Day 8 And End Of Our 2010 Alaska Cruise Vacation

This morning we docked in Seattle. Veronica and I had previously packed our suitcases and enrolled our luggage in the NCL Bags Program. For $20 a person, you provide NCL with all of your return flight information, you pack your luggage and leave it out in the hallway before retiring for the evening. NCL will pick up the luggage and take care of getting it to the airport and getting it all checked in. You will see your luggage upon getting to your final destination. Any luggage charges levied by the airlines will be applied to your onboard account. This program works out great, especially if your flight isn't until later on in the day and you want to walk around and check out the sites in Seattle..which is what we did for a while.

What's a trip to Seattle without visiting Pikes Place Market

Great seafood rules supreme in this market

It was Mothers Day so the were flower stalls jammed packed with flowers everywhere

These mini watermelons could fit in the palm of your hand

Those King Crab legs sure look good

These shrimp wre huge...biggest that I have ever seen

Homemade pasta bar..dried pasta of all types...including chocolate pasta

Lookws like they had a little fish art going on here

These dyed flowers looked beautiful

Assorted signage and funny stuff in the area

We stayed in Seattle for several hours and then headed to the airport. Because our flight did not leave Seattle until 10:35 that night, we settled down in a quiet place in the airport. We landed in Norfolk airport around 9:00 the next morning and from there a 1 1/2 hour drive home. With that drive, our 2010 Alaska cruise vacation came to an end. Our next big adventure will be this upcoming September, when Veronica and I will be heading to Europe for a 12 day Baltic Capitals cruise on the NCL Sun.

To see all of the other photos aned videos that did not make on my blog, please click on the "ALL Alaska 2010 Vacation Cruise Photographs and Videos" link. This link is on the upper right hand portion of my blogs main page.

New Year Brings New Adventures

I have been working on the final details of our upcoming cruise to Alaska on board the NCL Pearl in May.
Last year, when we were on the Pearl, we left out of Seattle as we headed towards Alaska. This year our cruise departs out of Vancouver, Canada at a pier and location called Canada Place.
We need to find a real early flight out of Norfolk, so that we can get to Seattle as early as possible..hopefully before noon. We then need to catch a shuttle bus at the Seattle airport, that will take us to the Vancouver airport, which is several hours away from Seattle.
Normally I would try to fly into the Vancouver Airport but the prices are really high to fly there.
The shuttle bus runs on a schedule and the earlier we can catch the bus at the Seattle Airport, , the sooner our long travel day will end, after arriving in Vancouver.
I made hotel reservations last night at a Holiday Inn that is located near the Vancouver Airport. I was looking at a couple of hotels that are located right at Canada Place but they wanted between $300-$400 a night there. They were nice hotels but there is no way that I am going to pay that much for a room that we would only be in for 12 hours at the most.
The shuttle bus would have dropped us off right at these more expensive hotels but we figured out a way to save some money and still make the logistics work.
I ended up calling NCL and they had some deals worked out between themselves and a couple of hotels, including the one that I ended up choosing.
We got a room for $150.00 at this Holiday Inn...expensive still but cheaper ones would have been a lot further out from the city. Our costs also included transfers from the hotel to the cruise ship.
That left only one logistical problem.....finding a way to get from the Vancouver Airport, where the Seattle shuttle bus drops us off, to the Holiday Inn. One quick call to Holiday Inn took care of that issue. They have an hotel shuttle that runs from the Vancouver Airport to their hotel.
**Update- we just got finished purchasing our airline tickets. We will be flying Delta on all legs of our journey. I'll tell you what....prices of our airline tickets were about 20% more than they were a year ago but we were able to get that flight that gets us into Seattle at 10:50AM.
This way we have some time to fetch our luggage and make our way to the location where we need to get on the shuttle bus, that will take us to Vancouver Airport...which I just checked and it is a 4 hour bus ride because of all of the stops the shuttle make.
Veronica and I will definitely want to grab a bite to eat and something to drink for our right to Vancouver.
This basically wraps up everything that we needed to do in preparation for our trip. Only other thing left is to pack and then we are Alaska bound again.
I almost forgot to mention a very important point....when we went looking around for prices for our airlines tickets, we stayed the hell away from CheapoAir. We learned a rough lesson last year after going through them (just one problem after another with them) and we promised ourselves that we would never do that again and guess what...that is one New Years resolution that was really easy to keep.

Seattle Floral Photographic Collage

Here are just a few flowers that we saw from the numerous venders at Pikes Place Market in Seattle. It was Mothers Day so the place was very busy.

Signage Photographic Collage

Assorted signs from our vacation

All Things Fishy Collage

These are various photos taken at Pikes Place Market. One of the fish vendors had prawns from Taiwan that were huge. The biggest prawns that I have ever seen in my life. They were called "grilling prawns" and they must have been around 7-8" long and around 5" in diameter.

Seattle Architecture Collage

I thought that I would put together a few collages from the numerous photographs that I took while on vacation. Here is the first one:

Day #1 of Alaska Vacation 2009 5/09/09

Starting today, I will be making blog entries about our 1st ever cruise to Alaska aboard the Norwegian Cruise Line Pearl. During this vacation, I took well over 1200 photos and videos. I will be uploading the best photos in order to save myself some blog space. ****PLEASE NOTE- I WILL BE UPLOADING ALL OF MY VACATION PHOTOS ONTO WEBSHOTS. AS SOON AS I AM FINISHED, I WILL PUT A LINK ON THE TOP RIGHT HAND COLUMN OF THIS BLOG.**** I hope that you enjoy. And away we go.....
On Friday, 5/08, we went to bed rather early because we had a very early plane to catch. I did not really sleep that well, which is not unusual when it is the day before a big trip. The following morning, we woke up around 2:30 in the morning on Saturday, 5/09. We were out the door and on our way to the airport by 3AM. Once at the airport, we checked in through one of those Kiosk things. We then weighed our luggage by ourselves because the the counters did not open up until 4AM. One bag weighed a little bit over the 50 pound per bag limit, so we put some items from one bag into another. Once we finished that, the electricity in the airport went out. We had a really bad lightning storm that we went through, on our way to the airport but it was over with by the time we got there. The electricity stayed off for a little over an hour. The airport was being run by generators but there was very limited services available. This meant that everything had to be hand written by the customer service personnel at the counters. This slowed everything down to a crawl but we were fine because we had everything done just prior to the electricity going out. We grabbed something quick to eat while waiting to depart. Our flights were long ones...over 3 hours to Houston and then over 4 hours to Seattle. Once at Seattle, we had a limo service pick us up and take us to our hotel downtown. Because our room was not ready yet...it was only about 11AM by this time...we stored our luggage in a locked room that the hotel provided us. We then decided to walk around Seattle to take photographs. I took a lot of architectural photos as well as scenic shots. We ended up walking to Pikes Market and the Waterfront area. It was packed down there because of some type of annual festival. Pikes Market was packed full of flower vendors for Mothers Day which was the next day. We ended up eating at the Fishermens Restaurant which was on the waterfront and very good. I had the fried Halibut and Chips platter and I think Veronica had the Shrimp and Chips Platter. By the time we got done with our dinner, we were pretty well pooped out do to the long day that we had. We went back to the hotel and went to sleep very early that night.


The famous Pikes Place Market

Flower venders at Pikes Places Market for Mothers Day

Various flowers that were in numerous stands at Pikes Place Market. Tulips and Lilacs were the main flowers

Getting ready for the tugboat races

Seattle ferry

This is the Norwegian Star. She was docked and taking in passengers the day prior to our Norwegian Pearl arriving

Various architectural photos of Seattle

This is Veronicas version of Breakfast At Tiffanys...Starbucks in hand

Pictures of Veronica outside of an old, but still used Theater

Here is a movie of some street performers outside of Pikes Place Market. Please make sure that you turn off or pause the music player that is in the right hand column of my blog.