Alaska - So Much More to See Than Glaciers

As we get closer to a new Alaska cruise season, May through September, I'm seeing a lot of questions asking about excursions and itinerary choices. One of the trips I never wrote about was our cruise tour to Alaska back in 2015. To this day, if anyone asks what my favorite trip has been, the answer is Alaska. It is definitely a different experience than the fun in the sun hang out on the beach image a first time cruiser might have pictured. However, it is an itinerary that I highly recommend everyone experience in their lifetime. If feasible for your time and budget, I'd also recommend planning your trip to include a land portion like we did. You see and experience so much more than just what you can see in a 6 hour port stop on a cruise ship tour. Keep in mind also the time of year you'd want to book this trip. The earlier and the later in the season you go, it will be colder and you may see snow. We took this trip in mid to late August and the temperatures were quite comfortable with just a light jacket.

For those not familiar with the lingo, a cruise tour is a combination of land travel and traveling on the cruise ship. You can pick itineraries that do the land portion first or the cruise portion first. I personally prefer the land portion first because it means the part of your trip that is unpacking once and sleeping in the same place comes at the end and you feel a lot more settled. The fact that for us in this case meant we had free laundry (suite perk) once we boarded the Grand Princess was even better. The land portion is a lot more get up and go since you are most likely in a different town every 1-2 days so it's different hotels to unpack and repack each time. There's also the geography aspect to consider. When it comes to cruising Alaska's Inside Passage, you can choose northbound or southbound. If you chose the cruise first option, you'd either board the ship in a city like Seattle or Vancouver and then get off in Anchorage to continue on land to Fairbanks. For us, flight wise, it was easier to travel home from Vancouver and start in Fairbanks.

One of the things you'll learn from researching Alaska cruises is that Princess Cruise Lines "owns" Alaska. By that I mean that they have their own established brand in the region with their own lodges with amenities on site for travelers to stay in. With another line like Royal Caribbean or Carnival, you'd be staying at a local hotel and bussed everywhere. At this point we knew we enjoyed Princess as a cruise line in general so using them for this cruise tour was an easy decision.

The next decision was which type of cruise tour to take. Princess offers several options at differing price points because the higher the price point, the more is included and planned for you. One option is called "On Your Own" which is basically Princess providing the transportation and lodging in each city. You'd be responsible for meals and tours on your own dime and effort. Next option is known as the "Denali Explorer" which is the same as On Your Own except they include the Denali National Park nature tour. The next option is "Off the Beaten Path" which includes the riverboat ride in Fairbanks. Another option which I'm not sure I even saw they had back in 2015 is the "Canadian Rockies Cruise Tours." Unlike the others, this option starts the land portion in Calgary and all the land portions are in a different Canada city ending in Vancouver. You never actually see Alaska until the cruise. We went with the final option, and the bane of my existence in trying to spell correctly, the "Connoisseur Tour." With this option, you are paying extra for the convenience factor of included tours, included meals and as they claimed, better perks along the way.

Navigating through your many itinerary choices can be a daunting task. Here's how to narrow down your choices when searching on Princess Cruises' website. Click here for a good comparison chart for what you get under each type of tour. Then you can bring up a much simpler list of itinerary options within that tour type.

If you select "Start/End Port" from along the top choices, this is where you can choose whether you want to sort by land first options or cruise first options. Here, we sorted by land first only options and narrowed the choices even more:

Rather than a day by day account of everything we experienced like my usual blog posts, this series will feature posts highlighting the places we stayed on land, the ship, and our tours in port. And of course some food pics. You know I would never miss covering the food! Our itinerary was 8 days on land and 7 days on the cruise. We traveled from Fairbanks to Denali to McKinley, to Kenai, to Anchorage/Whittier to board the ship. Then while on the ship we visited Skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan before ending in Vancouver. So come along with me as I recount all the glaciers, bears, and goodtime girls that we saw during our trip!

Alaska - Fairbanks Princess Riverside Lodge

Pretty much every flight available to get us from Baltimore to Fairbanks, Alaska meant getting into Fairbanks around 9PM. The first activity of the first official day of the cruise tour was a welcome dinner at the Fairbanks Princess Riverside Lodge where we'd meet our fellow travelers and our guide. The next day was to be filled with included tours so we knew that getting in at 9PM on that real first day would mean missing out.

So instead, we reached out to the lodge directly and asked to book an extra night for the night before the first day of our trip. While some cruisers have reported having to settle for a local hotel when doing this, we had no issue not only booking an extra night (at our own expense) but also getting to keep the same room for the entire time in Fairbanks. Keep in mind that even though we were at the same hotel, our connoisseur perks didn't kick in until the start of the regular cruise tour so everything from excursion to edibles was at our own expense. 

To get to Fairbanks, we had to fly from Baltimore with a layover in Minneapolis. Wasn't a long layover but the airport is large enough for us to grab a motorized cart ride to our next gate. Then on to Fairbanks getting in around 9PM. There was a lot of people arriving today, not just from our tour group, but we easily found the Princess representative waiting for us. The airport to lodge transfer included in our tour booking is the one thing that still applied so we soon joined the crowd boarding a couple motor coaches. Check in was fairly easy and we were in our room 1212 shortly thereafter given the later arrival.

Not too shabby a view outside our window:

This was a connecting room but we just kept the door locked. That's the chair meant for the desk pictured in front of the connecting door.

Nice small table and chairs where we'd bring back our breakfast on the go.

Average hotel bathroom though I'd be curious to know the backstory behind the inclusion of two toilet paper holders. One and Two ply?

Since this is a Princess Cruise Lines owned property, the usual cruise ship bathroom shampoo/body wash dispensers were installed in the shower here too. If you book a suite cabin on the ship, your bathroom will have little bottles of shampoo etc. rather than the dispensers.

It is a bathtub/shower combo so you would have to be able to step up into it.

Our room had two double beds with our own nightstands and lamps.

Since we were in the system as being part of the upcoming cruise tour, we were given our envelope of welcome paperwork this first night. Inside was basic information about the trip, a detailed schedule of what we were signed up for and when, and these different luggage tags. 

On a cruise, there is evenings designated as formal nights (or cruise elegant depending on how the line words it) where it is encouraged to dress a little nicer for dinner. As usual, how dressier is up to personal preference and we have never been turned away for not being dressed up enough. Dad's version of dressing for formal night dinners is to wear the long sleeve dress shirt instead of his short sleeve dress shirt. Yes, some people will go all out with tuxes and evening gowns but you won't be out of place if you're like me who goes for black slacks and a sparkly patterned blouse. I keep the comfort and add the bling! On the land portion, there is no formal nights. As a result, this is one item you'd only need on the ship. If there's anything you know you won't need until you get on board the cruise portion, put it all in one suitcase and attach the pink "Join me onboard" tags. On the first night, these suitcases with pink tags were collected and traveled in their own truck not to be accessible again until we got to Whittier. Everything you want to have with you in the hotel each night as the land tour goes on, put in another suitcase and attach the green "Join me tonight" tags along with the tags with the code of the next lodge. Each night before we moved to the next city, we put out our green tagged luggage with the assigned tags for the next lodge outside our room and the employees would whisk it away to be loaded onto the bus. These bags would be simply in the storage area under the same bus we rode to the next town in and then unloaded by the employees there to be waiting by your hotel room.

This lodge had options for a Breakfast Buffet or prepared dishes from a menu. Lunch, cocktail hour, and dinner options were also available. The nice thing about being on the Connoisseur tour is that we were given dining vouchers that were based on courses (i.e. choose one appetizer, one entrée, one dessert) not based on a max dollar amount. Didn't matter whether we chose the cheapest burger or the most expensive crab legs on the menu. 

If you wanted a ride into town, the lodge provided a shuttle bus:

We enjoyed walking around the grounds following the River Walk and Lodge Trail. One of my favorite spots was The Chef's Garden:

Just make sure to watch out for wildlife like moose and bears:

In case you needed a reminder of your tour's schedule, you can check these video screens in the lobby:

If by chance you're one of those strange creatures who want to work off as many calories as they are enjoying, the basement of the lodge held a small health club. Limited cardio machines like treadmill and stationery bike but a good assortment of weight machines and free weights. 

There was lockers, shower, and changing facilities within the health club space. You used your room key card to gain access.

Alaska - Arctic Circle Air Adventure

Starting off the trip stepping out of my comfort zone. I like to challenge myself on these trips both in trying new foods and trying new experiences. This trip's new experience was to take a flight over the geographic Arctic Circle. This was a Princess excursion and the reason we flew in a day early. It is an extra cost since it is one of the "optional" tours offered through the lodge and is quite the investment currently being offered at $609 per person. Click here to view Princess' description of the tour. This is one of the big differences between Alaska cruise tours and the other cruise tours Princess offers. Because the hotels on our trip were all Princess owned properties, they featured optional tours you could book in addition to the ones included in our Connoisseur cruise tour booking.

Our plane - we entered by stepping up from a stepstool and then essentially up onto the edge of the wing. Definitely not for the mobility challenged but we did have older couples who managed. 

As with many flight based excursions, there is a weight limit. In this case it's 340 lbs. We did have to check in at the front desk and report our current weights so they could pass it on to the flight company. There were others at the flight company office this day who'd planned to be dropped off above the Arctic Circle and go camping so they had to have themselves weighed and then their bags. Due to their extra bag weight, they were bumped to another flight after ours. There was 6 of us not including the pilot that gathered today to take this flight. The seats were all single seats on each side of the plane and we did get seated according to our weights prompting Dad and I to be assigned the great seats right behind the pilot. Didn't think there'd be a perk to being the heaviest in your group, huh?

While we were all getting checked in at the airport, an option to purchase a boxed lunch was given. We chose to decline as the only option was ham sandwiches with mustard.

On this initial flight, our pilot kept us flying low under the clouds so we could see as much of the landscape as possible. I admit there were a couple moments of sideways glances from me as I was close enough to see the controls flash warnings about being too close to terrain. The pilot caught me staring at the message a couple times and would chuckle as he pulled back up ever so slightly to make the message clear. As we covered miles of beautiful areal views, our pilot pointed out whenever we came across something notable like the pipeline, a village just for workers, and lakes.

Pipeline (to the right of the road)

When we reached the geographic coordinates of 66° 34' North, everyone passed up their cameras so the pilot could take a picture of the dashboard noting our location. You almost expected to see a "You Are Here" sign in the sky marking the spot. If you think about it, for that brief second as we continued on, half our plane was above the Arctic Circle and the other half was still below it.

After crossing the Arctic Circle, we landed safely in what I affectionally refer to as "the truck stop town" of Coldfoot, Alaska. Yes, that really is the town's name and they offer plenty of novelty items in the truck stop's gift shop mocking their own town name. 

I wanted to get a shirt that said the Arctic Circle coordinates but they didn't have one in my size. Dad picked up this shirt for himself:

We all took turns posing with the pilot in front of the plane:

The truck stop (yes that really was the only building in the area) featured bathrooms and shower facilities as well as a restaurant and the gift shop. Once everyone had used the restrooms and made their purchases, we met a new guide who would take over our for the land portion of our tour.

We all piled into her van where she handed out the boxed lunches to those who'd ordered them. They enjoyed their own personal Alaska drive thru lunch as they had to eat with the boxes in their lap while she drove 10 minutes up the road to our next town of Wiseman, Alaska. 

Here we met a gentleman who was native to Alaska and he and his family lived completely off the land. They had a cabin set up from one of the earliest and most notorious settlers in the area on the property. We all sat inside this one room cabin left as its original owner kept it while this gentleman told us all about what it was like to live off the land. 

No that's not where they keep the trespassers. This trap door in the floor was for nature's cold storage of their food.

We were then led to a shed on the property where the gentleman had filled it with decades worth of animal bones and carcasses from his hunting successes. He continued to give lectures on the different types of animal hooves as he proudly showed them off. It soon became a little much for me to listen to and I stepped back out into the fresh air.

Now this sign just outside the shed took on a new interpretation:

Let's just say a lot of us were glad we'd taken the opportunity to use the bathrooms back in Coldfoot. Here's the facilities we were offered in Wiseman:

We were driven back to Coldfoot where we reunited with our pilot and boarded the plane to come back across the Arctic Circle to Fairbanks. During the flight back, the pilot checked with everyone to confirm no one minded that we stay above the clouds now for a smoother ride back. 

All in all, it was a great experience that I was glad we had taken the time to fly in a day early to experience. When we landed back at the small airport, the company handed us each certificates with our names celebrating that we had officially crossed the Arctic Circle. 

I did have the second worst ear pain/pressure that I've experienced from a flight after this trip. I remember trying everything from moving my jaw around to blowing my nose but my ears would not pop until that evening. If you're susceptible to that when flying, bring precautions or follow one of the preventative home remedies like chewing gum while you're flying.

Alaska - Our first full day as part of the group (Part 1)

After the Arctic Circle flight yesterday, we attended the first official event of the cruise tour - a welcome/orientation dinner. This was held in a banquet room at the Princess Fairbanks Lodge with everyone together at shared tables. It was a multi course catered meal so your only choice was whether or not to eat what they brought out. Wine was flowing freely however. We met our guide who would stay with us the entire trek until the ship and she went over all of the paperwork and planned activities. It was nice to meet everyone officially and mingle with the people I'd be spending the next 8 days with covering the state of Alaska. And yes, I was the youngest in the group by at least 10 years but that's fine by me. By the end of the trip, I would jokingly dub myself the mascot of the group.

After breakfast at the lodge, we all met up this morning for our first included port excursion. All of these excursions were organized by and purchased from Princess. It was a bit of trouble and confusion when we wanted to reserve the optional tours from each lodge because at least at the time, it didn't let you book land tours on the cruise personalizer like you can for cruise port tours. We had to call Princess and have them do it for us over the phone. Today would be a full day tour known as Riverboat Discovery Cruise & Gold Dredge 8 Combo for which Princess currently charges $159.95. For those not on the Connoisseur tour where this was included, you can also book each part separately. The Riverboat Discovery Cruise is $89.95 and the Gold Dredge 8 is priced at $60.

Our first stop via motorcoach on the way to our excursion was to visit the Alyeska Pipeline up close and personal. This is included as part of the Gold Dredge 8 portion of the tour but there were stops later in the trip that would have not necessarily been included if you weren't on this type of cruise tour package. I think you have to be part of a scheduled tour to be this close but it still surprised me at how we were just able to walk up and touch the pipeline.

For the informational sign lovers:

My Alaska, what big pipes you have!

For reference, I'm 5'7" and I was barely taller than the platform underneath the pipe's platform. Note the nametag pouch hanging around my neck. While we didn't have sea pass or cruise cards for identification like on the ship, we had these nametag pouches to wear. These were a little bigger than ACL gave us so you could also fit in a folded up brochure or map.

The pin affixed to my nametag pouch strap was given to us for being part of the tour group:

Hey this pipeline has legs!

Partially, this stop was to occupy us until the Gold Dredge facility was ready for us. Several different groups were there today doing tours so they had to stagger us. When they were finally ready, this gentleman picked a high perch to address the crowd:

We next all boarded a trolley train to take a narrated ride over to the pavilion set up with troughs for gold panning. Each trolley car had TV screens so you could see and hear what the driver was saying. He even stopped driving at one point to perform a song:

Much like you might expect from a low budget ride at Disneyland, there were stations set up along the train/trolley route where the employees showed what it's like for someone who worked at the mine.

Just before we got to the pavilion, they showed us a demonstration in front of each trolley car on how to do the gold panning.

As we reached the storefront (what you thought there wouldn't be a gift shop?) , our narrator concluded his story by talking about how friendly the local townsfolk would be when you came to town often coming out to cheer and wave. On cue, several employees came out of the store toting all the little sacks of gold infused dirt to hand us as we got off the trolley.

After getting our little bags of dirt that were all guaranteed to have some amount of gold in them, we were directed to a pavilion filled with multiple troughs of water surrounded by long benches. Each spot to sit had a pan and an old film canister. You dump a little bit of the dirt from your bag into the pan, dip the edge of the pan under the water, and slosh it around a bit before emptying out the water back into the trough. The heavier dirt sinks to the side and the small pieces of gold will stick to the bottom of your pan. There are employees walking around helping if you have any questions. A couple of us had to get new bags because we ended up missing the tiny gold pieces with what we dipped back into the water. These were free but if you wanted another bag just to do the experience again or try for more gold, those were an extra cost. 

Next step was to take your finished product to be weighed in the shop. It was nice to see that they had a whole row of scales and employees helping keep this part of the process moving through quickly.

They'd ask you to guess how much your gold haul weigh was worth and my guy was impressed that I guessed $20 and it turned out to be $24 worth. Kind of surprised considering to look at the contents was barely flecks on the bottom of the film canister. There was a leaderboard mounted on the wall with the top earners. 

You can choose to simply take the canister and its contents back home for nothing more than the cost of the tour, as we did, or pay extra to turn it into jewelry. 

They had an example of a gold nugget worth $75,000 out on the counter that you could hold and pose for pictures with.