Vancouver and home

 We dock in Vancouver the next morning and have plenty of time to

have breakfast, go back to the room and then get our stuff out, exit the ship to go walk around the battery with shops around the bay.  We read about the history of Vancouver and go in a few shops and waste time before our float plane ride.  We find a great place to have lunch and Oscar again gets pizza and his usual things.  It’s okay, he can order off the menu in most places now and I’m fine with that.  At least I don’t have to bring snacks everywhere for him now.  In fact, most of the snacks we bought and brought with us have not been used, so I guess those days are

behind me now.  We head out to check in for our flight and check our luggage in with the little airport that has little float plane flights to Seattle, Portland etc near here.  We finally head out the the plane with our pilot and he says that Oscar can be his copilot.  So, he gets a headset and to sit up front with the pilot to see how everything works.  He is beyond excited and gets the best view of anyone in the plane.  We take big plane flights.  I know I’ve done this kind of flying before, sight seeing flying some time in my life, but not often.  I forget how well you can see

everything when you’re flying low.  It’s so awesome to see the land, the trees, the water so close, but a great aerial view.  We fly over some beautiful, huge houses and see the great port of Vancouver from a different perspective.  This turns out to be a great add on to our trip because Oscar now thinks that he wants to learn to fly before he learns to drive and will fly us all out to Bimini, Bahamas in his float plane.  We usually vacation somewhere near water, but only the Bahamas and Alaska have seemed to have so many float planes that they seem like a must have in the future for him.  That would be awesome and I’ll encourage him on that

goal because with the amount of travel we do, a pilot in the family would be helpful.  We get an uber after getting the luggage and head out to our Airbnb out by the airport.  The airport is no where near the port of course and we get to see a lot of the city as we go through most of it.  Wow, it’s big and busy and I’m so glad that we didn’t even attempt to do it justice.  You would need at least a week here to properly see Vancouver I think.  We check in to the worst airbnb we’ve ever stayed at….I mean even the hunting cabin in Georgia that Oscar called a stable was better.  It’s not unclean, it’s enough for us, I don’t know what made me so unhappy about it.  I guess the price with the little bit that we got for

that.  The hosts were nice and would have breakfast in bags for us when we left at 3:30 am.  It was just hard to get to sleep, get food there.  But, we tried to go to bed at 6pm at night in order to be somewhat rested for the flight.  It was excrutiating with John leaving his C-Pap packed for a quick getaway in the morning, Oscar not wanting to go to sleep.  We finally get several hours of sleep and our scheduled Uber arrives in time to take us to the airport to find out that everything at the airport is not open yet.  Our airline’s desk is not open, security is not open yet, it’s a wait and see game after trying to get there so early.  We are able

to eat some of our breakfast and get through security, hang out in front of our plane’s departure gate.  Our first flight home is underway and we get to watch the sunrise over Vancouver as we fly away and to Calgary.  We’ve never explored the western part of Canada, not even really the eastern part enough, so we have to return to just explore this country some time.  We land in time to walk straight to our next flight in the international part and get on to Atlanta.  We have a ton of time in Atlanta and waste time all over Hartsfield, but should have sent John to finish his Global Entry membership while we had 7 hours here.  There’s no

earlier flight to GR, so we spend the day in Hartsfield and get home at about 1am eastern time.  Luckily, we’re all still on Pacific Coast time and can make it home in the car before crashing at home.  Thankfully, we arrive home on Saturday night before having to go to school and work on Monday.  So, we get Sunday to recover.  

An addition to this trip.  Oscar gets to go to school one day on Monday before saying that his throat is sore on Tuesday.  We just traveled and even though we masked up and were negative at the time we got on the boat, he got COVID on the trip.  So, he gets to miss another 5 days of school before getting to return after Labor Day.  So, we’re probably already the family on the truancy officer’s list.  

End of the cruise

 We get a beautiful last day on the boat with Oscar enjoying his time at kids’ club to the point where he gets to stay all damn night practically

while they watch a movie in their pjs.  We have been going up there for their family get togethers for building a volcano, rawing together and bingo.  We’ve enjoyed the kids’ club immensely and I ope that the one on the Hawaii cruise is hal as good.  We head to trivia where I’m trying again to down play our chances of winning it all, but Oscar is nothing if not confident when it’s not warranted.  We sit down to play and he knows the first answer off the bat and feels great.  And then the

other 19 questions are things that he has no clue about and then he gets upset.  But the good news is that mommy is pretty sure of all of her answers.  We only miss two questions and are tied with another group, but the trivia guy wants Oscar to win today, so the tiebreaker question is about Spongebob Squarepants best friend….which, unfortunately, mommy has to answer again.  But it means that we get gold medals for winning trivia and you can’t imagine a happier kid.  We play a find

the nations game too where you have to talk to as many crew members as you can from different countries.  We get the silver medal in this game and our dominance on the ship is complete!  Oscar has learned to enjoy shuffleboard, playing with kids that he is just meeting, and pick up soccer on the deck.  We have been able to return to the feeling that we can cruise without a kid constantly with us throughout the day and have been able to sit and enjoy.  We’re cruising the inside passage on this last day and there are views of porpoises chasing through our wake, pods of orca hunting off to the side.  We hit everything we wanted on this last day of this cruise and it feels magical finally.

Skagway and Haines

 Next port day is Skagway. We dock early and have a great experience with the next excursion. We need the passports for this one because

we’re crossing over the border out of the US, toward Canada even
though we’re not entering Canada per se. Apparently there is a no man’s land of about 20 miles between the two borders here. Our excursion is to White Summit Pass where one of the most used passes into the Yukon territory for the gold rush. We didn’t get to see Dead Horse Gulch where you’re still supposed to be able to see bones from all the horses that died on this trek. The view is beautiful and for the

first time, John isn’t randomly stopped and searched when we pass through customs and back into the US. Our tour guide has lived in Skagway area for 20 years and is finally getting tired of the cold and inaccessibility…..she’s thinking about retiring to a beach somewhere and I can’t imagine living here….I mean I already live in the wilds of Michigan and that’s cold and inaccessible enough for me. We get to walk around Skagway, get a junior ranger book for Oscar to fill out while we hang out at the Skagway Brewery to get flights of all their beers. John is making a ton of progress in trying all the craft brews in Alaska on this trip. He can only have sips of them and rate them on his app though because we have to get a consult when we get home about surgery for the hernia…..carbonated yeasty beverages are not good for him right now, so I’m drinking a lot of beer instead. Oscar finishes his booklet and gets another badge for the Gold Rush National Park that’s here. We walk over to the side dock to see the huge rock slide that cut

off one of the docks here. We get back on the ship and are running late to leave the dock because there’s an excursion that hasn’t come back yet. An hour and some odd after we were supposed to have left, we finally do, but it means like two hours in Haines when it’s getting dark. We just get off the boat in order to look at some of the shops that have stayed open for our late boat and then head back to get to sleep.

  

Icy Straits Point and Ketchikan

Next morning, I can’t sleep. This happens more and more lately, but I

get to use it to good advantage today and check out our stop in Icy Straight Point while the boys sleep longer. I walk all around and get to watch an otter swim around the ship, sea lions that keep coming up to breathe as I walk along the beach scoping things out. I head back to the ship, we get some breakfast and head out to see the cannery, take a gondola ride from one dock port to the other and get some good pictures of the otter that is still swimming around. This

port is near the largest Tlingit town and we should have gone farther inland, but we’ve seen the wildlife and Oscar is gung ho to get to a trivia competition that is about flags of countries. Oscar is sure that he will kill it and the kid loves to study the Atlas, so maybe. We head up to the bar where trivia happens early luckily because the trivia crew is an intense crew and were already in place from the previous trivia competition. They’re all talking about how the winners got 3 our of 15

questions right, so I’m not feeling very confident about the situation, but Oscar remains confident. And he does know 16 of the 20. It was amazing, but the 16 year old who also apparently studies atlases too.
So, we lose, but Oscar still gets a prize from the head of the trivia because of how young he is. We talk with the other family and discuss cruises we’ve taken and how to raise kids that like to study crazy
things.  One more port and it’s Ketchikan.  We have another pretty lame excursion set up, but it gets us out of the main part of Ketchikan and we get a tour of town, head to the totem poles and are pissed off when we’re told that we need to get back on the shuttle after about only 15 minutes there because another ships passengers are

leaving soon.  They don’t have another shuttle that is coming out this way and we have to be on it, but we’re only pissed before we realize that we’ve pretty much seen every part of the totem pole park that we can anyway.  So, with our main goal the salmon ladder and finding a sea lion figurine for Oscar, we head back to Ketchikan. We hit the brewery of course, then Oscar and I head back to the salmon ladder.  I never thought that huge fish jumping up rocks would be the big wildlife hit of the Alaska trip for him, but there it is.  So, we walk up river when John joins us and try to get to the

hatchery that’s up here, but it’s closed for COVID and we catch a city bus back down to the port area.  We get some pictures and start heading for all the shops to see if we can find a sea lion.  There are walruses, harbor seals, whales and bears galore, but no sea lions for some reason and that’s what Oscar wants.  I finally find a beautiful one in a higher end shop that was recommended to me and we’re not going to pay $100 for knickknack for Oscar.  But in a similar shop I find one made out of nut ivory (yes, they carve little ivory statues from the core of nuts here) one that isn’t ridiculously expensive and want to get Oscar’s approval.  He likes it, but John hates it because even though it’s made from nuts, there’s the ivory statues around it.  Alaska can get past the ivory ban because indigenous tribes are

allowed to hunt so many animals a year as part of their cultural heritage and then can carve the ivory.  But it still upsets John and Oscar to some extent, so over in the corner is a little brown stone sea lion with actual whiskers for even cheaper than the other two and it is sold.  We head back to the ship and our next day is a sea day, so we get to just plan our day around trivia.  Because now Oscar is hooked and he thinks that we’re awesome enough to win.  I try to tamp down his enthusiasm because the big trivia group are hard core and we are not.

Cruising Hubbard Glacier and Juneau

 A sea day with a long pass at the Hubbard Glacier while the rich people get tendered off to do excursions, lets us get the lay of the land with the Windjammer Café, Oscar decides that he loves kids’ club

more than life itself and doesn’t want to leave it much. John and I get to rediscover what it’s like to cruise with just the two of us while he’s there for 3 hours. We can see the glacier best from our window in our cabin because we’re on the right level for it and have found a warm, sunny spot where we can sit and read our books as if we’re on a warm cruise when it’s still just too cold to think about putting on a
swimsuit. We play around with the app to try to figure out what’s happening where on the ship, but find that the little newsletter they put in the room every night is just better than the app. Oscar gets his

first towel animal on this evening and is so excited he can’t sleep, but we don’t care anyway because we made it on the cruise. I was really worried about not making it in so many ways, but we’re here now and our second day is our first port with an excursion out to the Mendenhall glacier in Juneau. Worst excursion in some ways, great in others. We’re at a outer dock so that the Royal Caribbean Quantum class ships can get the good port, but at least we have a dock and aren’t tendering in like another ship. We get to the main boardwalk along the sea in Juneau and walk around the town. Oscar has found the joy of going into a cruise lines’ jewelry store and getting jewelry for free. He got a whale tail charm necklace for nothing and is over the moon about it. We catch our excursion and have a father daughter team narrating that I think are trying to make it

on an Alaska show. He brags about how off the grid they live and how his daughter has never seen a Taco Bell or anything else like that, but she has an Instagram page of course. We see a black bear on the road out of the glacier which has everyone ooohhhing and aaahhhing, but don’t get a picture. Oscar doesn’t care though, we saw one and that knocks everything but Orca, wolverines and polar bears off his list of things to see on this trip. He knew we weren’t going to see any polar bears and I told him that wolverine would be like seeing a unicorn, it ain’t going to happen, but the kid dreams big. When we get to Mendenhall, we find the salmon stream and get to see huge fish swimming up this small, shallow creek, fighting each other and the river to get where they need to go. Oscar has decided that salmon are the best part of the wildlife we’ve seen and he doesn’t want to see any more bear because they will most likely be eating salmon and he doesn’t want that. So, no more need to try to see bear….awesome. We hit the ranger center and get his booklet, start hiking up to the waterfall and take a little detour to see the beach to find icebergs washed up on the beach. We get to have glacier iceberg ice like we got to in Iceland a year ago and are the only ones on this beach. It feels like a secret spot and ritual that we get to recreate here and is special. We continue on to the waterfall and enjoy seeing it, but I won’t let Oscar climb on the rocks around it and we realize that we now have 30 minutes to hike the mile back to the bus….so, we book it back and Oscar runs ahead to turn in his booklet, take his oath and get his awesome patch for the glacier and we even get to see the salmon again for a second before the bus pulls up. We find out when we leave some people that the next bus from our company will grab them….well, shit. We could have spent some more time there, but this is also supposed to be a city tour, but there really isn’t one. I mean how can it be a city tour when you don’t leave the main highway and in the capital of Alaska, you don’t go by the capitol building? Not acceptable. When the expensive taxi ride is over, we head to Alaskan Brewing Company to get an order taken and then completely ignored after that…..we receive no food, no check and we have to stop another waitstaff to find our original person again. She apologizes profusely and while I’m irritated as all get out, I tell her that with 5 large cruise ships in port, she’s allowed to completely lose track of people. She comps us our pretzel bites which was very nice and we pay it back in tips. We walk our happy asses up quite a steep hill in order to see the (dare I say it) ugliest state capitol in the United States and St. Nicholas church. It’s a Russian Orthodox church that was built in 1893, almost 30 years after the United States had bought Alaska from Russia. That little building was worth the trek. We head back down to the city boardwalk and take the shuttle out to the boat to reboard and have a real lunch in Oscar’s favorite restaurant now, the Windjammer. We realize that the cool kids’ pool is open with the slide because it’s actually sunny today, so we put on our suits and go for a swim too for several hours, move to the hot tubs because it’s cooling off. We see a woman at the bar with a Blanchard shirt on and I have to go ask if it’s Blanchard Michigan and it is!!! A group of 4 or more is on the boat from Blanchard, Michigan…..what are the chances? It’s a good thing I make friends with them because the bartender is exclusively serving their party of heavy drinkers and I get a word in edgewise to get John and I some drinks and Oscar a virgin peach dacquiri which he loves. Dinner in the actual dining room and Oscar loves their spaghetti, so we might actually get to come back some time. We’ve been seeing the shows every night and now that I’ve been on this boat for several days, I can definitely say that I’m not impressed by the food, the shows, the service or anything else on this cruise. This is our first cruise on Royal and I’m not feeling much of a need to return really. It’s the night before our anniversary and we get a faint pic of the aurora from the window in our cabin when I wake up close to midnight. That feels special and the Juneau day ends well for all of us after an interesting start.

Boarding Royal Caribbean Radiance

The next morning, we play in our yurt, get packed up again and head

out to the meeting spot as if we’re going on another tour with Major Marine but just happen to have all of our bags with us. He stops at several little campsites and RV places and we pick up people and are able to get into town, check our bags with the hotel again and stroll around town to get breakfast, complete Oscar’s Junior Ranger badge for Kenai Fjords National Park and then make our way on foot to the dock. We’re pulling our luggage with us, which John knows I hate, but it’s not raining,

there are sidewalks all the way out and it’s not that bad a trudge. Even better, when we get to the port, there is no one else there checking in practically. Royal Caribbean had set up times for everyone to check in and while we’re a little early for our check in time, there is no one in line. So, we walk right in, show them our passports, our negative tests, get our room assignment and get on the ship. And it’s time to get into the rooms at the time we get one. Oscar is astounded. This is his 4 th cruise,

but he doesn’t remember the first three because they were in 2018 and before. He thinks this ship is “class”, “first class” as we walk through the atrium, down to our state room, past guest services, and get Oscar signed up for kids’ club. We check out the pools, went to the cinema and watched Big Miracle which made us all cry. We keep getting all these intercom messages about people needing to check in with their muster stations and I’m a little appalled at how many and why people

   are not wanting to just get this done. Have they seen Titanic? Do they know what happens when you take safety at sea for granted? We’re up on the promenade deck for sail away, but no one else seems to be there….probably because it’s raining again. The party is going on in the atrium where it’s warm and cozy and it’s a dance party for a pretty much over 60 crowd. Oscar takes the dancefloor though and is the only one out there trying to give the dance instructor some help. He gets asked to give his name on over the microphone and feels like a rock star. Everyone thinks that he is “living his best life” because he doesn’t care that he’s the only one out there. I join him occasionally when there is some dance song that is good, but otherwise, he would stay out there all night on his own. So, a good first night on the ship. 

Seward

 We get to Seward, get our bags and check them in at the Harbor 360

hotel where our Kenai Fjords wildlife cruise is out of with Major Marine. We take our bonine and Dramamine after the debacle in Iceland and get ready to probably not see anything because it is still raining and foggy. But we have a great crew and captain on 

this boat and Resurrection Bay is good to us. We see Horned Puffins, regular puffins, the penguins of the north (can’t remember their real name), harbor seals, sea lions, and a humpback. We see all of this and are even able to have lunch on this boat, but of course, there is nothing that Oscar will eat and it starts to get bumpy on the boat. So, now he’s seasick, but I think it’s more to do with having nothing on his stomach. The crew are very solicitous of him, but he 

 went from super excited to be seeing all of this to green and crying to get off the boat. They’ve given us ginger ale, ginger chews, I’ve already given him Dramamine and they offer up oyster crackers. That’s what finally pulls him out of it. After 10 packs of oyster crackers, he’s smiling and happy again. It helps that we have reentered Resurrection Bay and the waves slow down too. We finally get off the boat and decide to find some real

food in town before heading out to our yurt which is about 10 miles away. We get Oscar’s junior ranger book and take it to Ray’s harbor front dining where I get the most excellent salmon and John gets delicious prime rib. Oscar has a berry smoothie and more crackers. After a great dinner, we find out that Uber doesn’t exist in Seward, so return to pick up our bags and are talking about what to do when the shuttle driver from our cruise tour

    hears us and says he’ll drop us off because we took their tour today. He knows where we are and takes us out to our yurt, says that there is a pick up point right by us the next day if we just happen to be there at 10 and we couldn’t be more grateful for his kindness. We see the signs at the kitchen around the yurts that there is no food allowed in the yurts. I ask via text if it’s okay to have Oscar’s packaged snacks, but when you’re playing

around with bears, you err on the side of caution and leave pretty much everything in the kitchen area for the night. We love our yurt. It’s raining, of course!!! And while this is annoying when you’re trying to see Denali, or hike or do just about anything, when you’re in a warm little yurt with the rain making a great tapping on the roof, it’s magical.

 We all fall a little bit in love with it and talk about getting one to put in the backyard. Oscar wants to live in one. I want one for the backyard until I look up the price, but we fall into bed and have a great last night before getting on the boat. Yes, we had shared bathrooms at the kitchen area, so no bathroom in the yurt. No, it wasn’t a problem. John had to go once in the night and had to take the bear bag with him to alert others and protect himself if he ran into one, but otherwise, our best night in Alaska for all of us.