Seward

Alaska 2016/Day 5: June 23, 2016 (Anchorage to Seward, 1st afternoon in Seward)

This was an early wake-up day. Unlike the depots in Fairbanks or Denali, where you could arrive 20-30 minutes pre-boarding without problems, the Anchorage Depot advises you to arrive at least 60 minutes ahead of time, and this advice was confirmed by the folks at the hotel. (The AKRR folks actually have a nice PowerPoint presentation - linked at the right - that walks you through how to best navigate through the depot.) Since we were traveling GoldStar this time our tickets included breakfast on-board, so we timed things to simply wake up, shower, and then meet in the lobby to walk back to the train station by 5:45AM.

Once at the station we waited in line to check-in and turn in our luggage. Unlike the smaller stations we did not have to present all our photo IDs. In an attempt to speed things up the Anchorage station handed me (the nominal Group Leader) a form to sign where I agreed that everyone traveling with me was who they said they were. So only I showed an ID and, in return, I was given all our boarding passes and an envelope with eleven GoldStar lapel pins. We took all this outside and across the street in order to pose for our first full group picture. (N, H and J had arrived the prior night, after most of us had gone to bed.) We also took this time to hand out the custom T-shirts we'd had made (at customink.com) for the trip.

The gang is all here! From left to right: (kneeling row) M, A, D; (standing row) W, S, H, J, C, R, E; (on wall) N

There's widespread consensus on Cruise Critic that this section of the railroad is the most scenic, and we found no reason to disagree with that opinion. This was a truly glorious segment of the trip. Upgrading to GoldStar was totally worth the extra expense for so many reasons, as the following pictures can hopefully illustrate.

N and H show off their morning Bloodies. Each GoldStar passenger gets two beverages as part of their train fare. As you get them from the bar (those legs in the center back are standing at the bar) your boarding pass is punched. Collectively, we enjoyed Bloodies, Screwdrivers, Alaskan beer, sparkling wine, coffee, hot chocolate, and various soft drinks.

One (of many) beautiful views from on board. I probably could have taken this shot from Adventure class...but I'm not sure I would have had as wide a window to shoot through.

Yeah, it's really amazing out there...

Representative of the hundreds of waterfalls you'll see throughout Alaska.


Another reflection shot.

A pair of Dall Sheep, captured by W's camera.

All of the above shots were taken BEFORE breakfast! What a way to start the day... :-) For some reason I forgot to take a photo of the breakfast menu. R had biscuits and gravy, others had French toast with reindeer sausage. I had an egg scramble with peppers. Breakfast was definitely better than dinner.

Our original plan had been to book at the Holiday Inn at the small boat harbor. However, back in December 2015 when we were making arrangements the hotel's website wouldn't allow any bookings for June, and when called the hotel also declined to accept any bookings without explanation. It turns out that an ownership change was underway and the hotel was being re-branded as Harbor 360 Hotel. Not knowing that, we booked at Best Western Plus Edgewater, instead.

We arrived at the Seward depot and looked around for the hotel shuttle. Not finding it, I asked the general town shuttle driver (in the yellow school bus) if she was the best option for our hotel, to which she replied "if your hotel doesn't have a shuttle". I ended up calling the hotel and was told that the driver was on the way. This minor inconvenience was - unfortunately - an omen. Strike one. The shuttle did arrive, but had so many passengers that they had to make a total of three trips to get us all. Half our party made it onto shuttle #2, three of us had to wait for shuttle #3, and three others decided to make the walk from the station to the hotel. (The latter group did this happily - they wanted the chance to stretch their legs.)

Once at the hotel none of our rooms were ready. Strike two. The hotel kept telling us that they'd had a lot of check-outs that day and they were scrambling to catch up. That may be true, but my point of view is that this was THEIR problem...and they were trying to make it ours. Rooms weren't available until a couple of hours after check-in time had passed.

We passed some of this time by having lunch at Zudy's Cafe, which was about 1/2 a block away. The panini sandwiches and soup were nothing to write home about, but they filled empty stomachs. After lunch D, A, and W made a quick geocache grab just outside the restaurant - but it was a bit too cold and damp to really enjoy the views of Resurrection Bay outside, so we eventually all returned to the hotel lobby to wait for our rooms and/or excursion pickups.

H, N, and A all went off to a dog sled place. I didn't organize this one so not sure of the details, other than that they had a great time. They made the reservation only about 2 hours before the event, which surprised me - I figured most stuff would be pre-booked long in advance.

The place that I went with M, C, S & W *was* booked long in advance, and necessarily so. We went zip lining with Stoney Creek Canopy Adventures. None of us had ever done this before (both H and N had prior zip line adventures so had earlier declined the option to go with us). We had a BLAST! For me, this was the best thing we did the whole trip. After we did a bit of "ground school" on a very short line suspended about 8' above ground, learning how to read the guide's hand signals, brake, spin, and hand-over-hand up the line in case of stopping short of the platform, we were driven up the mountain to the real thing. We experienced 8 lines of differing lengths (all about 70' above the ground), crossed three rope bridges, and also did 2 rappels (of about 45-60' each). The guides (Mike and ??) did a great job of introducing us to new skills with each line - we all felt nothing but confidence as we went along. In addition to the five of us there were also three people from another family, for the maximum group size of eight plus two guides. No cameras are allowed, but they took a few standard pictures and made them available for $8 per person on the web.

M takes off. This was the 4th or 5th zip of the day. The longest line was about 1400', and can be seen to the right in this photo, over the pond.

D handing in the air before starting his first rappel descent. One of the guides is below me, on the belaying line. While I was totally in control of my descent he was there to arrest my fall if I'd done something stupid (like let go). No chance of that, though!

Meanwhile, while the rest of us zipped between trees or rode behind dogs, E, R and J did something critical to success on our upcoming cruise: they visited Safeway and bought 10 bottles of wine (as we had 5 staterooms booked)! While waiting for the yellow shuttle bus to pick them up after shopping they spent a few minutes inside the Chamber of Commerce talking to some locals and soaking up a bit of Seward flavor.

Once we were all back to the hotel (and finally all in rooms) we gathered again and went for a walk along the shores of Resurrection Bay. The wind had died down so the walk was much more pleasant than it would have been earlier in the day. We passed by the marker for Mile 0 of the (original) Iditarod; a skate park - with local children out in shorts and T-shirts on what was, for them, a warm day; and part of the camping area built on top of what used to be Seward's industrial district. Most of Seward's port industry was literally wiped out by a post-earthquake tsunami in the early 1960's.

Small group shot at a memorial marker near they Alaska Sealife Center. From left to right, H, E, A, R. Just prior to taking this shot D and A had gone off to grab another nearby geocache.

We returned to the hotel for a short rest before walking down to Chinooks Restaurant. We'd made a reservation as soon as we arrived in Seward, figuring that seating 11 people might be challenging. Indeed, they mentioned that they already had 3 large parties booked but offered to seat us at 8:15PM. That wasn't a problem for us so we gladly took them up on the offer. They seated us right on time and we enjoyed our first family dinner together.

Waiting to order at Chinooks, taken by E. On the left side of the table, starting in the foreground: S, C E, N, H. Down the right side: J, R, D, M, A. Out the window is a view of the small boat harbor.

The quality of dishes varied. They had a smoked sablefish appetizer that we all agreed was excellent. We were sorry we'd only gotten one to share around the table. The mussels with chorizo and ceviche appetizers were good, but not great. We ordered the smoked scallop mac and cheese entree as a shared appetizer and it was very good - it would have been too rich as an entree! The house salad was very good. The salmon w/chipotle entree was deemed to be excellent salmon unfortunately overwhelmed by the glaze. The halibut w/chimichurri was very good, as was the cod. I can't recall what anyone had for dessert, which is probably an indication that they were average. They did bring us something with a candle in it in celebration of S's birthday.

We finished up our night with a walk back to the hotel. We did pass an ice cream parlor on the way and debated stopping in, but at this point (about 10:00PM) we were all tired and didn't want to extend our night any further. It should be noted that the yellow bus free town shuttle stopped at 7PM, so unless we hired a cab we had no other option than to walk both directions. Total distance was 1.3 miles each way, so we burned off some calories. I should note that my mother-in-law J is 84 and is going to outlive all of us. She took the walking completely in stride (no pun intended)!

Day 6: June 24, 2016 (Seward and start of cruise)

We got up early for breakfast as we had an 8:00AM Kenai Fjord boat tour with a 7:10AM pickup scheduled. (BTW: Kenai is pronounced KEY-nigh, not KEH-nigh or keh-NIGH.) Breakfast at the hotel was awful. Strike three. We've stayed at Best Western Plus properties before and the quality here was NOT in keeping with the brand. The scrambled eggs, in particular, were terrible. I'm always prepared to substitute oatmeal when necessary, which I did here. This was, perhaps, the most glue-like oatmeal I've ever had.

And now comes strike four, which by itself forever condemns this property for us. As per their process, we took all our luggage down to the lobby with our ship luggage tags on. They were to take all our bags (plus many others - lots of folks heading to Radiance staying there) over to the ship while we checked out and went on our excursion. This they did - for ten of us. S's bag somehow never made it to the ship. Her bag would not show up until DAY 4 of the cruise, at Skagway. The details are sordid. Suffice it to say that the hotel screwed up MASSIVELY. (Royal Caribbean, on the other hand, deserves TONS of kudos for the way they handled things. More on that later.)

If we ever return to Seward we will NOT stay here again.

Our shuttle arrived right on schedule and took us down to the small boat harbor where we were assigned to The Tanaina. The tour was enjoyable mostly for the novelty value - we can now say we've seen another National Park. Overall, however, it is just a long boat ride. We hit some unexpectedly rough water on the return part of the trip, which normally (I think) ventures through long stretches of the Gulf of Alaska rather than the calmer waters of the fjord. The captain returned to the inner passage at some point which helped, but both E and R were uncomfortable for the last part of the trip.

Even "just another boat ride" has some pleasant surprises. We did come across a pod of orcas, as well as a humpback that was repeatedly breaching. While we saw more whales in Juneau, it was only on this tour that we saw orcas and breaching, so glad we did the tour.

An otter, seen soon after leaving the harbor.

Three of the four orcas that were swimming close to us.

Our jumping humpback. He did this 8-10 times while we were within range. The boat captain had seen him from a long distance and announced "we've got a jumper ahead" before speeding up the boat in hopes of catching him still in action. Success!

Once the boat tour was over we walked over to the cruise terminal. This was an easy 15 minutes away. When we arrived (around 3:30P, if I recall correctly), M realized that he'd left his passport in his luggage. D'oh! What happens in cases like this is that the shore staff fill out a form requesting a luggage search, since M couldn't board without his passport. However, since the luggage had been delivered around 1PM it was considered likely that his bag might already be in his stateroom, so they also suggested that we all board so C could go to their stateroom and check for his bag herself. It took us about 20 minutes to clear security, get onboard, and make our way to the rooms. Bags were not yet there, but M&C's bags arrived within about 15 minutes so C went back ashore with M's passport and got him checked in.

After several days of living out of luggage we could FINALLY unpack! Noticing that our group of 11 was spread among three different tables (despite an email to the dining team a few weeks earlier requesting that we all be seated at a single table that had been acknowledged) D&E made haste to the MDR service desk to straighten things out. We got all of us reassigned to our own table of 11 in time for the first night's dinner.

We took time to get settled into our staterooms before meeting in the hallway to do a quick tour before our 5:30P MDR seating. Well, MOST of us met in the hallway. N wasn't there. Why not? Well, turns out N is a natural-born rum runner. Seeing that no one made any attempt to count the bottles of wine we were bringing on board she had left the ship, hoofed it back to Safeway (she's young and in great shape - she might have run both ways), and was bringing back two more bottles of wine! The rest of us wandered around the ship, with D, E, R & A (the only ones with prior cruising experience on Royal) leading the way.

With the expertise of seasoned vets, we made sure to time our arrival at the Centrum bar to allow us to grab our first drink of the cruise just prior to dinner. We went into the MDR and took our seats, and met our waiting team (Reynato, assisted by Roi). These guys did a good job taking care of us throughout the cruise. Unlike prior trips, Roi offered a 2nd roll service quickly - points to Roi. And Reynato was one of those waiters who saw that we liked to taste each other's dishes and started bringing us several extra appetizers and desserts in addition to whatever we'd already ordered.

Post-dessert (which this time included a candle in celebration of W's birthday) we had a quick muster drill that took less than 15 minutes. Shortest one we've experienced so far. We all returned to our rooms to prep for the Welcome Aboard show before calling it a night and sleeping soundly.