There has been a certain amount of déjà vu writing these words as, at last, I am going to tell you about our visit to Canada last September. This time I did manage to board our ship for Alaska! For those of you who did not know, this was our second attempt to take this trip.
In 2022, Bill and I travelled through the Rockies on the wonderful Rocky Mountaineer and then, as I was boarding our ship for the second part of our adventure, I was tested and was positive for Covid and promptly kicked off the ship. We spent four days in Vancouver at vast expense until I was fit to fly home to the UK. (It took over a year for our Travel Insurance to pay up…)
In September 2023, we flew back out to Vancouver and joined our Holland America ship without mishap and then began the unforgettable journey up through the Inner Passage to Alaska. As well as visiting the historic gold rush towns, we saw humpback whales and bears!
We visited Juneau, Ketchikan, and Skagway and then to cap it all we visited Glacier Bay National Park, a wild and beautiful protected wilderness. This is a world-famous natural bay with many glaciers and very strict rules. All the ship’s decks were open to us, and our lovely ship seemed to just drift in the water dotted with little bits of ice. I am quite sure we were not drifting at all but there was so little noise or disturbance in the water I could actually hear the humpback whales blowing. When we were close to the Margerie Glacier, you could hear it creaking.
A marvellous experience and I could write pages and pages on the cruise but when we docked back in Vancouver our holiday did not end there. Bill had hired a car, and we went over to Vancouver Island for a whole week before flying home to the UK. I am going to tell you about that next time. Spoiler alert! I did get close to bears…
