on Holland America Eurodam

Booked last January using a voucher from Peppermill casino. 7 day cruise from Seattle – June 28 to July 5 – with ports-of-call in Juneau, Icy Strait Point village of Hoonah, Sitka, Ketchikan, Victoria BC and back to Seattle pier 91. Claudia & I, first cruise ever for both of us, in a “Verandah” Balcony Stateroom on deck 5. The Eurodam holds 2100 cruisers and a staff of 850. This ship is HUGE, but the half dozen other cruise ships that docked near us during the week were larger(!), some held 4200 cruisers.

First port Juneau, state capital, pop. 31,500 after 40+ hours at sea. We had a beer at the Red Dog Saloon, visited two museums, a few shops and ate at a Mexi-Korean restaurant. Always a salmon dish on the menu, onboard and at every port. We tried not to order it for every meal, but you know it was fresh. Crab (King Crab) too, but we weren’t big fans.

Woke up Tuesday morn to a calm sea full of mini-icebergs in Glacier Bay National Park. Then we went to dock at Icy Strait Point and the small village of Hoonah. The Tlingit tribe used to live around Glacier Bay until the Glacier there GREW and pushed them out of their villages in the 1750s. They relocated to Hoonah. The dock is a private dock of the tribe. They must make good money, there are two beautiful trams, a zip line, two restaurants, a couple of tourist shops and wooden walkways along the beach; not bad for a population of 1000. 6000 tourists disembarked from two cruise ships the day we were there.

Next stop, Wednesday, is Sitka, pop. 8300. Former mining and fishing town, the Alaska purchase treaty was signed here. The dock is 5 miles outside of downtown and the bus ride was free but a 45 min wait in line. UGH! I blame the other docked cruise ship, but also we took our time disembarking like we did at every stop. This was probably the only time info was lacking before we got to port. Organization broke down a bit. We made up for it by getting back early and watching late-returners from our balcony. WHO was going to run and who would miss the gangway?

Woke up Thursday in Ketchikan. Pop. 8000, first incorporated (extant) city in Alaska. The dock is VERY CLOSE, right next to downtown. You can start shopping five steps off the dock. Besides some postcards, I hadn’t bought any souvenirs the whole trip, but this $60 coffee table art book- “Spawn Til You Die” – the Fin Art of Ray Troll grabbed and held my interest at a U.S. Park service gift shop in Ketchikan. Ray became “famous” after a T-shirt of the book title poster came out in 1986. His art is very much like Robert Crumb (of Mr. Natural & Fritz the Cat fame). Ray has a great, morbid humor to many of his pieces, and he is so into anatomical accuracy that he has had numerous new species named for him and he’s the artist for many university and government natural science organizations. I also really like Haida artforms and picked out some beauty notecards in Ketchikan.

We had no wifi all week. I had no tobacco for the week. We had excellent meals all week, room service and dinners in a restaurant as nice as what I’m spoiled with in Reno. New menu every day, 6-10 starters, entrees and desert. All included with the cruise price. We spent maybe two hours total in the casino, which had to close when we were docked. The video poker payoffs were low, and I dropped $800. A very pleasant trip, staff treated us nicely and they were loose enough to make jokes and hum and sing often. The weather was unexpectedly nice the whole time, just overcast the first few days, very little rainfall. We watched 7 movies on the in-room flat screen TV, some current, some classics. Maybe 2 dozen younger kids running the halls, not annoying. Lots of elders, no doubt retirees. A grizzled old performer telling jokes and playing singalong tunes in the Red Dog put it this way: he polled one cruise crowd and determined the average age was “deceased”.

I was quite impressed how this well-oiled industrial floating factory managed to put on a first class operation for a week, with something for everybody.