Quantum of the Seas in Icy Strait Point
For the last couple years my Christmas gift to my mother has been to take her on a little vacation. She doesn’t need any material things. Time spent together, experiences, and memories are more important. We stayed in cozy little Airbnb cabins near parks with good hiking trails and enjoyed our short getaways, but this past Christmas I decided to do something different. I booked a cruise instead. I also included one of my sisters in the gift. She has watched my dog and businesses while I travel many times as well as being there to take care of the needs of other family. My other sister knew about the booking long before Christmas and was in on some of the cruise plans with me. She also invited her two daughters to join, though they made their own booking in a separate cabin rather than bunking with the other 4 of us. So it became a 3-generation cruise.
the family – Linda, Jennifer, Barbara, Ruth, Melissa, Lois
We chose an Alaska cruise out of Seattle as that is the most convenient port for what started out as most of us, but ended up as only half once my nieces joined. Since Barbara and her daughters all live in the middle of the country they would have to fly no matter which port it was so it didn’t make much difference to them. We all ended up converging at mom & Linda’s house the night before and taking a shuttle to the dock. We had a boarding time of 10:30am, and the girls at 11:00, but everything from 10-11 was all in the same line so we were able to board together. This was the easiest boarding I’ve experienced since Covid. No long lines outside waiting to get into the port- not that there is room for that in Seattle anyway. We went right in without a line, got checked in and then went upstairs to a big room where some people were sitting in the seats waiting to board while others were lined up by the door so they could get in first. They opened the boarding about the time we got there and it didn’t take too long to get the line moving so we got onto the ship fairly quickly.
mom arranged our spare wall magnets into flowers
The cabins weren’t going to be ready until 2pm, but the girl at the check-in desk had said we could drop our stuff in our room before then. We were going to do it first, but they were hounding everyone to check in at the muster station immediately after boarding rather than doing it just whenever during the first few hours onboard like it usually has been since they stopped doing the crowded muster drills when cruises started up again after covid. As it turned out it was a good thing I still had my stuff with me. Key cards were at the rooms so they wanted to scan the boarding pass rather than the key card at the muster station and my phone picked that time to say the ones in the app were not available. Luckily I had paper copies as a backup in my backpack, which I had not needed to pull out until then. Their cabin being on a different deck, the girls had gone to a different muster station elsewhere. We dropped our stuff off at the cabin and then met them in the buffet for lunch. They still had their stuff with them, not having been told at check-in that they could drop it off. We went to their deck to drop it off and were just about back to the main hallway when someone from the crew spotted us and asked if we were on a back-to-back cruise since we had come down that hallway before the cabins were officially opened. She seemed a bit miffed that we had been told we could drop stuff off at the cabin. Apparently if it had been someone onboard who said so they might have been in trouble, but the people out in the port don’t work for the ship and there’s so many of them they’d never know which one it was anyway. We hadn’t seen anyone on our deck, but maybe that was the only one where dropping stuff at the cabin was actually allowed.
it’s sort of like a trundle bed except both sides are the same height
Once the cabins opened and we had a bit more time to look around we were a bit puzzled by the lack of an outline of a drop-down bunk in the ceiling of what we booked as a 4-person room. We expected there to be either two bunks or one bunk and a couch bed, but it turned out that rather than bunks or couch beds that just sleep one person, Quantum of the Seas has a bed that slides out from under the seat of the couch turning it into a double bed. Which meant Barbara and I had to share a bed as we had already decided to give mom and Linda the actual beds while we slept in the secondary accommodations. The other beds started out as one, but the steward split them into two with a small nightstand in between. When night came ours was set up with two quilts folded over like sleeping bags which gave us a bit of separation. Barbara had the inside and managed to get in and out without crawling over me. Mine started with the folded edge of the quilt to the outside, but I flipped it over so the open end was where it was easy to get in and out of without bothering her. Though it was smaller than my bed at home I actually had more space because Barbara is not a bed hog like my dog Piper, who always manages to sprawl out during the night leaving me waking up on just a few inches at the edge of the bed every morning.
North Star nearly up
We had a deck 3 oceanview cabin while Mel and Jen had a balcony on deck 9. Both were near the starboard aft so they were in the same general area of the ship, theirs was just up higher. We had booked one near a public restroom thinking that might be come in handy with 4 people in a cabin, especially if someone took a long shower or when we were all returning from shore at the same time. We expected that restroom to be in a hallway near the elevator like every other public cruise ship bathroom, but instead it was inside the casino. A casino that the app and even the printed daily cruise ship newsletter said was non-smoking, yet apparently that did not apply on cruises leaving from American ports so it did get pretty smokey sometimes. Besides being open on both ends it had an open stairway right into the promenade deck so no containment for the smoke at all. It did at least have a good ventilation system that would pretty much clear out the smell overnight when there wasn’t anyone in there. Luckily there were other nearby public restrooms just a flight or two of stairs away on the next two decks above us.
green duck blending in with the fake foliage in a planter
I brought 3 ducks each for everyone to hide, figuring that was enough to make it fun, but not enough to overwhelm anybody that wasn’t into cruise ducks since I didn’t expect any of them to know about them before the cruise, and they didn’t. They all thought that was a good number too and had fun hiding theirs.
Barbara found a pink duck in a planter in the solarium
Barbara found one duck that someone else had hidden so we weren’t the only ones onboard hiding ducks. All of them had disappeared whenever we went back to check if anyone had found them. One of mine didn’t even take long enough to go back for. I saw some large letters on an empty stairway, set a little duck in one of the letters, and had just stopped to take a photo of it when a young couple snuck quietly down the stairs above me. I didn’t see them in time to slip away before they saw me so of course they stopped to see what I had been taking a photo of before I left when I saw them coming. I hadn’t gone too far to still see them and watched the girl take the duck. Silent no more, she went the whole rest of the way down that stairway loudly chirping happy words I could hear from several decks away. I have no idea what she actually said or what language she was speaking, but from the tone of her voice I think finding that duck made her day. Which was good because making someone happy when they find one is the whole point of hiding ducks.
Linda, Mel, mom & Jen in the North Star
Most of the time we all had dinner together, and sometimes breakfast too. Sometimes we all did things together on the ship like taking a ride up in the North Star, a pod unique to Royal’s Quantum Class ships that rises up 300 feet in the air for an excellent view. Most of us also tried the skydiving simulator. We all went to a couple shows together, and for most of us the favorite hang-out spot was the solarium. Walking around and exploring the ship is always fun too, which we all did alone and in various groupings.
it’s easier to get a good photo when Barbara & I have our eyes covered since we’re the least photogenic
When I cruise with my husband we avoid photographers like the plague, but when cruising with my sisters we always get a photo package. I was really glad I had bought it online before the cruise because the onboard price was more than double. I did pay $10 extra to get them put onto a flash drive because their standard is to email them and besides coming out as better quality on the flashdrive, on our last cruise the email they sent only contained less than half of the photos so if we hadn’t had a flashdrive we’d have been missing most of them. On that one they’d added the flashdrive free because we hadn’t hit the max number of photos we were allowed, but I kind of had a feeling this one wouldn’t have done that, though it didn’t matter anyway because we actually went over and had to weed some out.
Gondola at Icy Strait Point
The first port stop was at Icy Strait Point, a place none of us had been to before. We got lucky and had a beautiful day, which is really nice at that port since the highlight is a gondola up to the top of a mountain. There’s also a really awesome zipline down, or you can go back down the gondola. With or without the zipline you get unlimited rides on the gondola, which is great since most places you just get one ride up and back. After we got back to our room on the ship my mom and I saw whales really close by right out our cabin window, which really brightened up her day after a bad reboarding experience.
Jen in the ifly skydiving simulator
A little girl tried to crowd past us at the security check, which I really wouldn’t have thought anything of, but the guy running it made her wait because our stuff was already on the conveyer and you have to go through in the same order as your stuff. I was at the conveyer trying to fetch my mom’s cane and our other stuff while she walked through, but her watch made the security thing beep. Instead of asking her to take it off and walk back through like normal they asked her to take her shoes off, which caught her off-guard. She complied too quickly and would have fallen if she hadn’t caught herself on the next conveyer over, which wasn’t running. The whole thing upset her. Meanwhile while I was reaching for the cane the little girl had gotten through security and tried to grab my mom’s bag right off the conveyer. I saw her reach for it and snagged it just before her hand got there. Then when we were leaving that area she came up to me and tried to say the bag was hers, but it was definitely my mom’s. That particular bag was not something the girl could have mistaken for her own even if she’d had anything on the conveyer, which she hadn’t. Besides having mom’s things sticking out of the top, the cloth of the bag itself was a unique pattern that nobody else would have because mom’s sister made it for her about 10 years prior for a trip they took together. I guess that little girl really liked that bag. No idea where her parents were through all of that. We’ve never had anyone try to steal anything from us on a cruise ship before.
totem pole in Sitka
Slightly before the cruise we got a notice that our port stop in Skagway had been changed to Sitka. We’d had an excursion booked in Skagway, the only one that all 6 of us were going to do together. There wasn’t anything suitable to replace it with in Sitka so we just ventured out on our own. We all left the ship together, but before we even got near the shuttle to town we passed by someone with a sign for a sea and land tour. It cost more than most of us wanted to spend, but the girls jumped on it. They enjoyed the sea part more than the land part. They saw sea lions and an otter, but no whales. The rest of us took the shuttle into town and walked to the totem park. We also walked up to the old Russian church, but it was closed so we just took photos from outside and Barbara bought some nesting dolls at a little shop near the church.
Sumdum Glacier
On a couple previous cruises we’ve been supposed to go to Tracy Arm for glacier watching and ended up going down Endicott Arm instead because Tracy Arm was blocked by icebergs. Those ships both made it all the way to Dawes Glacier at the end of Endicott Arm. This ship was scheduled to go down Endicott Arm, but didn’t even get halfway through before it turned around. They didn’t make any sort of announcement about that so we all thought it was going in rather than out until Melissa said she’d been out on the upper deck early in the morning when the ship did a 360. She didn’t realize at the time that it was bailing on the glacier, but since she had internet when she finally got enough signal to check a map app it confirmed that we were leaving Endicott Arm rather than heading toward the glacier. The other ships I’ve been on that made it to the end were considerably smaller. We did see a glacier on the side of a mountain which I’m sure was Sumdum Glacier, the name being a great source of entertainment on a previous cruise. As in I went to Alaska and saw Sumdum glacier, which of course when spoken people hear as some dumb glacier. I can’t find anything that mentions any other glaciers besides that one and Dawes in Endicott Arm and the mountains in my photo look the same as the ones in other photos of Sumdum Glacier. There is an offshoot of Endicott Arm called Fords Terror where an early explorer named Ford was trapped for 6 panic-stricken hours until the tide changed so he could get back out. We probably didn’t make it far enough down Endicott Arm to get anywhere near that though.
Mendenhall Glacier
In Juneau the girls had booked a kayak excursion and the rest of us figured we’d go see what the booths on shore had to offer. Last time I was there they had all sorts of things, but this time they pretty much just had whale watching or busses out to Mendenhall Glacier. One had a sign for a trolley tour of the town. The girl in the booth said that wasn’t running that day, but they had a combo that did a tour of the town and went out to the glacier. We had all been to the glacier before on previous trips, but didn’t have anything better to do. She said the trolley would be running that tour, but the trolley was really a bus that looked like a trolley rather than an actual trolley. The town part of that tour was just the bus driver talking about stuff on the way to the glacier, though it did stop at a giant whale statue on the way back. Not surprisingly, the glacier is smaller every time we go there. We saw some kayaks near the glacier, but it wasn’t the girls. Their tour didn’t get that close. Kayaking to the glacier is something I’d like to do someday.
Linda and the whale
Our last port was supposed to be Victoria. We haven’t ever booked an excursion there before, but this time the 4 of us were going to go to Butchart Gardens while the girls did something on their own. Watching out our cabin window on the way to Victoria, the pilot boat passed by right under our window bouncing in waves that looked a whole lot bigger splashing over that little boat than they did compared to the cruise ship. The boat went out of sight before it got to where the pilot gets on the ship, too close to the ship for us to see it from our window. Many ports require a local pilot to guide the ship into port. Pilots have to get on and off ships in all kinds of weather to and from their little pilot boats. Soon we could see Victoria from our cabin window, and a Norwegian ship already docked there. We sailed past it, circled around, and sailed past again. Time came to go meet at the theater for our excursion and we were just outside the theater door when the captain announced that he and the pilot had decided it was too stormy for the ship to get into the dock. I’d never heard of a ship not making the stop in Victoria before. Maybe it happens and I just don’t know about it or maybe that ship is just too big for Alaska cruises. The bigger ships never used to go there.
solarium at night when there’s nobody there
When you cruise you have to be flexible. We had the turkey dinner we thought we were going to miss and had one last evening to hang out in the solarium. Or should I say terrarium as the girls referred to it because lounging on deck chairs in the solarium reminded them of lizards sunning on rocks in a terrarium. All it took for us to know that’s where they were going immediately after the announcement of the cancelled port was a message containing nothing but two emojis – the sun and a lizard. 🌞🦎
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