My wife and I just came back from an Alaskan Inside Passage trip on the Sun Princess out of Seattle, June 4th through June 11th, 2006. For the short, short version for those deciding whether or not this would be a good cruise: TAKE THIS CRUISE. BOOK IT NOW. The Sun Princess is great, but more importantly, you need to get yourself to Alaska. It's beautiful.

For a more specific, rather lengthy, rundown on the Sun Princess experience, plus insight into excellent yet rarely-taken shore excursions, read on. I intend to focus my review on a lot of things that I never found properly described in previous reviews of this cruise.

Some background: I've never cruised before, my wife has cruised three times exclusively with Royal Caribbean (Alaska, Western & Eastern Caribbean cruises). So everything I know about cruise ships is from her stories, and she's never been on a Princess ship before. We have, however, been to an all-inclusive resort (Sandals) before so some of the cruising concepts that normally blow first-timers away were not entirely foreign to me. Read more