A trip to the inside passage of Alaska and Glacier Bay has been on our bucket list for a while. To check this one off my wife and I decided to take our first cruise and chose Norwegian. I booked through Norwegian's call center and soon learned that the low price guarantee had so many conditions it was worthless and some of the things the agent told me simply were not true. If I had it to do over again I book through a travel agency of some kind. Live and learn.

The Sunday embarkation was very smooth and painless. We were on the ship quickly and exploring by one o'clock. We had an excellent lunch in the Summer Palace. It soon became one of our favorite places to dine on the ship. It's a pretty good size ship and we had a lot of fun exploring it. Our first stop was Juneau and we didn't hit that until Tuesday at two. The ship is scheduled to leave at 10, so that doesn't give a lot of time to explore. We like to plan our own excursions, so we took a tour of the state capitol then took a bus to the Mendenhall glacier. There we were able to utilize our lifetime park pass at the visitor center and spend a little time walking the trails around the glacier. We even saw a midsize bear fishing for sockeye salmon, without much success. We thought the bear really needed to go to remedial fishing school. Got back to the ship about seven and had another nice meal at the Summer Palace.

The next and longest stop was Skagway on Wednesday. We decided to see what the weather was like before booking the train and I'm glad we did. Lots of low hanging clouds made for poor visibility above a few hundred feet. So we spent most of the day walking around Skagway and checking out some of the local museums & tourist traps. Read more