2018 The Wonder of Alaskan Cruise

[ZapperZ]

Are you sure that the smoking section was on Deck 10? I always thought it was in Quiet Cove on Deck 9. Maybe they've relocated it since I was on board. Nope, I just checked the DCL website and this is from their FAQ:

Booking & Reservations – Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Are there designated smoking areas on board?
A. In an effort to provide an enjoyable cruise experience for all our Guests, smoking (including the use of electronic cigarettes) is only permitted in the following designated areas of the ships:
Disney Magic and Disney Wonder

• Deck 4, outdoors, starboard side from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM
• Deck 9, forward, portside, any time

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I think they want the smoking section where adults can go easily and where it will be away from children (which I can appreciate). That means it has to be in Quiet Cove. They try to put it in a corner so it's away from as many people as possible. Unfortunately, it's near a stairwell and the smoke naturally goes to the decks above it. I find smoking to be gross, personally, so I totally understand your reaction. But honestly, unless you make the entire cruise non-smoking, you're going to notice it somewhere. At least DCL doesn't have a casino that connects to the rest of the ship, so that you smell the smoke throughout the Atrium or something like that.

I stand corrected. I added one deck level to everything that I wrote in that post.

My problem was that the smoking section on Deck 9 was in the forward section on the port side. And since there is a stairway leading up to Deck 10, you almost have a chimney for the smoke to come up. When the ship is in motion, the breeze flows to the back. So there's a greater length of the ship for the smoke from the front to travel to the back. When we were up on Deck 10 to view the glacier, you might be standing well behind the stairway and could still detect cigarette smoke in the air.

It just slightly ruined the experience, and like I said, it was ironic that these smokers didn't realize that here they were, in some of the most pristine air in the world, and they're not getting any of it, while some of us had to inhale the smoke.

Zz.

 

[ZapperZ]

Day 6 was Ketchikan, our last port-of-call. Once again, I was up early, and took this snapshot of the sunrise as we were approaching Ketchikan. So this is my wallpaper photo.

We were still not scheduled to arrive till mid to late morning, but I could already tell that we were near civilization since we were noticing habitation, some not in so-good condition.

When we saw an Air Alaska plane doing its landing approach, we knew that we were getting real close to arriving.

And here is Ketchikan as viewed from the ship.

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[ZapperZ]

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We had time for breakfast before we left the ship. And our excursion was in the afternoon. So we took time to have a really good breakfast.

Now I've talked about food a lot, but I realized by then that I never took photos of the buffet in Cabanas. So here is a sample of the breakfast buffet that morning at the Cabanas.

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[ZapperZ]

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Are you full yet? Oh wait, there's more!

This was Donald's breakfast that morning.

So now, hopefully, you'll understand why I, and Donald, needed to go on a diet at the end of the cruise!

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[ZapperZ]

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Anyhow, after we stuffed our faces, we disembarked the ship. I had one main goal that morning. We were told that there was still the tail end (pun intended) of a salmon run due to the warmer summer this year. So I was determined to find these darn salmon. We were told to go look for Creek St. and to follow that for as long as we can, because that would be our best chance.

So in the following photos, these were our trail as we followed Creek St., and then continued on even more to find salmons swimming up stream.

We were starting to see a few salmon along the way, and I thought that these were all that we might see in terms of numbers, considering that it was towards the end of the season.

We noticed our friend here still fishing for salmon.

We saw a big fish sign, and decided to continue following the trail.

Still following the trail, with the river to our left.

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[ZapperZ]

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We encountered a fish ladder. At this point, we were seeing a few salmon, a few dead ones as well, but I really thought that these were the density of fish that we will continue to see. But we still continued on along the trail.

The trail ended at a road, but the river continued, and there was a sidewalk alongside the river. So we crossed the road, and continued walking, keeping the river on our left.

We came to a bridge across the river, and that was when we noticed a bunch of people standing right on the riverbank, or on the riverbed itself. We found a path leading down to it, and that was when we hit the motherload. We found our salmon, and there were A LOT of them still! Considering that we were right down there, the salmon were swimming barely a few feet away from our feet!

I felt exhilirated to finally find this, because that was something I wanted to see. I think that we could have walked on even further and see even more, but this was enough for us for the time we had that morning. We stayed for several minutes before walking back to the ship.

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[ZapperZ]

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We sent back to the ship and got a quick lunch. Here was my plate of food.

That wasn't bad, but I was naughty that day. I took TWO desserts! They were too delectable to ignore.

After lunch, we met up for our excursion, which was the Rainforest Canopy zipline adventure. It was a rather small group. While we waited in the bus, it continued to rain.

We were driven to a rainforest center. It turned out that this was the place for a rainforest excursion, and next to it, was the canopy zipline adventure.

We transferred to another vehicle that took us to the top to start our zipline.

This was where we were suited up with our harness and safety gears.

OK, so I didn't snap any still photos while we were doing this. There were 7 ziplines, and 3 rope bridges. They were a lot of fun, even scary at times, especially that first rope bridge. But I was wearing a GoPro, and I'll edit the video that I took and will put them up here.

But let me describe things just a bit. We had 2 guides, Clay and Andrew, and they were a great team. They quickly learned all of our names, and not only that, they also will point out the different fauna and wildlife around us.

It was when we were crossing the first and longest rope bridge that we first saw one sleeping black bear. And then, as we were in the middle of crossing it, we saw a second one in the middle of hunting for salmon, and then a third one, also looking for food. Wow! Three black bears within minutes of one another.

The one couple that we met on this excursion actually snapped a pic of one of the black bears. The wife graciously texted me the photo, so here it is.

I have looked at my GoPro video, and yes, I captured this scene, so it should be good. I didn't snap any photo because (i) I was almost freaking out on that rope bridge and (ii) in the state that I was in, I didn't trust myself to reach into my pocket for my camera or phone, because I could have easily dropped it. We were very high up above ground and above these bears.

So you will just have to wait till I am done with editing the videos to see this in full.

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[ZapperZ]

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When we got back to downtown Ketchikan after our excursion, we still had a few minutes before we had to go back to the ship. So we walked around a bit to snap photos.

Soon it was time to say goodbye to Ketchikan and go back to the ship.

That evening, we had our dinner at Tiana's, and I was bad again! I ordered two dessert. But I had a very "good" excuse. They were beignets and Bananas Foster! I mean, how can one choose one over the other? Too bad they didn't have chicory coffee, or it will definitely feel like I was in Cafe Du Monde.

It was a long, tiring day, but it was one of the best days that we had on the cruise. A great way to punctuate the last shore day.

Zz.

 

[ZapperZ]

Day 7 of the cruise was our last full day, and also our day at sea. I couldn't believe that the week zipped by so quickly that the cruise was almost over!

The ship must have taken a route that exposed us more to the Pacific, because overnight and into the first half of the day, the sea was rough! We woke up to find that many parts of the ship had been cordoned off (Deck 10 and the promenade on Deck 4). So other than Deck 9, the passengers were being kept mostly indoors.

After breakfast, we ended up sitting by a window in one of the lounges just to be able to look outside. You can get a sense of how rough the sea was from the picture.

But this should give you an even better idea. This was the pool on Deck 9 that was closed. The poor crew member had to shield himself occasionally to prevent him from getting splattered.



Luckily, we had quite a few things that we wanted to do. One of them was attending a cooking class on how to make a chocolate lava cake. And yes, of course, at the end, we were served a sample, and a very nice sparkling wine (at 10:00 am in the morning) to accompany the cake.

I then spent time snapping photos around the ship.

There were characters meet-and-greet throughout the day in the atrium.

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[ZapperZ]

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Of course, there were princesses meet-and-greet. How could there not be? Belle was nice enough to wave at me when she saw me taking pictures from a deck above.

Donald wanted to look around the ship too. So I took him out for a walk.

He saw an outline of his head on the staircase railing.

It was no secret that he preferred The Dream, where he is the admiral.

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[ZapperZ]

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That evening, our last dinner on the ship was at Palo. And as expected, the service and the food were just outstanding.

This was my appetizer, their take on cioppino.

I still contend that their calamari is one of the best calamari that one can get. It didn't hurt that it came with a huge prawn as a garnish.

This was my entree, Dover sole with caper sauce.

Another entree on the table was the osco buco. And it came with bone marrow, which would have been perfect had there been toast points to go along with it.

Another entree on the table was the scallops.

.... and the lamb chops. The previous times that we had dined in Palo (on The Dream and the Fantasy), this was my entree. I decided to order something different this time. But now, looking at how delectable the lamb chops were, I should have ordered this instead and stuck to my "usual". I mean, LOOK AT IT!

I decided to take "revenge" on not ordering the lamb chops by ordering TWO desserts. The first one was the delicious panna cotta.

And the second one was, of course, their obligatory chocolate souffle.

{BURP!!!!}

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[ZapperZ]

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By late afternoon and early evening, the sea had calmed down quite a bit, and access was given to all the closed areas. I took a few more photos of the late afternoon and early evening scenes.

So this is my wallpaper shot of the last full day of our cruise.

Tomorrow, we will arrive back in Vancouver and our cruise will end.

Zz.

 

[ChuckElias]

100% agree about Palo's calamari!

 

[ZapperZ]

Day 8 was the saddest day of the entire cruise, because that was the day we disembark the Wonder and ended our cruise.

As was the case throughout the cruise, I got up early, showered and dressed, and had time to go up to Deck 10 to snap photos. We were already pulling into Vancouver very early in the morning.

The ship made a 180-degree pirouette before it docked at Canada Place.

We went for our last meal on the cruise. It was a quick breakfast.

But soon, our group was called to disembarked, and we walked out of the ship. Our cruise was officially over!

It was a fun, fun cruise, and I'd like to do this again.

I still have videos to edit and will post them here when I finished with them. So I have more to report.

Zz.

 

[ZapperZ]

Loving this report so much, I decided to wear my Alaska shirt from 2011!View attachment 314393

Going back to an earlier post, related to this, this was THE BEST T-SHIRT that I found during the entire trip!

And yes, I've worn it a couple of times already since we got home.

Zz.

 

[ZapperZ]

Cleaning up some of the stuff we brought home from the cruise, I came across this drawing I made during the fun, animation night at Animator's Palate. This was my character that danced on the screen.

It wasn't the most demented character that I've drawn for this.

Zz.

 

[John park hopper]

Enjoyed your trip report. Did you think the 7 day cruise was the right length of time or would you do a longer cruise if you could?

 

[ZapperZ]

Enjoyed your trip report. Did you think the 7 day cruise was the right length of time or would you do a longer cruise if you could?

Oh, definitely longer!

We didn't have enough time in Juneau (only half a day), and I can easily see myself spending a couple of days each in Skagway and Ketchikan. And we didn't get to Sitka and Glacier Bay.

I basically wrote this on the survey we got from DCL a couple of days ago.

Zz.

 

[LittleTuna12]

Loving your report and pictures! I can't wait to go on a cruise like this sometime soon!

 

[ZapperZ]

I was hoping to be further along in my video editing, but real life got in the way. So its taking longer than I expected.

Still, here's the first one, and it is my salute to the beauty of Southeast Alaska's Inside Passage.



Zz.