Big day today. We caught the Alaskan Railroad (the Chugach Express) in Anchorage for the trip down to Whittier to meet the boat. It was a little unnerving, since we just dropped off our luggage at the train station onto a giant pile of suitcases with Princess luggage tags. If, for whatever reason, it hadn't made it down to Whittier, we would have been in big trouble. We sat on the top deck of a double decker train car opposite a nice couple from Dallas and chatted with them about our various travels all the way down. The weather in Anchorage was nice, but when we got down towards Girdwood, the weather soured and by the time we got to Whittier, it was positively gross; heavy mist and quite chilly. Lovely weather for our Prince William Sound glacier cruise that we had planned before we actually got on the cruise ship. Actually, by the time we floated away from the moorings, the weather had turned nice.
The Prince William Sound cruise was excellent. We were able to get quite close to 2 actively calving tidewater glaciers (Beloit and Blackstone) and saw several large “raft-ups” of sea otters. The scenery was stunning and just a small preview of what was to come in Glacier Bay and the Inside Passage. The sound of a glacier calving is like a shotgun when the ice actually breaks and the immediate area around the face of the glaciers was really, really cold with a very cold wind racing downhill along the glacier. It's hard to describe the “glacier blue” color, but it's just beautiful. It ranges from a very light sky blue to very dark midnight blue deep in the crevasses.
Back in Whittier, we had to basically rush to the cruise ship in order to make the final boarding call. Of course, minutes before we got there, a trainload of people was disgorged into the departure lobby. There was quite a bit of confusion with us because none of the cruise line personnel in the lobby was informing anyone about the process, so we had to get out of line to actually get our cruise cards and boarding passes. They were starting to actually close up the check-in counter, so there was some confusion there with people scrambling around to get our cards, do our passport checks, etc.
The main lobby of the ship was beautiful, but also chaotic since we had to run a gauntlet of photographers; people hawking free drink cards, coffee cards, soda cards; passengers doing stuff at the front desk; etc. Fortunately, our luggage made it from Anchorage and was waiting for us in our stateroom when we finally got there.
We had dinner in the buffet (Princess calls it the “Horizon Court”) and the gorging began. The “plates” were more like the size of serving platters and it was very easy to load them up with all sorts of mediocre items. This was a recurring theme throughout the cruise. The food overall was OK, kind of like good wedding food, but the food in the buffet was just a notch below because unless you get something from a fresh batch, it just sits under heat lamps. The food wasn't “simple” but you just never felt that the dishes were individually prepared.
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