Category: Travel Stories

Due to the magic of the Jones Act, it would be illegal for a German-built ship such as the magnificent Norwegian Joy to do an Alaska cruise from Seattle and stop only at U.S. ports, even if operated by a U.S.-based cruise line and staffed with an American crew. One perverse consequence of the Act is, therefore, that U.S. law requires all of the passengers to be unloaded at a Canadian port and spend their money in Canada rather than in the U.S. for at least one day. This turns the trip into an international one, which can legally be run in a foreign-made ship.

Victoria, British Columbia, is getting enormously rich as a conseqeunce of this 1920 law. We stopped there at the end of May 2026.

Walking toward town, Fishermen’s Wharf:

We summoned an Uber for the 30-minute drive to Butchart Gardens, created circa 1906 by the wife of a cement baron in his former limestone quarry and run today by the family.

There’s something for everyone here, including fountains, totem poles, restaurants, a carousel, etc.

The shocking price of $44/adult ($31 in USD; 10 years of supercharged immigration, more carefully selected for skills and education than immigrants to the U.S., has made the Canadian economy so strong that the exchange rate vs. the USD has collapsed) doesn’t keep the place from being crowded on a sunny Sunday. They sell a membership to locals and the gardens are dog-friendly so maybe that’s part of it, but most of the visitors seemed to be tourists. It was challenging at times to get through the rose garden.

It all started with a Japanese garden in 1906:

Why is it virtually impossible to buy stone lanterns in the U.S.? Here are some beautiful ones, including an unusual one that is made, perhaps, from concrete logs?

I asked ChatGPT “Why aren’t Japanese-style stone lanterns made in China and shipped to U.S. garden stores by container/truck and then sold at a reasonable cost?” Our AI overlord says that the wholesale cost in China might be around $100, but…(1) containers are weight-limited, (2) “Breakage and missing parts are a killer”, (3) the port-to-store or port-to-house shipping is going to be expensive for a heavy object, 4) #tariffs #blameTrump, (5) stone lanterns don’t sell fast enough for a garden center, (6) Americans are tasteless and will accept a cast concrete or “cast stone” substitute.

Japanese Style in North Carolina seems to bring in the real deal for $1,000-$2,500, but they weigh 300-650 lbs. and then shipping is ruinous on top of that.

Maybe Optimus can learn to make stone lanterns?

I don’t dream of the winter that makes these rhododendrons and Japanese maples possible, but they are beautiful in spring!

Inspiration:

What do you get when you mix some of the New Canadians’ food traditions with Legacy Canada? Butter chicken poutine ($26 in fake money):

Artur, an immigrant from Turkey, had taken us out to the gardens. Wasim, an immigrant from northern India, brought us back to downtown Victoria.

The fountain across from the British Columbia Parliament Buildings celebrates the provinces and territories of Canada, which won its independence without a traitorous rebellion, unlike some countries…

We didn’t invest in the guided tour of the provincial parliament since, among other things, the idea of the capital not being in Vancouver seems ridiculous.

The Empress, a railroad-built hotel, is reached by walking past a statute of Emily Carr, a Canadian artist and writer unknown to Americans. She is the perfect inspiration for today’s immigration enthusiasts since she never got married or had children (though she had a dog Billie and a pet monkey Woo). Certainly she’s been replaced many times over!

At the opposite edge of the hotel’s block:

A passion for history required that we visit Rogers’ Chocolates, founded in 1885 by a man born in Massachusetts. This particular store dates to 1903.

Next stop: Munro’s Books.

Readers can perhaps guess that I headed straight for the children’s section.

Back in the adult area:

Of course, the staff was masked as well as allergic to cinnamon (see above):

The historic Chinatown surely has some great food, but we’d already stocked up on poutine at the garden.

Puzzle Lab was our favorite store. Laser cutting the “jigsaw” wooden puzzles enables them to cost a fraction of what a Stave costs (What would I do if Elizabeth Warren would follow through on her promise to steal Elon Musk’s $1 trillion and then give it to me (the second part isn’t included in her promise, but it seems only fair)? Order a bunch of Stave puzzles, which are perhaps $3,500 each.).

As part of an outdoor visitor orientation map, the government-run museum acknowledges that it is on stolen land:

Thanks to the miracle of spectacular immigration-fueled population growth, the city will be approving the replacement of an unsightly light-hogging single-family home with a beautiful 6-story apartment building:

At the extreme western end of the Trans-Canada Highway, there is a Mile 0 sign and a poignant statue of Terry Fox who tried to push through his cancer and run the entire distance. He died at 22. “Dreams are made possible if you try.” Well, I guess that’s true when you consider what happens to those who don’t try.

Then a walk back to the ship with views of the Olympic Mountains across the water, most famously traversed by enricher Ahmed Ressam in 1999.

Was ChatGPT helpful in planning this stop?

With 8 AM–6 PM, don’t burn the day on Butchart Gardens unless you particularly want gardens; it is farther from the cruise port. For your family, I’d walk from Ogden Point along the breakwater/Dallas Road waterfront to Beacon Hill Park, then continue to the Inner Harbour, Parliament buildings, and back. Victoria Trails describes Ogden Point Breakwater as a walk near the cruise terminal with harbor and Strait views. Independent cruise guides estimate the Empress/Inner Harbour area at about 1.5 miles from the cruise dock, so this is very doable as a half-day walk.

No. Butchart Gardens is a work of genius. Downtown Victoria is reasonably nice, but crowded with tourists and not filled with important architecture. Buying 3 lbs. of chocolate at Rogers’ and then reading through a stack of 2SLGBTQQIA+ books at Munro’s would be delightful, but doesn’t fill an entire day. ChatGPT frightened us further in a follow-up by saying that we wouldn’t be able to get an Uber back from Butchart. We got one within about 3 minutes (Wasim was dropping someone else off).

Related:

• a tale of my 1993 visit to Victoria

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We stopped into Ketchikan, Alaska, our last port in the Great Land. The first thing I found was the MV Malaspina, an Alaska Marine Highway ferry launched in 1963 that I took in 1993. She’s a Jones Act survivor that remained in service through 2022. Her sister ship, MV Matanuska, was launched in 1962 and remains in service! Malaspina is used as seasonal housing now:

A former paper mill at the Ward Cove cruise facility has been turned into a massive souvenir mall:

Downtown was mobbed, as you might expect from 19,000 cruise ship passengers being unloaded into a town of about 8,000.

What used to happen on Creek Street (above right)?

Tired of cruise ship food? Here’s the line for lunch at 11:17 am. Keep in mind that all 19,000 tourists have been on unlimited 6 meals per day plus 24-hour room service.

Commercial fishing boats with the real money-makers behind them:

Walking for 20 minutes to the Totem Heritage Center, run by the city, gets one away from most of the cuise ship crowd. The museum reminds us that Native Americans are natural stewards and protectors of the environment from the rapacious white man. Curiously, when I was in Alaska in 1993 the clearcut forests on Native Corporation land was pointed out as a contrast to the National Forest, in which white administrators wouldn’t permit clearcutting.

There was quite a bit of fragmentation in the “late nineteenth century”:

White do-gooders today want young Native Alaskans to invest a huge amount of time and energy in learning their ancestral languages, now of no practical value:

I asked a local native what he thought about this. “It would be a lot better to learn Spanish or Chinese,” he said, “after learning English. Or maybe Arabic.” He pointed out that things were simpler in his youth when the white man wanted Indians to learn English and white culture. “There are so many immigrants from India, China, Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East, and God knows where else that, in addition to our native culture we have to learn about languages, religions, and cultures from 10 or 15 different countries just to get through a day in the U.S.”

Speaking of keeping traditions alive, the local salmon hatchery is still closed for coronapanic:

A short walk down a creek passes by the Trail of Tears, updated for the 21st century: Married Man’s Trail.

The second facility for the city museum welcomes visitors with a land acknowledgement and pilots with an E6-B.

The local bookstore is next door and is ready in case a Black or indigenous (Palestinian?) 2SLGBTQQIA+ customer comes in:

Meanwhile, the store features a work by John Muir, a renowned racist (“advocated for white supremacy and promoting the race through eugenics, which called for forced sterilization of Black people and other minority groups”) who founded an anti-immigrant organization (“From 1989 – 1996, the Sierra Club had a national policy to greatly limit immigration”).

The kindness section of town: “Saving one cat will not change the world, but for that one cat … the world will change forever.” (Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever, might adjust this slightly…)

The main shopping drag isn’t a bad place to prepare for Christmas:

It also works for hunting and gun nuts:

Back to our ship for the 1.5-day trip to Victoria, British Columbia:

What had ChatGPT recommended?

Norwegian uses Ward Cove, not the downtown Ketchikan docks. Ward Cove says the complimentary shuttle runs between Ward Cove and downtown Berth IV and takes about 20 minutes each way.

Do not assume Rainbird Trail is available. The Ketchikan Gateway Borough says Rainbird Trail is indefinitely closed because of the August 2024 landslide.

For a forest walk, I’d look at Ward Lake / Frog Pond instead. Ward Lake Trail is described as a mostly flat lake-circumference trail, wide gravel, with bridges over Ward Creek. AllTrails lists Ward Lake as a 1.5-mile loop near Ward Cove, generally easy, about 44 minutes. That means you could combine: Ward Cove → Ward Lake/Frog Pond area → shuttle downtown → Creek Street/totems → ship

This was useless advice. The trailhead suggested by ChatGPT is a 3-mile walk from the cruise dock along a main road and there aren’t rental cars available at Ward Cove. As it happens, the rest of the family enjoyed a fishing excursion in a 6-passenger boat (plus the captain’s two Australian shepherds). It was too early for salmon, but they caught some rockfish and then had a bbq on an island. I didn’t join because it would have been much sitting in an uncomfortable boat (spoiled by the Norwegian Joy!).

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Where did the Huna Tlingit Indians forced by Climate Change to evacuate Glacier Bay circa 1800 end up? Just across Icy Strait in Hoonah. Right next to their town, after salmon canning became unprofitable, they set up a theme park for cruise ships called “Icy Strait Point”:

What did our AI cruise director suggest?

Icy Strait Point has a built-for-cruise feel, but it is also one of the better places for whale watching or kayaking because the tour boats don’t have to spend a lot of time just reaching wildlife areas. The port’s official site emphasizes the old salmon cannery setting and excursions tied to the natural setting and local history.

For a no-excursion plan, do the Icy Strait Point Nature Trail, beach, cannery area, and maybe walk/ride into Hoonah. The Nature Trail is short—about 1.1 miles, easy, roughly 0.5–1 hour—so it won’t satisfy your “couple of hours in forest” goal by itself. If you want a more substantial activity here, this is a good port for a guided wilderness hike, kayak, or whale-watch rather than improvising deep woods, partly because Chichagof Island is serious bear country.

Here’s the overview map:

We bought tickets from the ship for the Sky Peak gondola, which rises 1,600′, and arrived in the middle of a cloud for a bilingual talk by a tribal elder (not Elizabeth Warren):

Was waiting in line for the gondola worth it? 100 percent! Where better to practice outdoor masking than on top of a mountain in Alaska?

Remember to have your coffee before getting off the ship. The line for the shack at the top of the gondola wasn’t pretty:

The trail to a long boardwalk carried some warnings:

Who wouldn’t be happy to be out in the fresh air with a 12-gauge shotgun? One of these guys was from Indiana(!) and now makes his year-round home in Hoonah:

Were the guns necessary? The guides/guards said that the bears were all down closer to the water because there was an ample food supply down there during the late May time of our visit. The bear-free boardwalk:

The weather cleared when we got back to the top of the gondola:

There was a 30-minute line to get onto a free gondola that saves a 20-minute walk into Hoonah:

Hoonah with multiple ships in port is at least as crowded as Manhattan and with comparable restaurant waiting times.

Instead of waiting in the line, we hoofed it back to our ship and ate lunch on board.

I enjoyed seeing Serenade of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean ship that was home for me and mom on my very first ocean cruise (Baltic 2016). She’s also a product of Meyer Werft.

For fans of the costs of government regulation, a Jones Act Alaskan Marine Highway ferry, M/V Hubbard. She was built in Alaska and took 17 years from being “envisioned” to completion, i.e., enough time for the Chinese to build a few cities and associated shipyards for Neopanamax container carriers. The cost might have been as high as $100 million, including crew quarters that were added, for this Ketchikan-built 5,000-ton vessel that carries 53 cars. With her sister ship, in other words, the cost was higher than what our Chinese brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters charge to build a Neopanamax container ship of 15,000 TEU capacity and 135,000 gross tons. Do the Chinese need 17 years? ChatGPT says closer to 1 year, though this can stretch to 3-4 years depending on the shipyard’s backlog.

If we returned to Icy Strait Point we’d book a whale watch.

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Previously in this space… Sitka, Alaska Public Library

Here’s a report on the rest of our late May 2026 visit, planned by ChatGPT:

Take the free shuttle from the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal into downtown; the terminal says its complimentary shuttle runs during port hours and averages about 10–15 minutes.

Then walk to Sitka National Historical Park. The NPS describes the park’s Totem Trail and Russian Memorial Loop as 1.6 miles total, through Sitka spruce/western hemlock rainforest, with vistas of Sitka Sound and the intertidal zone. Travel Alaska describes the Totem Trail as a mile-long path with 18 Tlingit and Haida totems, connected to the Battle of Sitka/Russian history.

This is the port where I would not book a standard bus tour. You can make an excellent day from shuttle + walking: downtown Sitka, St. Michael’s Cathedral exterior/interior if open, Totem Trail, beach/intertidal stops, and maybe the Alaska Raptor Center if the boys are interested.

Arrival:

Here’s Eurodam, capable of holding 2,000 passengers and looking like a personal yacht compared to Norwegian Joy:

Downtown includes a working marina:

As we walked toward ChatGPT’s suggested totem trial, it began to pour. We took shelter at a cost of $40 in the Sitka Sound Science Center, a one-room aquarium.

The aquarium maintains a full COVID-19 sub-site. Here’s my favorite page within the sub-site, “Thank you to the Sitka Assembly for supporting science” (September 28, 2021, a year after Ron DeSantis cruelly prevented local governments in Florida from enforcing mask orders (by banning fines)):

The page links to a bunch of papers, but not “Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery” (2015): “overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination”.

After the rain subsided, it was on to the National Historical Park.

It’s a beautiful forest, even with the totem poles:

The visitor center is crammed with humans, many likely infected with respiratory viruses. The ranger, however, is protected:

Next stop was the ChatGPT-suggested Raptor Center:

On the way back to town, we passed a public school building. Their COVID-19 war never ended:

We walked by a lot of humble houses with beautiful flower gardens. This one made me nostalgic for Maskachusetts:

It apparently is possible to grow tulips in Florida. The bulbs, about $1 each, need to be refrigerated for a few months and then planted as annuals in December or January. Everyone who holds stock in any company valued at more than 100X earnings should be required to plant tulips!

(It looks like tulipworld.com, fireflyfarmandmercantile.com, and menagerieflower.com sell pre-cooled bulbs for Floridians who lack extra fridge space due to (a) no basements, and (b) the spectacular inefficiency of high-cost built-in refrigerators.)

Sitka was the principal town of New Arkhangelsk, the site of the transfer of Alaska after Seward’s Folly, and then the capital of the Department of Alaska/District of Alaska until Juneau took over in 1906. The Russian heritage lives on in a beautiful cathedral:

The gift shops that branded themselves “Russian” are now tempering that with public support for Ukraine:

If you need to decorate a corner of your living room…

My favorite local business? Flipside Arcade. Here’s my Google review:

Perfect spot to spend a couple of hours if it is raining (i.e., more or less any time in Sitka). The owner, Scott, is plainly passionate about preserving America’s pinball legacy. Machines are generally priced at whatever they might have cost when new, e.g., 50 cents/game for 90s microprocessor-based machines. Maintenance is excellent. Photo below is of a new Stern SPIKE 3 Pokemon machine being delivered.

(Remarkably quiet inside, at least if you’ve been accustomed to cruise ship crowds!)

How did ChatGPT do? Poorly, in my opinion. I’ve asked it a bunch of pinball questions. It should have suggested the arcade as a rainy-day possibility. ChatGPT’s ideas were similar to the overview one might find in a paper guidebook.

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ChatGPT’s first cut at a day off the cruise ship in Skagway, Alaska (6:30 am-7 pm):

This is probably your most natural hiking day. Do Lower Dewey Lake in the morning; it’s a real forest/lake hike close to town and cruise piers, and multiple Alaska cruise hiking guides recommend it as one of the best port hikes in Skagway.

Then do the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park museum/historic district. The NPS says its Skagway historic-district walking tour is a 0.64-mile self-guided tour, and the visitor center/museum and restored Mascot Saloon are part of the park experience. This gives the boys context for the gold rush without sacrificing the active day.

Again, ChatGPT shied away from “overtouristing” by giving us a lightweight schedule. Pressed, it also recommended riding the White Pass railroad, which, as it happens, was a pioneer in containerization.

We ended up not doing the Lower Dewey Lake hike because the only time available for the railroad was mid-day, it took us a while to get organized in the morning, and the train ride took longer than expected due to a locomotive failure.

Walking towards downtown from the cruise pier:

Crossing the railroad tracks:

I remembered the town as sleepy when I visited in 1993. Here’s a photo from the absolute peak of the tourist season in 1993, July 25:

For comparison, May 2026 (well before peak tourism; looks like the weather improved, at least, thanks to Climate Change!):

Quite a few of the sidewalks were covered to Times Square densities:

Because it was Memorial Day, we used Google Maps to navigate to the “young men who left home and community to answer the call to help preserve peace and freedom in the world” plaque:

These men fought and died so that we could have Rainbow-first Retail and so that people could preferentially shop at stores that proclaim “women-owned” (because “Women have always been the primary victims of war.” (Hillary Clinton)):

If they hadn’t been killed in wars they could have come home to drink at a brewery under the sacred flag:

The National Park Service explains the alternatives facing the “Sourdoughs” prior to the railroad’s construction:

The gold rusher had to bring a minimum of one ton of supplies up these trails in order to get through Canadian immigration. Unlike today, where being helpless and in need of four generations of welfare enhances one’s admissibility as an immigrant to Canada or the U.S. (as a “refugee” or “asylum-seeker”), the Canadians at the time didn’t want anyone who was likely to become a dependent. Therefore, they inspect a miner’s luggage to make sure that he had at least one year of food.

The railroad promised to change all that, but it wasn’t finished until the gold rush was over (Wikipedia), but the investors still made money because there were other resources, including copper, silver, and lead, to be pulled out of the Yukon. Uncle Sam stepped in to save the railroad from the Depression by taking over the system during the construction of the Alaska Highway in WWII.

Passengers in the uncrowded Alaskan wilderness ready to get on…

The trip starts fairly flat.

At a few points it is possible to see Skagway and any cruise ships docked there:

We sat next to a Mexican real estate developer. He and his wife were big Trump supporters because they believe that Trump will help quash the cartels that compromise safety within Mexico. They do not like their progressive president, Claudia Sheinbaum, due to inefficiency, cronyism, and failure to deal with organized crime. Although not Jewish, they dislike Sheinbaum’s support for Hamas and frequent condemndation’s of Israel for “genocide” (exacerbated in Gaza by rapid population growth). “Even if she were right about Israel,” the Mexicans pointed out, “what does the Gaza war, or any war in the Middle East, have to do with Mexico and Mexico’s problems?”

Here’s a reconstructed border shack where the Canadian government used to try to make sure that immigrants could be self-sufficient:

After one of our locomotives failed, a train in front of us sent back one of its two to help us up the final steep ascent. Then we used our own single locomotive for the trip back down to Skagway. Have faith in timber:

The term “Gold Diggers” has a different meaning here than in the lower 48. From the downtown bookstore:

We decided that the kids weren’t ready for this:

A fun souvenir:

How did ChatGPT do? Fair. The railroad trip is more or less essential, in my opinion, despite the extra sitting time. It’s the only way to experience the reason that Skagway exists, i.e., getting through the pass. Furthermore, it has to be booked well in advance because the trains fill up. There isn’t enough to do in downtown Skagway, even with a hike, to fill up a whole day.

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Instead of reading guidebooks and working my feeble brain, I let ChatGPT do the planning for our shore time in the various ports that Norwegian Joy brought us to. I cut and pasted the itinerary, said that we preferred to just walk off the ship rather than get into some other form of transport, and that we wanted to be active. ChatGPT’s first idea for a 1:30-10 pm stop:

Option A: Mendenhall Glacier + Nugget Falls. This is the safest family bet: transit/taxi/shuttle to Mendenhall, walk Nugget Falls, then return to town. The Forest Service notes that trails such as Nugget Falls, East Glacier, Trail of Time, Moraine Ecology, and Dredge Lakes do not require a fee just to hike, though some visitor-center areas do.

Option B: Mount Roberts Tram + hike from the top. This is closer to your ideal: the tram is right by the cruise docks, and Travel Juneau describes Mount Roberts Trail as 2 miles/1.5 hours to the Mountain House, 4.5 miles/4 hours to the summit, with the option to ride the tram up and hike from there. For kids, I’d ride up, hike toward Father Brown’s Cross or farther only as conditions allow, then tram down.

A caution: I would not push Mount Roberts hard in fog/rain or near dusk with kids. There were fatal cruise-passenger hiking incidents in the mountains above Juneau in 2025, including hikers who apparently left the actual trail in wet/foggy conditions.

ChatGPT was helpful in clarifying that the Mendenhall Glacier can’t be reached on foot from downtown Juneau and that Ubers aren’t easy to obtain. I ended up manually refining the above to include (1) a rental car from the cruise pier area, (2) eliminating the Mount Roberts Tram, which was down for maintenance, and (3) adding the National Shrine of St. Thérèse (because we had the car).

Some photos as we approached Juneau for our 1:30 pm disembarkation, highlighting the absurd mismatch between the ship’s waterslides and pools and the 50-degree cloudy windy weather.

Approaching the town (note the two other ships already docked):

AVIS has apparently had some issues with previous renters…

We got a Chevy Bolt and suffered zero range anxiety because… Juneau isn’t connected to any road network. AVIS rents nothing but EVs in this location. No need to worry about charging either because they tell you up front that you’ll pay $25 extra to recharge.

Here’s the total:

Quite a few services in Alaska are about 2X the price you’d pay in the Lower 48, so $254 for half a day of car rental isn’t terrible. It would have cost more to book a bus tour for four people out to the glacier and we wouldn’t have had any flexiblity.

First stop, the Mendenhall Glacier. Cropped just right, it looks like an uncrowded wilderness, right?

In reality, the parking lot was overflowing and the trail to Nuggel Falls was about as crowded as a Manhattan sidewalk.

The trail to the falls has some nice rainforest:

The falls per se is where you see that Fred Meyer was having a sale on humans:

If you could tolerate more sitting in a boat, this might be the way to do it:

From the walk back:

On to National Shrine of St. Thérèse (Wikipedia), a 30-minute drive away. Due to a fresh breeze coming off the water, this was much colder than the area around the glacier.

Something you might not see in Massachusetts, “This Memorial is Deduciated to the Victims of Abortion”:

The stations of the cross are depicted:

Note how bundled up against the wind everyone is:

One of the kids had a wardrobe malfunction at the waterfall so we stopped at Fred Meyer and found this awesome shirt:

Prices at the one and only McDonald’s in Southeast Alaska weren’t terrible, but adding a Denali Mac to the cruise ship diet was a sandwich too far.

Back in downtown Juneau…. here’s Seward, the man who made us masters of this domain, looking none too happy about the purchase:

Nice doggie:

The gift shops included my dream Christmas tree and a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag:

The gift shop that was celebrating our 2SLGBTQQIA+ brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters with the flag out front also displayed quite a few dead animals inside:

Totem poles are everywhere, despite the fact that it was really natives much farther south who were passionate about this art form.

The last photo:

How well did ChatGPT do? In fairness, I didn’t say “I found a rental car” and then ask it to update the plan. I think it was too conservative about how much can be comfortably packed into a 9-hour block.

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A walk through the Hoh Rain Forest, part of Olympic National Park, starts with a pool that looks like something the late great Takashi Amano might have designed (see Summer travel idea: the public aquarium in Lisbon to see the Takashi Amano show and Return trip to the world’s best public aquarium (in Lisbon)):

It happened to be what passes for “sunny” in this part of the country on the day that we visited, which isn’t ideal for atmosphere:

The iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t do the best job at managing the contrast and capture the experience:

They make a big deal out of this banana slug, a victim of iPhone overexposure (I don’t know of a convenient way to tell the iPhone “make all of the photos for the next hour subject to -0.7 f-stops of exposure compensation; probably this would have been a good time to use a third party camera app):

Getting to this part of the Park requires a two-hour wait in a traffic line to get in on busy days. Because the entrance fee is essentially zero ($80 for an annual pass that covers an entire carload of humans), the NPS doesn’t have the cash to accomplish the basics, e.g., repair a broken water fountain that the rangers said hadn’t worked for months. If they’d added a $10 per person crowd-control surcharge and the number of visitors fell by 5 percent as a result, that would have given them over $600,000 to fix the water fountain, almost enough even at California High-speed Rail levels of efficiency.

Practical tip: There is a good burger place, Hard Rain Cafe, on the way into the park. It would be nice if they cranked up the burger prices by enough to pay for real bathrooms, though, instead of Graham Platner-style portapotties.

What if you don’t want to deal with a two-hour sit in your rental car, various bathroom emergencies, etc.? There is a similar rainforest roughly an hour’s drive to the south: the Quinault Rain Forest. It’s part of the National Forest.

Because the U.S. Forest Service has decided to charge almost nothing, just like the National Park Service, they can’t do maintenance. Here’s a bench in the middle of this old growth forest that is probably worth $10 million:

Another example:

There’s a nice lodge (with some masked staff members), but we didn’t eat there:

A few miles up the road is the world’s largest Sitka Spruce tree. The trail there includes “Free Palestine” and “Land Back” messages:

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A report based on an end-of-May 2026 trip on Norwegian Joy out of Seattle. This report will cover the on-ship environment and I’ll do separate posts for the ports.

We picked this particular cruise because it was one of a handful that visited Glacier Bay and that went round-trip rather than requiring a multi-leg air journey back from Anchorage. As an added bonus, the trip departed Seattle (no need to deal with airport immigration/customs chaos) rather than Vancouver.

Our itinerary:

Cautions that apply to any Southeast Alaska cruise…

The typical cruise ship is designed for the Caribbean and nearly half of her public space will be outdoors. Especially if traveling early or late in the season, these areas will be considered unusable by most passengers and, therefore, the interior public spaces will be more crowded than on a Caribbean trip. We traveled toward the end of the coldest Alaska winter in 50 years and it was still about 10 degrees colder than typical. The outside spaces got little use except when near Seattle/Victoria.

Modern cruise ships are a too big to fit comfortably through the traditional “inside passage” routes. Here’s the Alaska Marine Highway System route:

Furthermore, the cruise lines probably wouldn’t want to pay for a Canadian pilot to be on board for roughly 3 days of any round-trip. Thus, the cruise ships do most of their “Inside Passage” travel outside of the protection of Vancouver Island, for example, and the Pacific can throw much bigger waves at a boat than the Caribbean typically does. If you are prone to seasickness, consider a cabin on a lower deck and close to the center of the boat. These have the advantage of being some of the cheapest cabins on a cruise ship. If you’re determined to splash out on a high forward cabin, just be prepared for your food to also splash out!

Finally, expect the ports to be crowded. A town of 8,000 or 10,000 might receive nearly 20,000 cruise ship passengers on a typical summer day. All of the “downtown” sidewalks are going to be at least as packed as Manhattan sidewalks (not Times Square on a Friday night, but more crowded than an average Manhattan sidewalk). If you want to experience these towns as an Alaskan might, you’ll need to go before or after cruise season and/or do it via air/hotel. If you’re there in June, for example, there is enough light to do a lot of activities after the cruise ships cast off (typically 6-8 pm). This is not to say that the whole idea of Alaska+cruise ship is dumb. A sizable Alaskan town might have only one or two decent hotels and restaurants. The situation is better than when I visited in 1993, but a Hampton Inn-grade hotel remains a rarity. The cruise ship is the only practical means of supporting significant tourism because the hotel and restaurant arrives with the passengers.

Back to our specific cruise. Norwegian Joy was launched by Meyer Werft in 2017 and holds about 3,500 passengers. It lacks an all-the-way-around walking/jogging track and purports to make up for that with elaborate water slides and an electric go-kart track. None of the “wow” items are useful in the cold. Some experts might say that the ship was designed for ants and needs to be at least three times larger:

Here’s a view from above at Icy Strait Point:

It was warm enough on departure from Seattle that some kids were actually using the main pool:

Consistent with other cruise ships, the hot tubs aren’t actually hot. Instead of the 102-104 that a homeowner might set a backyard tub to, the cruise lines are perhaps setting the tubs to 98 so that a guest can sit in the tub for five hours while consuming 10 alcoholic drinks and not suffer any ill effects. The dream of a hot soak while the Alaska scenery scrolls by must remain a dream.

Buffet

More efficient than Royal Caribbean or Celebrity, e.g., with multiple omelette stations at breakfast so as to reduce queuing, but less variety and somewhat lower quality than Royal Caribbean (much lower than on Celebrity). The Indian section is mostly vegetarian for what that’s worth. Despite a high percentage of Filipinos among the crew, there is no Filipino section. Our 10-year-old liked to sneak down to the buffet and get crepes with Nutella.

The Haven

Norwegian lets you buy your way out of much of the noise and congestion by signing up for The Haven. This has its own spectacular lounge looking out the bow from the 17th floor:

We had a two-bedroom family room that was comfortable for a family of four and came with a “butler” whom we seldom used. Our master bathroom:

The Haven has its own restaurant, which turned out to be the best on the ship (see below regarding the specialty dining options), though they didn’t begin to vary the menu until the last couple of days of the journey. Maybe it is for the best from a waistline point of view, but the bakers weren’t capable of making a decent croissant or danish even for Haven guests. Remarkably, however, they did make some good fruit tarts with custard for the lounge. (It is possible to make a good croissant on a cruise ship because Celebrity does it!) Donuts were terrible, below the standard of a supermarket donut.

The Haven has its own sundeck on Deck 19. It is theoretically limited to guests 16 and older, but on an Alaska cruise there aren’t enough people up there for anyone to want to bother enforcing the rule.

The Haven has its own solarium with pool and not-very-hot hot tub:

The Haven concierges would organize escorts on and off the ship and make use of crew-only elevators to eliminate delays at peak times.

Was the Haven worth it? I would happily go on Celebrity again in peasant class, would willington go on Royal Caribbean non-suite, but I wouldn’t travel on Norwegian except in the Haven (about 2X the cost of a standard balcony room for a comparable-size cabin).

Specialty Restaurants

Most of these are $60 per adult as a supplement to a regular cruise fare.

Le Bistro: the 12-year-old enjoyed les escargots; the 10-year-old refused to “take one for the team”. Pretty good overall, though the baguette wasn’t truly crusty. The desserts were interesting.’

Teppanyaki: our chef, Kurian, was Filipino and a great performer. Food quality comparable to what you’d get at a good “hibachi” place in the U.S., but a more entertaining experience. “These shrimp are from Maine,” our chef proclaimed. “… the Main Dining Room.”

Q Smoke House: Imagine H-E-B supermarket BBQ… then subtract three levels of quality. Nice people, both kinds of music (country and western), fun decor, but apparently the inability to operate a real smoker is fatal to food quality.

Cagney’s Steakhouse: they can’t use a gas grill and they apparently don’t want to use a cast iron pan on an induction burner. Consequently, the steaks had no crust and were a bit soggy. The lamb was overly salted. The Prime Rib would probably be the smart choice since it doesn’t need a crust. The desserts were terrible, e.g., an obscenely huge chocolate cake that room service also delivers and a raspberry crème brûlée that was absurdly over-flavored with raspberry. Ice cream at the buffet would be a better choice.

Entertainment

Performances were weak compared to either Royal Caribbean or Celebrity. Singers and dancers were talented, of course, but they weren’t backed up by a live orchestra. The most popular performers on the ship turned out to be a Beatles tribute band (awesome period costumes).

Life on board

Internet: Starlink and much higher bandwidth than what Celebrity delivers. WiFi coverage was excellent throughout the ship.

Laundry: After a few days, Norwegian offers a $40/bag wash/fold service. Unlike other cruise lines, however, they bounce the laundry back to you if you don’t laboriously count what you’ve stuffed into the bag. The “bounce” took 24 hours.

Gym: Big and well-equipped, but not at the bow like some cruise ships have and, therefore, not inspiring.

Coronapanic has degraded cruise ship life, according to our cabin steward. Where Norwegian previously assigned one steward per 16 non-suite cabins, after the post-COVID restart the number is 22-24. Guests who previously received two services per day are now cut back to one. Haven guests receive two services per day, but the first cleaning might not happen until after noon. My memory of Royal Caribbean and Celebrity was that the cabin attendant quietly kept track of our whereabouts and would dart into our room 3-4 times per day so as to undo whatever chaos we had created. In the Haven, by contrast, our cabin cleaner was a nice guy but he cleaned on his schedule rather than on ours. Consequently, we were often in the room when it was time for him to clean or do the turn-down.

Some folded-towel art from Ceasar:

What to Pack

Pack some decent binoculars because it is possible to see otters, whales, seals, and other interesting animals from various open decks and even one’s balcony. What’s “decent”? Nikon Monarch M5 8×42 is the cheapest reasonable binocular. You don’t want more than 8X magnification because the ship+your hands aren’t that steady. The M7 costs more and has a wider field of view, useful when searching for whale spouts. The Zeiss Conquest HDX 8×42 is twice the cost of the Nikon M7, has a slightly narrower field of view, and is perhaps worth the money if you love high quality optics. (Confusing, the Japanese-brand binoculars are supposedly made in China while the German-brand binoculars are, according to our AI overlords, made in Japan.)

Pack a European-to-US plug converter because half of the outlets in the room won’t be usable for Americans. Norwegian won’t lend out or sell converters on board because they’ve discovered that Americans aren’t smart enough to understand voltage and whether a device has a switching power supply. To avoid explosions and fires from people plugging 115V-only gear into a 230V outlet they try to prevent this mechanically.

Do you need to see Glacier Bay?

Should you pick a ship/cruise around the requirement of seeing Glacier Bay? It’s useful for crossing the National Park off your life list, but mostly… no. Cruise ships are so large that they can’t get close to the wildlife that perhaps thrives in the National Park relative to some other parts of Southeast Alaska. There are plenty of alternative glaciers that aren’t national parks that are still beautiful. If you are serious about experiencing Glacier Bay it is probably better to fly to Gustavus and do a day cruise into the park on a smaller boat.

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My last visit to Ruby Beach and the western side of Olympic National Park was 1993 and is described in Chapter XIII of Travels with Samantha.

Ruby Beach is the traditional headline attraction for this part of the park:

Due to the government’s refusal to charge market prices (see What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices?), the beach is crowded and the facilities, in this case outhouses without running water, are grossly undersized for the number of visitors. We were there well before peak season and look at the line:

The beach is dog-friendly, though!

Kids love the tide pools here:

Imaginatively named “Beach 4”, however, had a larger and sadder animal-related sight: two dead whales, one a baby humpback and one a young gray whale. A worker at Kalaloch Lodge blamed Donald Trump for the whales’ deaths. How did Trump kill the whales? By authorizing increased ground fishing, e.g., for halibut, which she said interfered somehow with the density of the food that these whales like to eat. ChatGPT:

What she has right: gray whales are bottom feeders. They eat seafloor invertebrates, including amphipods, by scooping/sucking sediment, and bottom-contact fishing gear can damage some seafloor habitats. NOAA describes gray whales as primarily bottom feeders eating benthic and epibenthic invertebrates such as amphipods.

Where the claim likely breaks down: the major NOAA explanation for the recent gray-whale starvation/mortality problem is not “more groundfishing,” but localized ecosystem changes affecting access to and quality of prey in the northern Bering and Chukchi seas. NOAA says those prey changes caused poor nutritional condition, more deaths during migration, and fewer calves.

The “Trump allowed more fishing” story that is in the news mostly concerns opening Pacific remote island marine monument waters to commercial fishing, far southwest of Hawaii, and a broader deregulatory push. That area/policy is not the northern Bering/Chukchi gray-whale feeding ground, nor the Olympic coast. A federal judge later blocked the Pacific monument rollback, according to 2025 reporting.

Also, the key Alaska/Bering Sea bottom-trawl habitat regime was not newly created by Trump. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council says Bering Sea measures adopted in 2007 and implemented in 2008 “froze the footprint” of bottom trawling and created major trawl-closure areas, including around St. Matthew Island, St. Lawrence Island, and Nunivak/Etolin/Kuskokwim Bay. On the West Coast, NOAA says the groundfish plan has long included habitat protections, including more than 100,000 square miles closed to bottom trawling or all bottom-contacting gears since the 2006 Amendment 19 action.

Regardless of who killed them, the poor animals ended up as backdrops for tourist phone images:

(If Greta Thunberg were still interested in climate change, rather than Gaza, she might be interested to learn that ChatGPT says “Arctic warming → less/changed sea ice → less high-quality bottom-dwelling prey for gray whales → malnutrition during migration” is a plausible explanation.)

This beach also has some great tide pools:

Our base was a cabin in the Kalaloch Lodge, somewhat rustic but the having a kitchen was awesome. Be sure to stock way up on groceries before heading here, though, because the on-site store has a limited selection. The restaurant is reasonably good, but all of these remote places struggle with the fact that the American workforce no longer contains a significant number of people willing to travel to a seasonal job, even if that job is in the middle of a world-class national park.

The weather, mid-50s in early June, was perfect for this Pitbull of the Oberland (Bernese Mountain Dog):

The woods on the other side of the road have some hiking trails.

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