Phil Reimer
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 [...]
KENAI, Alaska — The three bears, said the young man from the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, are called Hugo, JB and Petrone. In a strange quirk of giving bears names, Hugo is female while JB and Petrone are male. Their names do indeed have something to do with alcoholic beverages. And why is a female [...]
For months, we’ve been hearing about how European countries are on the verge of bankruptcy…first Greece, then Ireland, Spain, Portugal and even Italy. While it’s not exactly a bailout, cruising is giving Spain a shot in the arm, at least this week. Last Saturday, eight cruise ships delivered 31,000 passengers to Barcelona. This weekend, nine [...]
It’s time for some “new ship” announcements…Carnival is adding three but none will have the familiar funnel design…The newbies are going to less familiar members of the Carnival family — Costa and AIDA, the latter a little-known branch of the family residing in Germany…Costa will get a 3,700-passenger ship in 2014, its 17th and largest [...]
There’s an old joke Down Under. You know the difference between an Australian and a canoe? A canoe tips. That’s the basis for the battle brewing in Australia’s cruise industry. To tip or not to tip. It is not customary there, it is not expected and generally it is not practiced. In fact, a “tip” [...]
Continue reading about Tip for Celebrity an Aussie Challenge
Everywhere we go in the cruise world, one thing never changes. Somebody mentions Carnival, and somebody else says Party. They are two words that go together like smoked and salmon. Like Face and Book. Will and Kate. Baton and Rouge. But life as we know it at Carnival is changing. Word leaked out of its [...]