Cruise to Alaska Day 02: Cruising the Inside Passage

We went to the Captain's Reception, where the ship's officers all introduced themselves and there was free champagne and nibblies.

This day had the second most beautiful scenery of our cruise (you'll see the MOST beautiful scenery when I show you the Hubbard Glacier!), but you'll notice that I only took one photo of it. Real photographers see more deeply when they look through the camera lens, I think, but as for me, I think that I have to choose whether to look deeply at something or take pictures of it--a memory doesn't feel as real to me if I've only seen it through the camera. So for much of the trip, I chose whether I wanted to look at it or photograph it, and on this day, I clearly wanted to look!

White-sided dolphins from our cruise ship! After breakfast, I bundled up and sat out on deck most of the day, alternating binoculars and Hamilton. 

This isn't the last time that we saw white-sided dolphins, but I believe that it's the only time that I photographed them.

Ditto with the sea lions!

I was pretty excited about the lecturers on the ship--we had a naturalist and an oceanographer. I brought my travel journal along to each lecture and took notes.


Here's our naturalist.


See? Notes! People commented on my note-taking, and once, as I was casing one of the fifth-floor lounges for the best spot to watch the string quartet, an older gentleman in a track suit waved me over to him solely because he'd seen me taking notes at that day's lecture and wanted to discuss it with me. One of my favorite things about this cruise was adult conversation--very little talk about kids, but lots of talk about books, movies, travel, and history!

Even though the scenery was majestic--we were cruising the most narrow part of the Inside Passage, including the Seymour Narrows, a part so treacherous that it requires its own pilot--this is the only photo that I took of it on this day, and even this is at the very end of the day, when the fog is coming in and I'm on my way down to our room to dress up for a reception.

Okay, I sat in our window and read for a little while longer before I got dressed.

And then we hit the martini bar, because the entire ship had an open bar in honor of the Captain's Reception! It turns out that I love myself a dirty martini. I'd meant to try as many different cocktails as possible while everything was free, but instead I had two dirty martinis.

So obviously we then hit up the super fancy restaurant while we were nice and drunk. Thank goodness for the bread basket!

Our cruise included all the food, even the fancy food at the fancy restaurants, and my philosophy was that if there was something on the menu that I'd never eaten before, then by god, I was going to eat that thing! Here I'm eating my first caviar.

Not pictured: the whales that we also saw (my first whales!!!), the blanket burrito that I spent most of the day happily in after an attendant thought that I looked cold and brought me THREE fleece blankets, the captain, whose biography informed us that his career at sea began when he ran away from home as a teenager(!!!), or the cruise director, who gazed at the captain with stars in her eyes during his welcome speech.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!