Liberty of the Seas

Because of our agency's sales, my wife Sharon and I were recently invited on the Inaugural Cruise for Royal Caribbean's newest ship, Liberty of the Seas.

The Liberty is the sister ship of Freedom of the Seas and the two of them are currently the largest cruise ships afloat. Some prefer the small ship experience for their intimacy, but if you like large ship cruising, the Liberty has a lot to offer. It truly is a "floating resort."

A Royal Caribbean innovation first introduced on the slightly smaller Voyager Class ships is the long, indoor Promenade. On the Liberty, this Promenade is as long as a football field! Like walking down a small town street, the Promenade features 13 shops, restaurants, and bars of all types. There's a Ben and Jerry's ice cream shop, a Seattle's Best coffee shop, a barber shop, a Sorrento's Pizzeria, an English Pub, a wine bar, and a cafe, as well as, gift shops, jewelry shop, perfume shop, and apparel shops. Walking down the Promenade is like visiting a new town! Passenger cabins add to this feel with their promenade facing windows overlooking the "street." All they need is a few window flower boxes! (Be careful to keep your curtains closed at appropriate times because cabins across the "street" can have views into your private life.) In the evening Royal Caribbean puts on a parade and street festival down the Promenade. Was it Mardi Gras??? Sharon was looking for beads!

For other dining, the Liberty has three dining rooms with the main room being three stories high. A beautiful, large chandelier adorns its center above the Captains Table. (Sharon & I weren't invited to that table. Maybe the Captain was afraid he would have had too much fun. For an small extra fee you can dine in one of the Liberty's specialty restaurants; Chops Grill for steaks and Portofino for Italian. Basically, the extra fee is like paying a tip to the staff as they are not included in the normal dining room tipping. The service is excellent and the food a notch above. Especially for special occasions, I would recommend at least one night's dining in a specialty restaurant.

For any meals you don't want to go to the dining room, buffet dining is available. I like how Royal Caribbean has divided up its buffet. Instead of only having one or two lines for the buffet, they have also added different "islands" for such things as a carving station, desserts, sushi, etc. I'm not big on waiting in long lines and this breaks it up a bit. You can also catch a hamburger and milk shake at the Johnny Rockets Diner! There, the wait staff even does a choreographed dance to the Bee Gee's "Stayin-Alive!"

The pools on the Liberty are generous in size. The H2O Zone is a kids pool area with whimsical, spurting fountains. There a numerous hot tubs in the pool area, but in the Solarium Pool area, two large hot tubs jut out from each side of the ship and are suspended 12 stories above the water! What a view to relax in the swirling waters and stare out into the ocean!

For the active, the Liberty has areas like a full size basketball court, a tall rock climbing wall (Sharon made it to the top), miniature golf, golf simulator, large fitness center overlooking the ocean, and a boxing ring. The full service spa is large. (And they always smell so nice!)

Two other innovations by Royal Caribbean on these larger ships are an ice skating rink and a surfing Flowrider. The ice skating rink seems about two thirds the size of a hockey rink and you can skate or take lessons. Sharon & I saw one of their night-time Ice Shows and it was one of the best shows we have ever seen! The Flowrider at the back of the ship shoots a high speed sheet of water that allows you to "boogy board" it or, for the well balanced, learn to surf. Women should be cautioned to were something other than a bikini because the rushing water tends to knock off bathing suits!

Night time grown-up fun is plentiful with a huge casino and a variety of bars and show rooms. The casino is probably the largest I have seen afloat. Sharon and I are not big gamblers, we usually stick to the slot machines (we broke even this cruise!), but we saw a roulette table with a dollar minimum and are told that's unusual (but affordable for us novices!) for a casino. You can go to a champagne bar, a martini bar, a piano bar, disco, or regular bars. Anyone like Karaoke? Sharon took in one of the nighttime shows in the theater and said it was one of the better shows she had seen on a cruise ship.

The Kids Club seems extensive with a large arcade, computers for use in an activities room, and a Fisher Price affiliated program for those under three. The cabins feature Royal Caribbean's new updated beds, linens, towels, and flat screen TVs. The bed was too comfortable!

If you want to be able to have a wide variety of things to do and places to go aboard a cruise ship, the Liberty of the Seas is a good place to Live the World!

Hubbard Glacier

As our Alaskan cruise continued, my wife, Sharon, woke me in the early morning. Our ship was sailing into Disenchantment Bay, home of Hubbard Glacier. It was drizzly, foggy, cool, and too early for me to rush awake. Sharon went up on deck and I followed later.

Hubbard Glacier is North America's largest tidewater glacier. A tidewater glacier is one that travels far enough to reach the sea. The origins of Hubbard are back up in the Yukon about 75 miles and it is still advancing. The face of the glacier is 6 miles long and 300-500 feet high. A lot more is under the water. It is HUGE! Our ship, Celebrity's Summit, was dwarfed by this 50 story high chunk of ice. We "parked" about a mile from Hubbard, but because of its size, it looked like you could almost reach out and touch it. When we saw a sea bird fly by our ship toward the glacier and almost disappear as it neared the face, we gained a little perspective!

For our best view we were allowed to go to the front of the ship to the helicopter landing pad. There, facing the glacier, a Tlingit naturalist (who Sharon & I had met and become friends with in Hoonah, our previous stop) told us all about Hubbard. The ice has a blueish tinge as did many of the glaciers we had seen earlier. I think this is caused by the air in the ice being pressed out by the pressures of the glacier. The color seems more evident under cloudy skies than sunny. A lot of the glacier's surface is heavily crevassed and fissured. Again, the size of these jagged cracks and convolutions was hard to comprehend until we saw them dwarfing full size spruce trees near the glacier edges. All glaciers also have dirt/gravel they have up heaved incorporated throughout their ice. Some appear "dirtier" than others like the smaller glacier to the side of Hubbard.

Viewing Hubbard Glacier was almost like a religious experience for me. Here we are, in the middle of nowhere, all by ourselves (well, 2500 other passengers too), in a slight drizzle, with fog shrouding the tops of the mountains, in front of a massive, thousands of years old example of nature, and it is perfectly silent. The silence would occasionally be disrupted by a reverberating "crack" or a distant rumble like thunder. Never quite heard sounds like that before. These sounds were Hubbard expanding and contracting. Like the old man he is, he creaks like my old knees. We kept a sharp eye because some of these cracks and moans meant calving (ice falling into the sea from the face of a glacier). Because of the size of Hubbard, though, by the time the sound got to the ship, the calving had already occurred. Did I mention that Hubbard is big? Live the World!

Vancouver, BC

Our Celebrity cruise left from Vancouver. If possible, I'd always suggest having your travel agent get you to a port at least a day ahead of your cruise departure just in case you encounter any flight problems. Now I know there are never any flight cancellations (yeh, right!) , but, just in case, it sure eases my mind to know a little flight delay will not make me miss my cruise. My wife, Sharon, and I went to Vancouver two days ahead of time to explore the area.

Vancouver is a large city (about 2 mil) on the coast and has a new, cosmopolitan but "out- doorsey" feel. Being on the water, near the mountains, with a lot of parks made me feel like I should be jogging or hiking. Yet, the downtown has new skyscrapers with good shopping, great restaurants, and fun entertainment. We stayed in the West End area which is within walking distance of a lot of food, entertainment, and shopping. We walked to Gastown, their historic area, which features a lot of "pubs" and jazz entertainment. Seems like this Northwest area has a lot of micro-breweries, so my wife had to try them all (or was that me? I forget). The city also has a large Asian population with the biggest "Chinatown" in Canada. That also equates to good oriental food!

Sharon and I explored two other Vancouver city areas that I would recommend. Taking a city bus from the West End we went to Granville Island. Don't know if this is an actual island, but it is an area down by the river that has been refurbished with a lot of restaurants, micro-breweries (for my wife!), a great market (fresh vegetables, fruits, fish, meats, crafts, etc.) and fun entertainment. A nice place to stroll around and spend an evening (and take a cab home!).

We also walked from our West End hotel to Stanley Park; the crown jewel of Vancouver parks. Stanley Park is a huge natural area (like Central Park, NYC) that has horse-drawn carriage rides, miles of foot trails, seawall walking and biking trails, with picnic areas; you get the picture. There are also shuttle buses rounding the park. You can get on and off at stops throughout the park and visit their restaurants, totem pole exhibit, scenic overlooks, etc. Very relaxing way to be outdoors. Again, Vancouver, with a lot of parks, seems centered around the out of doors.

The next day, we took the Sea Bus across the bay toward the mountains. Earlier we had purchased a two day bus pass that also included transportation on this ferry. This area north of Vancouver has a lot of nice residential areas (you notice how well flowers grow in this mild climate), but we headed to two other attractions; Capilano Park and a salmon hatchery. A bus (again, pre-paid) took us from the dock to Capilano. The park, in the tall pines and hemlocks, has an exhibit about the old logging days, but the main attractions are its suspension bridge and tree top tour.

The suspension walking bridge is 450 feet long and hangs about 230 feet above a river. Traversing the "two lane" bridge with people walking both ways is a cool experience that becomes more "exciting" when kids start it swaying! Actually, the park rangers are real good at stopping these shenanigans. Once on the other side, there are paths to walk the woods. If you so desire, there is the Tree Top Adventure. The Adventure is a series of suspended foot bridges that goes from tree to tree throughout the park with "tree houses" at the junctions. At times you are 100 feet above the foot paths. Pretty unique.

A half mile up the road from Capilano is a salmon hatchery. It has the normal exhibits and tanks with various size fish, but what I found interesting was the fish ladder. The "ladder" is a series of stepped tanks that allow salmon, that are migrating up stream to spawn, a way to get around an obstruction in a stream like a dam. At the hatchery the fish ladder has windows into the tanks. Here, you can see the salmon pooling in the various tanks until they get enough courage to make the jump up to the next higher tank. Tough to get the timing right to photograph the jump, though.

With only two days in Vancouver, that's about all Sharon & I could accomplish before boarding our ship (cool ship terminal!). Two things we had wanted to do were a day trip north to Whistler (winter & summer resort area and part of Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics) and a ferry ride over to Vancouver Island and the town of Victoria. Maybe next time. Remember to Live the World!

Cruise Alaska

This summer my wife and I took a cruise of Alaska's Inside Passage followed by a few days in Denali. I'll follow-up with some other blogs on the land portion of our trip, as well as, thoughts on the ports we visited.

There are a lot of options when cruising Alaska. First you have to decide if you want the small ship experience or what we consider "the normal size" cruise ships. The small ships generally have a more casual atmosphere and decor/accommodations and often have an expedition/education theme. They have the advantage of being able to go to places the larger ships can't. The larger ships have all the glitz and glamour we associate with cruising. They offer the lounges, spas, entertainment, and activities that are normally limited on smaller ships.

Next you have to pick a cruise line. All cruise lines are not alike. Even some ships within one cruise line can have a different "atmosphere." They will vary in price (of course), accommodations, level of service, food, type of clientele, prepaid inclusions, and activities/entertainment. A good travel agent can pick the cruise line that best fits your budget and tastes.

Cruises will vary in length and travel either north or south. There are a few round trip cruises (in and out of the same port), but I feel they only give you a tease of the experience. These cruises don't go far enough. I don't have any preference if I take the north or south route for just a cruise. I don't even see a big need to pick what side of the ship your cabin is on (to be able to see the land), but for some that might be a factor to consider. A determining factor would be if you are adding a land portion to the cruise (that, I really recommend!). Some people like to do the land tour first and then the "relaxing" cruise last (a south route). My preference would be cruise then land (north route, which we did) because the land portion was so spectacular! Doing the land tour first would make the cruise anti-climactic for me because a day in a port, although pretty and interesting, was not as dramatic as spending time as part of the land. Also, we saw much more wildlife on the land portion and, of course, Mt McKinley!

My wife and I were on the Summit of Celebrity Cruise Line. Celebrity is an upscale Royal Caribbean; its parent company. It's above the mass market entry level cruise lines but a step below the luxury lines. In a lot of respects, I find Celebrity and Princess Cruises are similar. There is still a wide variety of ages on both cruise lines but more of an upscale clientele and decor than, say, Carnival. Celebrity has a good reputation for its food. The service is good, the ship clean, with normal entertainment. Their specialty restaurant (at an an additional fee) was excellent! Cirque du Soleil is on board with an abbreviated show, but I wanted more having seen several of the full scale shows. Cruising on the Summit was very enjoyable. Having been cruising in the Caribbean, it was weird to see the deck chairs around the pool to have rolled wool blankets instead of towels! Live the World!