Around Christmas of 2004, as we began to plan our 2005 vacations, John announced that he wanted to do something special for our anniversary.  At first, he refused to give me any details, as he still needed to work out a few things first, but soon enough, he revealed his surprise.

We were going to take a cruise for our anniversary...and we were going alone, without Mary!  She was going to spend a week with her grandparents, Bill and Erika, so that John and I could get a sort of second honeymoon.

The question was: where should we go?  Naturally, our first choice for a cruise was to go to Alaska, but as we began to price the different cruises, we found that Alaska was just a bit out of our price range.  Caribbean cruises were much more affordable, so we priced a few of them and waited.

When it came time to book our cruise, in late April, we were surprised to find that those affordable Caribbean cruises were now out of our price range - in fact, the one that we wanted to take had almost doubled in price!  Out of curiosity, we went back to the Alaskan cruises to compare the prices, and we were excited to find that the cost had dropped dramatically.  By the end of the afternoon, we were booked on a 7-day Alaska Cruise - the Glacier Discovery Cruise, on Holland America Line's ms Ryndam, embarking on July 17, 2005 out of Seward, AK, and arriving in Vancouver, British Columbia, on July 24.

Soon, as our cruise documents began arriving, we had airline tickets to take us from Phoenix to Anchorage (returning via Vancouver), and we had tickets for the motor coach to take us from Anchorage to the port in Seward.  We also had shore excursions booked  for our three stops during the cruise: in Sitka, Juneau, and Ketchikan.  As the day of our cruise approached, we were starting to get very excited...and with temperatures in the 110's in Phoenix, we couldn't wait to get out of the heat!

Click on the links below to read about our adventures in Alaska - The Last Frontier.

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