Travel to Alaska with kids
Fifteen years since we first talked about going to Alaska one day, that day finally arrived!
Choosing to travel to Alaska however was the easy part. It was much harder to decide how to travel and what to visit. After a ton of research, we found that there’s really no bad way to visit Alaska. It’s like taking a bad picture of Alaska..there is no such thing!
So we decided to take the one way northbound cruise from Vancouver to Seward as we were travelling with some friends and at least a few from the group had plans to travel on to Denali.
We flew to Vancouver two days before the cruise to give us a day to visit the city. One day, of course, is nowhere near the amount of time we would want to take to really soak in the pacific north west..but it was enough to give us a taste of the city and enough slack to be comfortable that neither we nor our bags would miss the boarding to the cruise!
Boarding the Norwegian Jewel took about 90 minutes and off we went on our first ever cruise. It was smooth sailing for pretty much the entire trip. We had a day at sea, then three ports in a row, Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway. Those were followed by two more days at sea through the Inside Passage as we cruised the Glacier Bay and Hubbard glacier. The port of disembarkation was Seward, Alaska.
Ketchikan is known as the salmon capital of the world. Visiting around the second week of July will give visitors a chance to see the salmon run up the Creek Street at the center of the town. Juneau is just as famous for king crab and a fantastic restaurant called Tracy’s Crab Shack near the port. It is even more famous for Mendenhall Glacier, about 30 min of bus ride from the port.
Skagway has a ton of things to offer, the gold rush history, the historic white pass mountain train, proximity and acceptability to British Columbia, and many other tours and excursions.
The two days at sea seemed a little long, but the glimpse of our first glacier, Marjorie Glacier in the Glacier Bay National Park was worth it! There is something very elemental about seeing these giant sheets of ice moving forward, crushing everything in their way. The ice and the surroundings are pristine, not a speck of man made debris in sight, just pure nature.
We visited a couple of glaciers in the Glacier Bay and the beautiful Hubbard Glacier the next day. The pictures and words just don’t do them any justice!
Our cruise finally came to an end on the 7th day and we disembarked early in the morning in Seward, Alaska to make our tour to Kenai National Fjord Park. It turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip; we finally got to see the marine wildlife we had come to see.
We got to see puffins, harbor seals, a pod of humpback whales, sea otters and many other animals. We got very close to two more glaciers, got to try a glacier ice margarita! 🙂
After a full day at the Kenai Fjord National Park, we head to Anchorage on the Alaska Railroad. It was a beautiful train ride going past the beautiful mountains, glaciers, rivers and valleys.
Spent the last day driving around Anchorage, visiting the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and hiking at the Kincaid Park. Soon enough, our Alaska trip was over, we went home with our hearts full and hopes of coming back someday!
