Day 4:June 14, 2012  

Day four started nice and early with a 7am port.  We wanted to get off the boat pretty early in attempt to buy tickets to ride the White Pass train. The tickets sold through Disney were sold out because we waited too long to buy them. We also had hopes that it would end up costing us less but it ended up being about the same price at about $120 per adult ticket through M&M Tours.

The thing I love about this port was that it was within walking distance of the town. If you buy train tickets through Disney you can just walk straight off the boat and the train is waiting for you right there. Because we didn’t have tickets yet we walked right outside the docking area and there was a nice little tourist office. The guys inside were super nice and not pushy at all. We ended up getting tickets for the afternoon train, so we headed into town for some tourist shopping. I really hate tourist shopping so I ended up finding a bench outside and people watched most of the time. 

When I say this is a cute little town I really mean it is a little town. Lets just say that the population more then doubles when a cruise ship comes into port. We learned that is last year's high school senior class consisted of 4 kids (3 girls and 1 boy). They also don't have a doctor in town, if someone is in need of a doctor the closest one is in Juneau, Alaska. Women are taken to Juneau by boat or plane when they are going to give birth. 

At the end of the main tourist street (Broadway) is a microbrewery called Skagway Brewing Co. As soon as it turned 10am my dad and I poked our heads in for a quick beer and let my mom and sister finish up there shopping. It is a cute little bar and the staff was very friendly. They had a nice little game room on the upper level with shuffle puck (I love this bar game). This would be a great location to escape the cold rainy weather. We were lucky to not get any rain at the port.

A great thing about having the port so close is that you have the option of walking back and grabbing lunch without wasting too much time.  My mom and sister did this but I was nowhere close to hungry. I stopped over at the Alaska Fudge company instead for a sweet snack.

We picked up the train at the downtown station. It was a very pretty ride. There was commentary over the speakers telling about the town and the history with the goal rush. They also announced bear and goat sightings.  

Katie and I loved being able to stand outside the car. It was a little scary, especially when going over a bridge.  The only downside to standing outside was it was cold and we couldn’t hear the commentary. 

I always ducked back inside when we went through tunnels. It got really dark. 

The train is a one-way trip and all the tourists get off at the first stop. The stop is in Fraser, Canada and they have a station that you can stamp your own passports. We had some time to walk around and take pictures of the wonderful scenery before our bus from M&M tours came. 

We really just paid for the train ride and bus ride back down but the bus driver got everyone’s approval to take a couple of photo stops and to be able to do commentary the way down. He was amazing and really cute too but married (sorry Katie).

We stopped at the welcome to Alaska sign and again at a really cool bridge. This area has tons of tiny earthquakes because of being so close to a fault line. The bridge was designed so that only one side is attached to the ground, that way it doesn’t fall every time the earth moves below it. 

After getting back to town, we were really tired so we headed back to the boat for some down time before dinner. 

One thing I wish I had planned on doing was taking a hike in Skagway. There are lots of trail heads very close to their downtown area.  They have a park ranger station on the main street; they can help you plan hikes. Some of them are as short as a one hour roundtrip.  I wish I had done a little planning beforehand! 

Dinner this night was in Animator’s Palate. My favorite dining experience! As you eat dinner color starts seeping into the wall of the black & white dining room. At the end the wait staff does a little show. 

After dinner they had the first showing on the Avengers 3D in the big theater. I started falling asleep before the opening credits so I headed back to the room to find my sister already asleep. I took a quick nap and then we both headed out to the adult show. The show was called "Match Your Mate". It was fun and we learned way too much about a few of the couples on the ship.  It was like the old game shows were you got points for answering questions the same way. This is the night we learned they could ask any question as long as the Disneyfied it, “Where is the most exciting place the magic has happen?” 

I know you are all waiting for it… here is our towel creature of the night. I think this one is a frog. 

Day 3:June 13, 2012 

If you look at the itinerary really fast you might miss that the day labeled Tracy Arm is not actually a port but another very scenic day at sea. This is one of the most amazing nature experiences that I have ever had. 

We kick started this day with a character breakfast.  Everyone gets one of these on one of the cruise days.  They give you a ticket with your scheduled time on the first day.  

At the breakfast four different characters (Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, & Pluto) stopped by our table to say hi and took pictures with us.   

The waiters also entertain by folding dinner napkins into fun hats for everyone at the table. People all over the dining room were being transformed into characters like Dumbo, Rapunzel, Minnie mouse, and goofy. 

After the breakfast we headed back down to our rooms and bundled up in layers of clothing. A little tip: bring a scarf, hat and gloves… you will thank me later. We layered with a hoodie under a wind breaker jacket. It gets very windy if you stand at the front of the ship and very cold when you get close to the glacier. They do have free blankets to use on deck, these are located in bins on deck 9 and 10.

If you head up early on this day it is a great time for whale watching before heading down Tracy Arm. My mom and I are really into photography so we staked out a spot at the front of the ship on deck 10 to get a prime view. This is really not necessary! We ended up leaving our awesome spot when we needed to eat lunch, the trip down Tracy Arm takes around 5 hours.

What people don’t realize (or at least we didn’t think this through at first) is that the boat has to turn around after it reaches Sawyer glacier. This makes it so you will get an amazing view from the port side of the ship. I am not the tallest of people too, so I ran into the ship rail being too high in most places to be able to take pictures over it. 

The best places my family found to take pictures of the glacier when the boat turned (less crowded and low rails) was this little nook on deck 9. You access this spot form a staircase at front aft on deck 10 (I circled it in red on the map below). You get an obstructed view of the front of the ship but have a wonderful view when the ship turns.  

Another spot that we found to be empty was deck 4, this is also a great spot when the boat turns. 

If you are not looking to take amazing pictures, I would recommend just wandering. It is almost surreal seeing the Wonder float down this pass with huge cliffs on both sides.

They have the view from the front of the ship projected on the movie screen over the Goofy pool, so you can see where the ship is headed. If I were to do it again, I would have gone and hung out in the hot tubs for a while!  

I have to say one of my sister and I’s favorite parts of this trip was watching the hundreds of seals down by the glacier. We were told they live there because whales don’t travel that far down for food (aka they don’t become fish food). Many of the seals had just given birth; we were concerned after seeing blood on a few of the icebergs, but then put it together. Katie even watched one of the seals give birth! It was the highlight of her whole trip.  A gross little fact, the birds eat the afterbirth… we saw some of that happening too.

The seal pups were so cute and could swim seconds after being born. This is a good thing because our ship was sailing right in their path

Lunch on this day they do a special grill out, outside of Beach Blanket. According to my family, they had the best grilled salmon they had ever tasted (I am not a seafood person). They also had steak and chicken to choose from along with the full buffet line open.

They also have hot chocolate and cookies behind the wind breaking glass. Adding some Baily’s to the hot chocolate helps you warm up even more… its 5 o’clock somewhere, right? 

They do have commentary during this trip up Tracy Arm but is only playing inside dew to Alaska noise pollution laws.  I caught parts of it during lunch and after going back down to my room to warm up. 

My biggest tips for this day of the trip are:

• Bring binoculars, this are great the whole tip! We used them all the time in our stateroom window looking for whales.
  
• Relax! It is a long day; there is no need to be in the optimal spot all the time. Nature is all around the boat, not just in the front. 
  
• Dress warm and in layers! We found out a scarf in the gift shop will cost you $20. 
  
• Make sure to stop and take a few minutes to soak in all the beauty that is around you!   

After a nice nap we got ready and headed up for dinner. I didn’t mention this before but every night before dinner they have both professional backdrops and characters to take family picture with. Our personal favorite is to take pictures on the white backdrop, they always turn out so cool. You don’t have to pay anything to take the pictures, just if you want to buy them.

Dinner this night was in Tritons and we were eating off the Tritons’ menu.

After dinner they had a family hypnotist show. They had the adult version the night before. Both were really funny! My cousin, April, actually got chosen to go up on stage! She fell out of the trance only after a couple of minutes in, because the show started the same as the night before so she figured out what was going on. 

My mom and I ended the night by going and seeing the movie “The Help” playing in the theater. The rest of our group when to Radio Wave to see the adult showing of Side Show Bert. They all said it was not very good. This was the only show we were disappointed by the whole cruise. 

I feel like I have to continue the tradition of showing you our towel animal, so here it is. We all have mixed feels to what kind of animal it is… cat mixed with bear?

In my last post I had mentioned that we brought our own water bottles onto the Disney Cruise to use outside of dining hours.Well, I got really ambitious the week before the cruise and decided to surprise my family by making them water bottles with their name and favorite Disney character on it. I got this idea from House of Hepworths. 

I borrowed a silhouette machine from a friend to do this project and I never want to give it back. I love this machine!

I started this project by leaving a cryptic message on Facebook asking all my family that was going on the cruise to post what their top two favorite Disney characters were. This was fun because they knew I was doing something but had no idea what it was. 

I downloaded a free Disney font to use for the text on the water bottle. 

The Disney characters that I used came from a Google image search. I got the best results with the images that were coloring book pages or cutouts (basically the ones with no backgrounds). You need a medium – large image file for this to work. You can sort your results by image size (on left sidebar). I saved the image to my computer and opened it in Silhouette Studio. 

I am not going to give you a step by step on how to do the rest. I am just going to direct you to this amazing YouTube video by Sarah’s World that I used. 

Here are a few tips that I have after making eight of these water bottles: 

• Find images with fatter lines. If the lines get too thin they don’t stick very well and are also a lot harder to weed the middles out. I ended up redoing Stitch and Peter Pan after the cruise because they were starting to peel away. The second time around I really increased the line size.
  
• The less detail in a character the better. A lot of the newer characters don’t work as well because of all the detail. For me Stitch and Wall-E were the hardest and Mickey and Donald were the easiest.
• Peeling away the vinyl is time consuming and requires patience. I love detailed work like this but some don’t.

Our second day at sea consisted of naps (the boat just rocks you to sleep), bingo (we didn’t win {insert sad face here}), Disney movies on our stateroom TV, shuffle board, Disney trivia, and lots of food! I know what you are thinking, shuffle board, bingo, and naps? Yes, we were living the dreams of old people everywhere and loved every minute of it.  

There are so many planned activates on the ship that you can’t do everything. I was concerned about having too much down time because of the cold weather and not being able to play in the sun but this was never a problem for us. I actually wish I gave myself more down time throughout the cruise.  

Everyone receives a navigator in their stateroom at night with a time table of the next day activities. The activities director also lists some activities over the PA system in the common areas (hallways mostly) throughout the day.  Every time he did this I was reminded of the movie Dirty Dancing when the actives were being announced through the mega phone. 

Dinner on the second night was the Golden Mickey’s (aka formal night). They hold the Captain’s gala before dinner this night.  This is one of the few times they give out free alcohol drinks on the cruise; we definitely took advantage of this one.  If you look at all under 21, I recommend bring a second form of ID other than your key-to-the-world card.  Katie had a lot of problems getting drinks even though she is 21. 

We were seated in Tritons this night. They were serving off the Golden Mickey’s menu. 

We ended up being late to the Golden Mickey’s show that night because we went for round two of free drinks for the second dinner seating. By the time we got to the show they were out of seats so we had to sit/stand on the side steps. Because we had no kids in the group, I feel like the free drinks were worth it. If you have kids or it is your first time on the cruise I would recommend getting to the Golden Mickey’s early. They have it all set up to make it feel like you are walking the red carpet to the theater. 

I feel like there is no better time than now to talk about it (if you don’t plan on going on this cruise or don’t care about drinking you can skip the rest of this blog post). First of all you can carry on as much alcohol as you would like, as long as it fits in your carry-on bag. You must be 21 or older to carry alcohol on. Just keep in mind you have to carry this bag around with you when you board. 

The alcohol you carry-on is for consumption in your stateroom, but they don’t send people around smelling your drinks. Just don’t be incoherently drunk when around the ship with your own drinks and you will be fine.  We brought our own water bottles and mugs to keep our drinks in. This is essential if you want to make mixed drinks and is just a more efficient way of carrying pop / juice (alcohol or not) during non-dining times.  I would also recommend bringing a shot glass to help gage how big your pours into the non-see through glasses are. Oh and for the occasional shot with Walt. 

The pop machine on deck nine has a limited selection of non-pop options for mixers (pink lemonade and fruit punch). We ended up getting more mixers by asking our wait staff after dinner for juices to go. They were happy to do this for us and filled up disposable cups with pineapple and cranberry juice. They also gave us a cup of cherries too, which we infused with alcohol (we had a fridge in our room for medical reasons, so we had a place to keep the cherries). 

On the cold day sailing through Tracy Arm we went through a whole bottle of Baily’s adding it to our hot chocolates.  We ended up picking up a new bottle at the first port. 

I have to say this too. It you don’t want to go through the trouble of concealing your drinks like you are an underage college kid, the drink prices on the ship are not the extreme. They are very comparable to a bar in Seattle (where I live). I think the beers started at $3.50 and the fancy mixed drinks were around $8. They make the drinks really strong too, at least the one I bought.  

Day 1: June 11, 2012

"A Disney Cruise without kids?", is the question I was getting asked from everyone I told about my upcoming vacation. After sailing on one Disney Cruise, my family and extended family has been hooked ever since. I hope you enjoy my day-to-day recap and pictures of our wonderful Alaska cruise on the Disney Wonder.  I am also going to be adding some tips and tricks that my family has learned on the cruise or through our past cruises with Disney (these will be in blue text).

Here is a little background information about our cruise and group:

     Ship: Disney Wonder
     Dates Sailed: June 11th-18th 2012 (7 days)
     Demographics of our group: 8 people, 3 adults and 5 kids (ages 20-24 (I know we are big kids)), 2 families
     Staterooms: 2 rooms (one for each family), 2nd deck, AFT, Ocean View, Big porthole 
     Ports: 

The weekend leading up to our departure was a whirlwind of activity. My mom, dad, sister, aunt, 2 cousins, and my future cousin-in-law all flew into Seattle on Saturday to visit for a few days before the flight. Yes, that is seven extra people in my house! It was crazy but we made it work and I loved being able to have family over at my house!

Have I mentioned one great thing about our Disney Alaska cruise is that this one leaves out of Seattle, no long flights or time zone changes for me!  My husband, Alex, decided that he was going to skip this vacation (he is more of a lay on a warm beach and drink sort of vacation guy, not a lets go to colder weather), so he became our wonderful chauffeur to the ship the morning of our departure.  It took us three car loads to get everybody and all of the luggage over to the port.

The most exciting thing to me was turning a corner on a road I have traveled a lot in the past and see the Disney Wonder sitting on Pier 91.  My vacation that I had been dreaming of was really here! After arriving and saying bye to Alex we walked into the terminal. The first stop is dropping off checked bags followed by a security check. It was really refreshing to go through a security check and not have to completely undress and be patted down. I was even about to leave my belt on through the metal detectors! So much better than the airports.

We then were able to go check–in and get our key to the world cards. This was our first time sailing on their new system so we had to get our picture taken for our cards (I made a great face for mine that made a lot of the staff giggle when they saw it all week). Next onto the waiting area, this area makes everyone so much more excited to take that first step onto the boat with Disney music playing and characters, like Mickey and Minnie walking around in sailing outfits. 

The first thing we did after boarding the ship was head up to Beach Blanket (on deck 9) for some lunch. It was a beautiful day in Seattle so we filled up our plates at the buffet and headed outside to soak up some sun and enjoy the gorgeous views of the city and mountains (both Mt. Rainier and the Olympic Mountains) were out crystal clear. 

After eating we took some pictures of the skyline and mountains then headed down to the Goofy pool to find some chairs to take advantage of the sun while waiting for our rooms to be ready. 

My sister, Katie, and I took one look at the empty Goofy pool and garbed our swimsuits out of our carry-ons and jumped into the pool. I don’t think we have ever seen the Goofy pool empty. We were in there for about an hour before other people started to join us.  

We climbed out of the pool and headed down to our stateroom to find our bags already there (so much better then changing again in the tiny bathroom stalls! And the added bonus of being able to pull out the one pair of, just-in-case shorts I had packed). We took advantage of our bags early arrival and unpacked everything. I have never been the type of person that unpacks my bag during a vacation but this is highly recommended, almost required, to be able to live in a tiny space with three other people for a week. The nice thing about unpacking is you can slide all your empty bags under the big bed in the room, freeing up tons of space and making the tight quarters livable.

We then headed up to deck 9 for some much anticipated post unpacking pre safety drill ice-cream. Only to find out they close the ice-cream down 30 minutes before the safety drill. 

After the quick and painless safety drill we headed to deck 10 to stake out a table for the parents to watch the sail away party from. They like deck 10 because the get a birds-eye view of the party to take pictures of us but I heard rumors that they are joining us down on the dance floor next time! Oh and we ran over and got ice-cream!

The music of the Disney Wonder ship horns blew and we were off on our Alaskan adventure! I was torn but I left the party to walk around deck 10 with my dad taking pictures of my Seattle home drifting away. I loved being able to see views of the city that I was not used to and pointing out places I knew. 

To my disbelief, after the sail-away party was done it was already time to head down to our room to get ready for our first dinner (we had first seating at 5:45pm).

Our first dinner was a Parrot Cay. All Disney Cruise lines have a rotational dining experience. You rotate through three different dining rooms and your wait staff rotates with you. They get to know you and you them. In the past our wait staff has been amazing! But this time around they seemed very busy. They had other tables then just ours but we were always being served last. Both servers were really nice guys, but very soft spoken. They were not the fun loving characters that we have had in the past. This is probably my only negative of the whole cruise but I feel like the dinning staff plays a huge part in the overall experience. 

The service improved by the end of the week after talking to the head server, he stepped in and helped speed up the service. The lesson of this is speak up if something is not at 100%. Disney will try to make it better!

After dinner (or before if you have late dinner seating), Disney puts on full Broadway style productions that are unique to the cruise line. The first show was called All Aboard: Let the Magic Begin. They have a total of five of these shows throughout the cruise, the other nighst they have variety show type acts made for a PG audience. We had a juggler/comedian, hypnotist, and a ventriloquist.  One of the nights they show the premiere (on the ship) of Avengers in 3D, they made this movie available to watch in the movie theater after that night.

Every night after the family show, the Route 66 area becomes an adult only (18+) area.  Our favorite thing to do was go to Beat Street at 10:30pm for the adult only show. They had adult versions of the family variety acts and other comedians do Adult only shows. Our Scottish adult entertainment (Disney rated) host, Scotty, was great. He taught us that he could ask any question as long as you disneyfied it. The first night was a wacky scavenger hunt… all I am going to say is by the end of the night there were men strutting around in bras and women’s shoes, holding hand bags and wearing lipstick. This has to be one of funniest nights on the cruise. We laughed so hard]… I only wish I brought a camera.

I am going to end this extremely long (sorry) first day post by sharing pictures of our first towel animal. Every night during dinner, your room stuart cleans and prepares your room for sleeping. The includes turning the once couch into bunk beds. They also leaves a towel creation and chocolates for you.  

I personal think this towel creation is a seal because of the chocolate left on the nose but the whole rest of my family argues that it is a swan. What do you think?