Alaska Bound

It's booked and we're ready to get going! In early July, we will be heading to Alaska on a Royal Caribbean cruise. Leaving from Vancouver aboard Royal Caribbean's Serenade of the Seas, we will spend 7 days exploring the edge of Alaska, both on the ship, and off. We will be booking some shore excursions as well, but we haven't quite decided which ones we are doing. How do you choose between a scenic arctic railway adventure, a hike through glacial waterfalls and rain forests outside of Juneau, a helicopter adventure over the Juneau Ice Field, a wildlife cruise on a high-speed catamaran, dogsledding adventures and ATV tours? Unfortunately, budget doesn't allow us to do all of them so we have to decide somehow. Does anyone have a 9-sided coin we could use?

We are both rather excited (as you might have guessed). As if all this wasn't already enough, we recieved news last week that we had been upgraded from the Stateroom that we booked into a Junior Suite! The room and balcony are both double the size of what we booked and it didn't cost us a penny extra. Incredible! There is one part of the trip we already have fully planned, and that is to have breakfast sent to our suite every morning to enjoy it on our balcony. The room looks pretty nice (as you can see in the picture), but I think a lot of time will be spent on the balcony. The suite is on Deck 10 so there should be a pretty impressive view. We have also heard that the captain will do a complete 360 degree turn in several spots so everyone gets to have a look at specific areas. This means we can avoid the crowds on the decks and see it all from our balcony!

Here's an interesting fact to close with. For a very long time now, cruise ships have been assigned "godmothers" when they are launched (you know the whole thing where they break a bottle of bubbly on the hull). Well, the godmother of our ship is none other than Whoopi Goldberg.