Alaska Summer Solstice Cruise - Sea Day

Cruise Day 9

Monday, June 17, 2024

We’ve been very busy the last few days so today is a welcome sea day.  After our early morning yesterday, we indulged ourselves and slept in today, but we couldn’t sleep too late as we wanted to attend a lecture at ten.

After getting ready and having breakfast in the Neptune Lounge, it was nearly ten, so we headed directly to the World Stage for a lecture from Kurt on Alaska’s role in World War II.  The talk was very interesting as we had no idea of how involved Alaska was in the war, especially in the Aleutians as two of the islands were occupied by the Japanese and it took fierce fighting to get the islands back.  My dad was in the Navy and served as a radioman on Adak Island at the southern end of the Aleutians nearly 1400 miles south of Anchorage.  He made rather light of it; I had no idea he was part of the action.

After the lecture it was back to our room where I brought the blog up to date and Val took care of some more escrow stuff on her sister’s house.  She also verified some information for several of our upcoming private tours.  By the time we finished it was time for lunch and we were hungry.

After lunch we relaxed and read for a bit in our room as the weather outside was cold, overcast and rainy.  There was a talk late in the afternoon about Dutch Harbor and Nome that included a question-and-answer period that we attended.  The talk was OK, but over the last few years, Holland America has merged the Port Guide position into the Cruise Director’s job and in our minds, that just doesn’t work very well.

Our Grand Africa Cruise was the exception as our cruise director was a former port guide and very knowledgeable, but since then the results have been less than satisfactory.  Her talk this afternoon showed that our cruise director really hadn’t done her homework and only had superficial knowledge of the ports and some in the audience had more information than she did based on some research they did.  I suspect this wasn’t really the fault of the cruise director as they have a lot of responsibilities and may not have time to really do much research on the ports.  Hopefully Holland America will remedy this in the future, but I doubt it.

Afterwards, Val and I looked at our pictures from Valdez and then relaxed until dinner.  We had another good dinner tonight and I have to say that the food has been very good so far.  Holland America started a program for their Alaskan cruises where they emphasized fresh, locally procured fish and I have to say they have really done it.  All the fish we have had so far has been very good, particularly the salmon.  It was another short night for me in the casino as my losing streak continues.

Tomorrow we’ll be in Dutch Harbor but won’t arrive until noon, so we’ll have no reason to get up early, I like these late arrivals.