Norwegian Pearl Review

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Norwegian Pearl - Alaska

Review for Alaska Cruise on Norwegian Pearl
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TR4
First Time Cruiser • Age 50s

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Sail Date: Aug 2007
Cabin: Oceanview Porthole Window

This review is for the August 5,07 cruise to Alaska on NCL's Pearl. I would like you to keep in mind that this review is subjective to my experience on this cruise. The comments and reviews are based on my own opinions and experiences. Our background, my husband and I are both in our early 40's and this was both of ours first cruise. Which makes this review a little more difficult because we have nothing to compare it with. We booked this cruise in January of 2007 and while looking on the computer for information about Alaska I came upon the Cruise Critic site. From that moment on I was hooked. The amount of information I gained from these boards was overwhelming. Through-out the next several months it seemed I was visiting the boards daily. I soon joined our cruise roll-call and began to meet several really exceptional people. After a few months visiting with everyone, I was asked to be the leader of the group. This meant setting up a meeting time and place with the ship and getting together some information about the ports we were visiting. I was very nervous about my newly assigned position-someone who had never cruised before in-charge of a meeting! Well, looking back it was a great privilege to meet and work with some very delightful and caring people. While on roll-call we had a chance to talk about things we wanted to see and do while cruising. This was a great outlet for information. The anticipation for this cruise was more than I imagined. It was really nice to visit with others sharing your same excitement level and understanding. My newly assigned job required me to talk with the ship's crew and set up a meeting place on board the Pearl. During this process I talked with a few of NCL's staff that I felt went above the call of duty to assist in my needs: Karen Chong-viau from the group reservations, Maybelin Gutierrez from group event planner for the Pearl and Kathryn McAdam from the Casino Marketing department. All of these people made great first impressions for NCL. As far as the cruise planning, I can tell you right off the start that I tried to plan everything right down to the hour. I retrieved past freestyle daily sheets and tried to plan for our entire week. It didn't work out that way. We ended up just doing everything at that moment and it really seemed to work out great. The only regret is I did miss some shows and classes I had really wanted to see and do. There were so many things to choose from I found it hard to decide what to do. We only live about 6 hours away from Seattle so we drove to the pier. Good choice since we had 7 suitcases-yes I over packed but 3 of the bags were items for our meet and greet party). We arrived early Sunday morning and it was starting to get busy with everyone getting off the ship from the week before cruise. We decided to park in the Bell St parking garage. (One thing I should mention is if you use the lower entrance at the side of the garage you go right into the cruise parking area). We were a little worried that our expedition fitting the height requirements but we had no problems. The garage attendants were very quick and helpful getting our luggage and parking the car. We found that the embarkment process was quick and painless, even though we were there several hours before our boarding time. NCL gets an A+ here. We waited only a short time before we were able to board the ship. Our room was not available yet so we explored the ship, made dinner reservations and went to the garden cafe for lunch. About 1:30pm our room was ready so we went to drop off our carry ons and check out our cabin. We found our cabin, 5504 (port hole window on the port side) to be adequate in size. The bathroom was a little small but we made do. For the two of us the cabin had lots of room for our things. We had plenty of space in the closet and room under our beds for the suitcases. The refrigerator was a little small but overall everything was fine. Upon arriving to our room we meet our room steward, Rondaldo Rodrigazo. He and Teresitade Los Santos were very nice and did a great job with our room. We didn't require any extra service but had we I am sure they would have accommodated us. After checking out the room we made our way to deck 13 to watch the sail away party. The weather was great and we were treated to a fly by from the Blue Angel flight performing for SeaFair. The party was great but it was our first experience with how expensive the drinks were on-board. Once we left the Seattle harbor we went back to our room to talk with the group service coordinator, Gary Aldredge( by phone upon his request). We sit up all the last minute items for the CC meeting and double checked all the numbers of guest. Our luggage was delivered to our room very early in the afternoon which was nice to get everything unpacked. On the advice from other cruise critic members I packed a bathroom organizer and hung it over the shower door. It worked great keeping everything up and out of our way. We had our life boat drill at 3:30pm and our station was the stardust theater. It was very uncomfortable setting in the chairs with the life vests on. Luckily it didn't' take too long and we quickly were released to return to our room. Dinner tonight was at the Garden Cafe (will do restaurant review later) and after we enjoyed the evening at the casino (even though we missed the welcome aboard show).

Monday: Monday was sea day and was a nice chance to check out the ship. We had our Cruise Critic party before lunch and it seemed to go very well. We had someone from every group posting on roll call show up. It was a great turnout. Some of the ships officers visited briefly and left their cards in case anyone needed anything. The party was really great to put screen names with faces. We had snacks (provided by the ship) and door prizes (provided by a couple of members of our roll call). I would like to thank 'Papa Jacks family' and 'ACruise4us family' for all their help. After our CC party we grabbed a bite to eat and entertained ourselves with the ships activities. We were invited to attend the Captains Cocktail party this evening, which was a pleasant surprise. It was a privilege to meet the captain and the senior officers. We enjoyed visiting for about an hour and then departed for dinner. Tonight was' dress up or not' night and we decided to put away the blue jeans and break out the 'dress up 'clothes. We had made reservations at Summer Palace for this evening. Summer Palace is one of the main dining rooms; it was very elegant and had beautiful decorations. We were quickly seated but waited a while for service. Our waitress seemed overwhelmed with everyone's tables and rarely visited our table. Dinner took a while to be served but when it arrived I thought it was very good. All the staff at Summer Palace was very friendly and pleasant, we just seemed to get lost in the shuffle. After dinner we went to the Stardust Theater to watch the 'Second City show'. This was a comedy show and was very humorous. We were impressed by the show, but surprised at how short the show seemed. We later went back to our cabin to find delicious treats waiting for us. Another great day! Tuesday: Tuesday was our Juneau stop. Before arriving in Juneau we were treated with a large amount of whale activity. It was an amazing experience to stand at the rail and watch them play and hunt. When we arrived in Juneau it was cold and wet (surprise, surprise). Most of the helicopter and sightseeing flights were cancelled due to the weather. We had chosen to do the excursion JNU412 offered by NCL. This was the Mendenhall glacier and wildlife quest tour. Our excursion bus picked us up at the ship right on time. We had an excellent tour bus driver who drove us to the Mendenhall glaciers. Thanks to the advice of our bus driver we walked the trail off the left of the parking lot where we had the privilege to see a mama bear and two cubs catching fish from the creek. This was a high-light of our trip. It was difficult to get pictures of the bears, because of the amount of people that were there. If visiting here on your own, I would wait and hour or so after the cruise ship dock and then go to the glacier. It seemed very busy when we first arrived but by the time we left it seemed to have thinned out a bit. The weather at the glacier was -well raining, but we really enjoyed our visit here. The blue ice and large waterfall was impressive. We loaded our bus again for the second part of our tour-whale watching. Our bus driver took us to our Whale watching boat and we quickly located a seat and waited for our adventure to begin. unfortunately we waited for several more buses of passengers to board the vessel. In my opinion, it seemed that the tour was way over-booked. Several people could not find seats and were forced to stand the entire trip. We saw some whale activity but not nearly what we had seen from the ship. Even when the whales were spotted it was very difficult to get any pictures because of the number of people trying to find a spot at the rail. We finally started taking pictures over the tops of people's heads. The only advantage I saw doing a whale Watching tour verses seeing them from the ship was at least on the tour they stopped so you could try and get photos. The tour operator and staff were very friendly but I probably would not do this excursion again. I don't want to give anybody the idea that this is a bad excursion, Mother Nature does not work on command and if we hadn't seen some much whale activity from our ship, we probably would have enjoyed the experience more. I also think if the vessel would not have been so crowded it would have been more enjoyable. We finished our excursion with a little time to spend in town. We visited the Red Dog saloon and did a little shopping. We didn't feel like we had enough time at this port. (Cell phone note-this was the only port that we could not get coverage with our Verizon cell phone). We boarded our ship (special cabin note- when picking a cabin keep in mind that deck 4, port side was used several times as access to the gang plank. It was very difficult for people staying in these cabins to enter or leave their room with everyone standing in the hall). We had dinner at Indigo, which was the other main dining room. It was not as grand as Summer Palace, but I preferred it better. The food was delicious and we enjoyed the evening of fine food, exceptional Service and visiting with new friends. Wednesday: Our port of call was Skagway. We arrived in port early in the morning and the weather was actually sunny. Skagway was a cute town but didn't seem realistic.

The town seemed clean and the people were friendly. It still had a lot of T-shirt shops and jewelry stores (which seemed to be the only shopping in Juneau) but didn't seem to have that many home town business shops. Our excursion in Skagway was also booked through NCL and was the White Pass rail, Klondike highway and gold camp adventure. We boarded a bus at the Pier and it took us to a different pier to pick-up more guest from other cruise lines. Once the bus was loaded we went a short distance to the train. Everyone got off the bus and onto the train. I spent most of my time on the train ride standing between the rail cars, this made for better photos. If I was sitting inside the left side of the train (going up) seemed to have a better view. We arrived at the summit a few hours later and after the Canadian authorities checked everyone's passports we exited the train. We did not stay here long but boarded our bus for a ride back down. I did not care for our tour bus driver; she kept saying how expensive it was to live there and how hard it was to save for school. I felt as though she was asking for money the whole time. The other bus driver told us information about the area and cute little jokes. She tried the jokes but they didn't go over real well and when she tried to tell us about sights that we would be coming too, she would tell you the waterfall is on the left, but after passing it you would realize it was on the right. Too late for pictures. My husband said I was too hard on her and we did give her a tip anyway, but not as much as the other driver. The last stop on tour was Lairsville, which was redone to look like an old time gold mining camp. I didn't care for the camp but wondered around the area for a little while. We watched a quick show and was kind of taught how to pan for gold. We were really looking forward to panning until we realized that we were just given a pan with sand and a few flakes of gold. The flakes were really hard to see and I saw a lot of kids getting up-set that they couldn't find what they were looking for. Once you found your 3 or 4 small flakes of gold you were done. If would not have been so bad if you could have kept panning for a while but it only took about 10 minutes and we were back on the bus. We still had plenty of time in Skagway to shop and wander the town. We boarded the ship about 7 pm and had time for dinner before leaving this port. (When leaving Skagway we saw several waterfalls off the port side of the ship). Once it became dark we headed indoors to enjoy more of the Pearls entertainment and then off to bed.

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Oceanview Porthole Window

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