What I Use: Alaska Cruise (Premium)

My wife and I travel a lot, but we’ve never been on a cruise, and it’s been an interesting and eye-opening experience. I’m surprised to say we’ve really enjoyed it, though it’s so different from the way we usually travel.

It’s also been a shocking lesson in unfamiliarity and complexity, so maybe I’ll get that out of the way first.

On the unfamiliarity front, this just isn’t the way we normally travel, and I mean that very broadly. We always do our own research and travel independently, and we travel as light as possible. But a cruise tosses both of those notions right out the window. This is a highly curated experience, and we needed to pack so much that we both brought two of the suitcases that we usually travel with, and we had to check them for the flight, ye gods. (We don’t own bigger bags.) It’s been a bit awkward.

It’s also made me wonder about one of our pet travel maxims. I often write about introducing a certain, surmountable level of complexity into travel, the point being that my wife and I find overcoming challenges to be a rewarding part of the experience. But it’s important to find the right balance there. If it’s too challenging, it’s not fun. To date, most of our biggest travel-related challenges have been language-related, whether it’s the two decades we spent visiting Europe or the past year and a half in Mexico.

This cruise has been a challenge of a different kind, and we were both surprised by the amount of complexity in making this trip happen, as was everyone else we spoke with about this topic. I tend to think of cruises as a kind of mainstream American activity, something that would appeal to people who prefer Disneyworld (or whatever) over the types of trips we normally take. Which I know sounds condescending, though I don’t mean it that way. I just figured cruises would be easy.

They’re not, at least for newcomers like us. In a stunning moment of comeuppance, my wife and I, Raphael and his girlfriend, and almost everyone else we spoke with, has struggled with all of the myriad requirements we had to complete in order to make this trip happen. There were four separate mobile apps we had to deal with—ArriveCAN (for admission into Canada), Holland Navigator (for the ship, one of the worst apps I’ve ever used), VeriFLY (vaccination and COVID-19 test verification), and one for the travel company that TWiT used for the cruise—and each had its own multiple, often repetitive layers of requirements. And that was all before we got on the boat.

I won’t beat all that to death, but Rafael and I, and, separately, my wife and I, spent many, many hours together going over all this and figuring out how to move forward through the requirements. We also had to reconnoiter with both Leo and Lisa and Richard Campbell and his wife to figure out schedules for our excursions and other activities. In the end, it was all worth it: we were able to bypass the incredible sea of humanity trying to board the ship at check-in time and get on board quickly. But we really worked to get there.

And then the complexity continued onboard, of course. As noted, the Holland America app, which is just a mobile version of their website, is terrible. It often doesn’t work in some way, and is very slow, and it is the front-end to us getting online, which was another nightmare. Once we figured out how to really get online—you can’t just connect to the Wi-Fi, you have to go through the app, a multi-step process that needs to be repeated again and again—we realized that we needed to upgrade the quality (at $110 for the week for four devices) and that, even then, it would almost never work in our room and would disconnect throughout the day regardless. It has been sort of OK out in the ship, I guess, and so I’ve found time each day to sit by a window and work. I was even able to upload photos to the site for a laptop review and this post, albeit a bit slowly.

Making and updating restaurant and activity reservations has likewise been complex. We were only able to get tables for 2 or 4 depending on the place ahead of time in the app, but we found that we could adjust the tables for 2 to 4, and the tables for 4 to 6, again depending on the place, in person onboard. And as with everything else, once you figure out the system, you kind of move into a calmer, more assured mode. It just takes a while.

That some people do this, and do it a lot, is amazing to me. There are most assuredly other complexities stacked on top of what I’ve remembered, including whatever differences there are between cruise lines and different ships, but I can’t even wrap my brain around that. But you live and you learn.

And, seriously, do not take my grumbling above as some indication that this hasn’t been worth it. Connecting with the 120 or so people who are part of the TWiT group has been a lot of fun, and spending time with them and Leo, Richard, and Rafael and their respective spouses has been great. The ship itself is interesting, with lots to do if that’s what you want, or nothing to do in a comfortable chair if that’s your thing. There is great food and drink, everywhere it seems, and some of the dining experiences have been notable. None of it has been bad.

But there are two related aspects to this trip that put it over the top: Alaska, which I’ve always wanted to visit, and the excursions that help you explore the place in unique ways. We booked several, and they run the gamut from aggressive (the Taku Glacier helicopter landing and airboat adventure) to the more sedate (whale watching, and a few others).

The first occurred after almost two full days of sea travel—from Saturday afternoon until Monday at 1:00—so it was a welcome break from what was already becoming a disconcerting haze of eating, drinking, and sleeping. Richard, his wife Stacy, Stephanie, and I went on an excursion called Taku Glacier Helicopter Landing & Airboat adventure that was perhaps the highlight of the trip.

We disembarked in Juneau, Alaska, took a short van ride to a heliport on nearby Douglas Island, and were flown to Taku Point, my first helicopter ride. From there, we explored the exterior of the glacier onboard a fast-moving and expertly piloted airboat. And then we took the helicopter to the top of the glacier, where we drank the cleanest water on earth, running off the glacier. When we returned, we ate and drank in Juneau. It was the complete experience.

Our next excursion was a whale watch and marine mammal safari that was most interesting for our views of Orcas and Humpback whales. This was great in its own way, but I’ve had more impressive Humpback experiences off the coast of Massachusetts.

Thanks to a crappy bus experience, Richard and I missed our Sitka Food Lover’s Tour the next day, but we made up for it by eating the biggest crab legs either of us had ever experienced in town. That was incredible.

And then on Thursday, we went on a wilderness cruise and Silverking Lodge seafood feast excursion. There were some amazing Bald Eagle sightings—this state is chock full of them—and then the promised feast.

I noted above that packing for this trip was unusual, but the tech I brought along was pretty standard, if you’ve followed along with any of my What I Use posts. I carried most of the tech, save the gadget bag, in my HP Renew Backpack, which can hold two laptops. And the two laptops I chose were work-based: I brought the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga (Gen 7) that I just reviewed and an older-generation HP ZBook Firefly that I’m using for Windows 11 Field Guide screenshots. (This is a personal device that’s older than the ZBook Firefly 14 G8 I reviewed last year.)

That HP backpack also carried my Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, for noise-cancellation on the plane, my iPad Air, my backup Pixel 6 Pro smartphone, charging cables, and various other items like our passports and so forth.

My gadget bag was a bit lighter than it’s been of late since I left the big and bulky microphone setup at home. But it contains more cables, the Anker Power Strip with USB-C I love so much (and really needed on this trip because of the power receptacle locations), and some other trinkets I never used.

Logistically, working on the cruise has been difficult. Our room is very small, smaller than any hotel room, and cramped, and while there is a small desk, it’s not ideal. Worse, the ship’s Wi-Fi is often non-existent in there, though I discovered over time that if opened the door and reconnected, it would actually work for a while. I’ve had much better results out in the ship.

The other issue is cellular connectivity: Google Fi has worked well when we’re near land, but there’s an unusual issue all people will face when you’re out at sea because connectivity will either be very, very expensive or non-existent. So we told the kids to message us on Facebook Messenger and have left the phones on Airplane mode when we were not in sight of land. When I can connect via cellular, the connection is much better than the ship’s Wi-Fi.

I had downloaded some Netflix content to my iPad Air ahead of the trip and watched part of a movie on the way here. And there is a TV in the room that gives us access to a pretty decent collection of semi-recent movies and TV shows. But we’ve not spent even one second watching anything. We’ve been too busy hanging out with friends and the TWiT cruisegoers and exploring Alaska. We’re usually beat when we get back to the room and have almost always collapsed immediately.

I’ve enjoyed the cruise more than I expected, but I wish the space and connectivity in the room were better. Still, not a horrible first experience at all. And I’m happy I was able to get some work done, as I prefer writing every day and publishing online as quickly as possible. It was challenging but doable.

We will be back in port on Saturday and then we fly home Sunday. I suspect I will be in a coma for much of next week.