopped off at the park and did the trail around the bay and saw the totem pole park. Ubered to the airport was easy and took a lot longer to get there than expected, to anticipate that we deciding when to get to airport.
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