We cruised to Alaska on the Diamond Princess from Vancouver to Anchorage in late June 2013 with our two adult children. We booked the week before when we finally started thinking of a way to celebrate our 35th anniversary and found some fabulous cruise discounts.
Embarkation: Much easier than our previous two cruises. We arrived at the Vancouver port at 11:00 a.m. and dropped off our luggage without any line or waiting. Rather than wait around to board, we walked around the Vancouver Pier area and did some sightseeing. There was a free historical multi-media presentation on one of the piers about the War of 1812. It was very well done and especially interesting because it was from the perspective of the “other side” - Canada was a colony of Britain at that time.
We decided to board around 1:00 p.m. By that time there was a line and it took us about 30 minutes before we got through all the staging points. The line included passengers boarding a Holland American Line ship – after the customs check, the HAL passengers went to their cruise check-in and Princess passengers to ours.