In Venice, the locals are talking about charging cruise passengers a head tax for visiting Italy’s pretty and most unique city. We realize it’s on the other side of the world but…have they heard of Alaska? Here’s the problem…or the first one anyway: The astounding growth of cruise ships visiting Venice is becoming an environmental [...]
Our cruise blog teammate Phil Reimer, who has been writing about ships and ports and the eateries and people on both, has spent this week on the Carnival Liberty. His impressions are posted daily on his cruise blog, portsandbows.com. The Liberty is the first Carnival ship to go 2.0. In Celebrity’s world, this is called [...]
What’s in a name? If the name is DreamWorks, just split it. The “Dream”…”Works.” As far as Royal Caribbean cruise ships are, it sure does. Last week, Shrek and Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda expanded their families. Or maybe Royal Caribbean expanded its family. The first time the famous DreamWorks characters appeared on a cruise [...]
When a ship arrives carrying our friend and Ports and Bows colleague Phil Reimer, we know where you’ll find him. An early riser, Phil likes to be first off the ship…if possible. As for us, not to much. We’d be quite happy — unless there is an urgent travel commitment we have to keep — [...]
As custodian of the most regal of all ships in the cruising community for 50 years or more, Cunard has always more or less played by its own rules. It is, after all, British and nobody tells the Brits they have to fall in line by doing this or doing that. So when Cunard announced [...]
DENALI, Alaska — Passengers on Princess cruise ships have three choices when it comes to seeing the Denali National Park. You can spend 4 hours riding a school bus, 8 hours riding a school bus or 13 hours riding a school bus. Now, in case you think that sounds like torture worse than being punished [...]
DENALI, Alaska — It’s true that landing on a glacier that’s part of North America’s highest mountain leaves you speechless. Finding the words to describe it is just as difficult so if this is the shortest blog you’ve ever seen on this site, you’ll know why. Actually, the pictures do tell the story. The eight [...]
ALASKA — It’s been sitting there for 4,000 years or so, since the last Ice Age. It doesn’t move, except for a jiggle here and there from the 800 or so earthquakes there are in Alaska every year. At 20,320 feet, it is the highest mountain in North America. Yet Mount McKinley is treated as [...]
ON THE CORAL PRINCESS — Her name is Boujke Bijlsma and one morning at 6 a.m. she was sitting in her office on the Coral Princess. She looked out the window onto the waters of Alaska and there, swimming furiously, was a moose. She watched for a few seconds, then turned back to her deskwork. [...]
TALKEETNA, Alaska — Until now, Iditarod was a word that we always found difficult to spell and harder to say, but that was before we had a hand in training the dogs that run 1,049 miles in temperatures of minus 60 degrees. Yes, indeed, better them than us. So when the first Sunday in March [...]