By Elaine Glusac
From geography lessons and wildlife studies to a little mother-son insight, an Alaska cruise is truly educational.
Ship’s Log: Day Two. Cruising the Inside Passage.
“The muscle controlling a whale’s tail is called a caudal peduncle,” I offer.
“A beluga whale is born gray and turns white,” my son, Seth, responds in a new ritual we’ve adopted: competitive recitation of the day’s lessons on an Alaska voyage that is, so far, full of them.
“Well, minke whales don’t raise their flukes when they spout,” I counter.
He stares me down. “Mom, glacial silt makes lakes and oceans blue.”
Ship’s Prologue: Winter 2008.
By profession and by preference, I’ve been traveling with my son, now 8, since he was 3 weeks old. Despite luggage hassles, cranky episodes, and one four-hour marathon reading and rereading The Caboose Who Got Loose on a flight from Spain, I’ve found the going richer in the company of a child. Sometimes he’s a key to a culture, such as the time he began playing with some Italian kids in a piazza and their parents invited us to join them for an aperitivo. Other times he offers insights that elude me, observing New York subways as thrill rides, for example. All the while I feel I’m contributing to his education by showing him the wide and wonderful world.
When we decided to visit Alaska, land of the fabled gold rush, colorful Jack London stories, and teeming wildlife, the rangy geography of the 49th state – which celebrates 50 years of statehood this year – seemed daunting. As I considered the options, I wondered: What if we didn’t have to change hotels every day? What if we could satisfy our curiosity and rove place to place without the exhaustion of packing and unpacking daily? What if we took a cruise?
The benefits were clear: We’d have transportation, lodging, and food provided. We’d get to see the entire Inside Passage – roughly 1,800 miles, from Vancouver, Canada, to Seward on mainland Alaska – without navigating it ourselves. By choosing Regent Seven Seas Cruises’ 700-passenger Mariner, we could also enroll in Ambassadors of the Environment, a children’s ecology program designed by Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of famed underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau. And rugged port excursions into the wild meant we wouldn’t have to compromise our zest for adventure.
But my worries ranged from the social (formal nights, really?) to the physical (can children fall through ship railings?). Moreover, we’d have to give up our independence. I’ve always prized the ability to change direction when something isn’t working out. On a ship, we’d have one course for eight days in one direction only: true north.
Ship’s Log: Day One.
Departing Vancouver.
The Mariner’s 12th-floor deck is crowded with passengers juggling cameras and champagne flutes. One man, oblivious to the celebration, is jogging. Seth leans over the rail of the ship as we pass wooded Stanley Park and booms, “Stunning!”
From our suite’s private veranda, Vancouver’s harbor gradually winds by as the ship does a slow 360-degree spin to calibrate its compass. It’s a relaxing ritual, this marine pirouette, even with a steward vacuuming the bon voyage confetti (since the party next door includes a toddler, the cruise line has installed transparent walls across the balcony railings as a childproofing measure, banishing my worst fear).
Veteran sailors of Lake Michigan accustomed to cramped berths, Seth and I marvel at the size of our penthouse suite. Curtains separate the bedroom from the living room, a pied-à-mer where an L-shaped banquette and an armchair oppose a cabinet wall with a desk, preloaded iPod, flat-screen TV, DVD player, and stocks of wine, water, sodas, and snacks. Best of all, we have our own tuxedoed butler, Anjan Roy – “Call me Roy,” he says with a smile – to attend to our every need, which includes daily canapés at 5. Today it is caviar, and it is good.
Ship’s Log: Day Two.
At sea, between mainland Canada and Vancouver Island.
A cruise director once described Alaska to me as a “port cruise,” in which passengers signed on for the port stops, as opposed to a “ship cruise,” prized for the boat’s amenities over its route. True, we are using the ship to port-hop, but our first day at sea is a chance to decelerate, acclimate to the gentle roll of the ocean, and enjoy a ship cruise, playing Scrabble over cookies and hot chocolates in the espresso bar, riding the eight-story elevator, and playing Ping-Pong and paddle tennis on the open decks.
I’m tempted to say 8 is the ideal age for a junior cruiser: They are aware enough to appreciate the setting and independent enough to allow parents occasional trips to the spa. But then I see the fun the 4-year-olds are having playing freeze tag and the teenagers belting out karaoke. Though collectively called Club Mariner, Regent’s kids’ programs are designed for a range of attention spans and interests, with everything from toddler play groups to teen scavenger hunts.
Seth, a subscriber to National Geographic Kids and an eager backwoods camper, eagerly
joins the separate Ambassadors of the Environment group. With maps from the ship’s bridge spread across a meeting-room floor, naturalists Molly Jones and Laura Ostrov teach six school-age budding environmentalists to use a sextant to chart the ship’s course and how to differentiate latitude from longitude. “Latitude rhymes with ‘fatitude,’” suggests Laura. “It goes around the equator like a fat waist.”
We explore that concept over dinner at the ship’s Asian restaurant, coincidentally named Latitudes, for which Seth enthusiastically dons his best. “A fathom is six feet or two meters,” he says over lobster with curry, “and the ship has a seven-meter draft, meaning we can go anywhere up to eight meters deep.”
I knew that he liked studying science. I learn that he likes wearing suits and eating shellfish, too.
Ship’s Log: Day Three. Arriving at Ketchikan and kayaking the Tatoosh Islands.
Awake by 6 am to watch the ship dock, Seth is fascinated by the mechanics of this large vehicle. Thick ropes are thrown from its sides; a gangplank is quickly moved into place, then married to a set of dockside stairs; and the entire walkway is efficiently carpeted in regal red.
Walking down the plank, we disembark at Ketchikan, a former timber town that
has turned forestry into entertainment at The Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show. The predictably corny but surprisingly entertaining spectacle pits two-man teams of lumberjacks against each other, racing to chop wood, climb 40-foot trees, and roll floating logs until the other team falls off. As a parting souvenir, Seth has them autograph a paperback-size wood chip.
Back on the dock we meet up with guides who will take us kayaking around the tiny Tatoosh Islands, part of Tongass National Forest, a 17-million-acre preserve of remote, undeveloped beauty that we will regard on much of our cruise. After a boat ride to what we dub Skipping Rocks Isle for the smooth, flat stones that litter the beach, we board a tandem kayak, knifing around islands thick with cedars where red, orange, and purple starfish cling to partially submerged rocks. Between strokes, Seth spots nine eagles, one loon, two harbor seals, and innumerable pigeon guillemots and murrelets. A pod of Dall’s porpoises trails us back to shore.
Ship’s Log:
Day Four. Whale-watching in Tracy Arm and canoeing around Juneau.
Seemingly half the ship is up at 5 am with Regent naturalist Charles Iliff in the Observation Lounge, looking for whales despite the 47-degree weather on deck. We are entering a prime summer habitat for humpbacks and train our eyes to spot telltale clouds of mist that issue from blowholes, followed by dorsal fins cresting and tails telescoping down as the whales submerge to feed.
Disembarking in Juneau after lunch, we board another boat, a canoe modeled on a 12-
passenger native Tlingit war canoe, bound for water-level views of Mendenhall Glacier. Setting the pace for twin columns of oarsmen behind us, Seth and I paddle into iceberg-filled Mendenhall Lake. Rounding a point colonized by nesting arctic terns, we pause before the towering, electric blue, accordion-pleated ice wall that is the tidewater face of the glacier. Keeping a safe distance from nearby icebergs, which are prone to capsize, we beach the canoe at Nugget Falls, observed by a mountain goat in the grass, nursing two fluffy white kids.
It has been another cloudy day, but Seth informs me, in today’s lesson, that there is more sunlight when it’s cloudy because the light that filters through bounces off the water to the clouds and back down again. He’s discovered Alaskan optimism.
Ship’s Log: Day Five. Hiking the Chilkoot Trail near Skagway.
“How are you today, Seth? Are you awesome?” asks Roy, striding into our room as he does each morning with room-service breakfast, inquiring after our plans.
We have signed up to hike a portion of the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail, one of two main routes to the Klondike gold fields used dur miners to bring a year’s worth of supplies with them, and the trail is said to be littered with heavy castoffs such as cast-iron cookware. We find it exhilaratingly rugged, with steep, rocky inclines and descents hazarded by exposed tree roots, and wonder how the miners did it while dragging 400-pound bags of flour. After two miles, rather than backtrack, we board rafts and float the Taiya River back to the trailhead with a new appreciation for the prospectors.
By comparison, the ship seems more opulent than ever. We stay up to catch the musical floor show and meet Emily, a 12-year-old from Illinois who has sailed with her grandmother to China, Tahiti, Malaysia, and Singapore. “Travel helps with social skills as you grow up, and you get to learn a lot about places,” says Emily, font of today’s wisdom. “It can also inspire careers. I always wanted to be a teacher or a food critic. Travel gets you closer to that.”
Ship’s Log: Day Six.
Searching for sea otters in Sitka.
Regent has saved the most beautiful port for last. Ringed by jagged, snowcapped mountains and adorned with the onion-domed Saint Michael’s Cathedral, Sitka was the capital of Russian Alaska before the United States bought the state in 1867. What drew Russian trappers then draws us today: sea otters.
A gray, 90-pound male with a glistening black nose and white face preens in the sunlight before the four-engine catamaran that ferries us, Ambassadors kids and their families, on a wildlife excursion into Sitka Sound. Throttling on, we slow at Saint Lazaria Island, where scores of comic puffins with thick orange bills and blond ponytail-like feathers swoop and bob. At a final stop, an estimated 100 sea otters raft together in a kelp bed, so many it is hard to tell snout from tail, flipper from flipper. In the near distance, dozens of seals bask on the beach. Two eagles fly overhead, and just then a humpback sounds 20 feet to starboard – Alaska’s marquee five-in-one postcard panorama.
Ship’s Log: Day Seven. Observing Hubbard Glacier.
If our itinerary were a play, we reach the third-act climax at Hubbard Glacier, the terminus of a 76-mile-long river of ice boxing in Yakutat Bay with a six-mile-wide, 400-foot-tall cliff face. Continually moving forward, the glacier calves in pieces ranging from massive bergs to boulder-size bits that rain down like sifted confectioners’ sugar on the icy surface below.
Crowding into the 12th-floor Observation Lounge, we join a giddy throng. A cruise, I realize, is what you make of it. Surely somewhere someone on board is doubling down in the casino, or getting a massage, or perusing the art gallery. The choices are enough to satisfy the most ardent of independent spirits. Seth and I pose before the stunning backdrop as a stranger snaps our picture with my camera.
Ship’s Log: Day Eight.
Seward, Anchorage, and heading for home.
For the first time in a week I’ve had to pack our bags. Taking the three-hour panoramic train ride from the port of Seward to the Anchorage airport, we sight moose, alpine glaciers, snowmelt-swelled rivers, and banks of lupine wildflowers, a scenic send-off.
“Did you know it takes 100 feet of snow to make 10 feet of glacial ice?” Seth asks, gazing at the snowcapped mountains. I didn’t. Alaska is a land of many lessons that, quite possibly, adhere best when learned early.
North to alaska
Set sail on one of these summer cruise itineraries.
Doing It Regent Seven Seas Cruises offers numerous seven-day Inside Passage itineraries aboard the Seven Seas Mariner this season between Seward and Vancouver. Children aged 9 through 17 can participate in the Ambassadors of the Environment Youth Program designed by Jean-Michel Cousteau on departures from June 10 through August 12. Multiple departures: May 20 through September 9; from $3,295 (Ambassadors program additional $299 per child).
More Ways to Go Celebrity Cruises offers a variety of Alaska journeys from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and Seward. Celebrity provides a five-tiered, age-based children’s program, plus onboard pagers so families can stay in touch. Multiple departures: May 11 through September 18; from $449.
Eight Holland America Line ships ply the Inside Passage throughout the summer on itineraries that range from round-trips out of Seattle and Vancouver to one-way sailings between Vancouver and Seward. In addition to shipboard children’s clubs, Holland America introduces kids to the kitchen with culinary workshops. Multiple departures: May 6 through September 25; from $449.
Princess Cruises sails eight ships to Alaska from Vancouver, San Francisco, and Seattle. Princess’ National Park Service Junior Ranger Program teaches kids about the region with fun presentations and activities. Multiple departures: May 9 through September 14; from $399.
Three ships in the Royal Caribbean International fleet offer cruises from San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and Seward. Onboard children’s programs extend to infants’ and toddlers’ playgroups. Older siblings appreciate the rock-climbing walls, athletic courts, arcades, and mini golf found on most ships. Multiple departures: May 2 through September 19; from $449.
Silversea Cruises launches 12 sailings throughout the Alaskan summer aboard the 382-passenger Silver Shadow, ranging from sailings between Vancouver and Seward to trips out of Vancouver and San Francisco. Multiple departures: May 28 through September 12; from $2,647.
Insider Expertise
Cruises are a great way to see Alaska, but there’s much to do on land as well. In-the-know Virtuoso travel advisors share their recommendations.
What to Know
“This is one of the easiest soft-adventure trips you can plan, as you don’t need to worry about passports, language barriers, currency conversions, and eating unfamiliar foods. It’s a wonderful ‘starter’ trip.”
“Bring two pairs of binoculars – because you won’t want to share.”
“Ask the lodge staff for a wake-up call if the aurora borealis shines brightly in the middle of the night (but remember, it might be 3 am when they call!).”
“Dress like an onion: in layers. You can start the day with more clothing, then peel layers off as the day gets warmer. This applies all year long.”
“Mount McKinley is only visible maybe 80 percent of the time, so you might not see it.”
What to Do
“Don’t miss a tour of Kenai Fjords National Park. Most of my clients say this was their favorite part of the trip. The train ride from Anchorage to Denali is also a must-do; it’s scenic and relaxing, and some of my greatest pictures came from that ride.”
“If you have any love for fishing, Alaska is the place. Whether it’s for salmon, trout, or halibut, a stay at a fishing lodge for a few days or a day-trip charter is not to be missed. Entrée Alaska can arrange stays at the best lodges.”
“Dog sledding on a glacier is unforgettable. Grown-ups love it as much as the kids.”
“The glacier-field helicopter tours from Juneau are unbelievable!”
“Take the aerial tram up Mount Alyeska for wonderful views.”
“Backroads’ walking and hiking tour of Alaska offers an in-depth, on-the-ground experience of rain forests and glaciers, as well as a railway ride and a day cruise in Glacier Bay. Great hikes, fabulous scenery, and up-close views of snowcapped mountains from small planes.”
“I’m partial to Talkeetna, an easy ride from Anchorage and Denali National Park. It offers the best view of Mount McKinley, plus lots of activities such as flight-seeing, fishing, and rafting, to name a few.”