martincath

You're welcome, although I think it was entirely coincidental that my post in any way helped someone from your neck of the woods! For Seattlites, I'd recommend driving your own car across on the Black Ball for several days on the Island (transit around Vic, and to and from ferry/airport, is decent but everywhere else especially going town to town varies from god awful to "What is this transit you speak of? I do not know this word!" levels) and getting to the bits that cruisers and daytrippers never see. Compare and contrast Cathedral Grove with your own woods out on the peninsula, which I understand now have both Quiet Park and Dark Sky Preserve status in parts of Olympic NP, stormwatch or surf in Tofino (watch out for the beach wolves though - do not take that delicious-looking dog in your pic!), check out the roofgoats of Coombes, etc. etc. Or for a quicky Just Vic weekend, the Clipper from downtown to downtown has a stellar convenience factor!

^Yup, while the wedding photo lineup has dropped quite a bit at QEP thanks to the waterfall being turned off (we're trying to get it compliant with new rules about water re-use, so hopefully it returns soon - back in the day every summer visit I'd see a queue of wedding parties waitingf for their turn at the 'bride and groom in front of the waterfall' shot!) the resto, Seasons in the Park, is undoubtedly the most scenic resto patio view within the city being right up at the highest point of Vancouver. I always tell folks who ask this question the same thing - if you can fly in to YYJ instead of YVR (or out, post-cruise) then only having one full day in Vic might be worthwhile. If you're locked into your Vancouver flight/hotel/both, then the only way to actually get plenty of time at Butchart is an independent visit rather than a coach tour. Throw money at the problem for flights both ways and you can easily get a decent visit to the gardens, enough time downtown to do the museum, a gallery or shopping or whatnot, even a whalewatch within the same length of day as the day trips by bus/ferry which only give you 2 hours tops at Butchart. It's a helluva long day though, exhaustingly so - we did this on our first visit as tourists, enjoyed it at the time but it really wiped us out so we ended up having to cut back on planned Vancouver activities the next day so in hindsight, it was a bad move. Flight prices now are almost four times what we paid back then as Harbour Air have bought up all their competition and jacked up prices to match HeliJet, and flying offpeak times cripples a trip like this - you really need to be on the first and last flights, and that first one is often packed with business travelers heading to Vic for morning meetings as that's where oh so many of our provincial government departments, big unions, etc. have their HQs. If all you want to do is Butchart, taking public transit to and from the ferry makes for a cheap day, and you can stay much longer at Butchart than the day trip coach tours - $5pp for a day trip bus ticket on the Island, about $20 each way on the ferry as walk-ons (senior rates differ), transit costs on the mainland depend on day, time, age of traveler but worst case an Adult day pass is less than CAD$12. Still a 12 hour day, but you can have 4+ hours at Butchart. But personally I'd stay in Vancouver - while Butchart packages several excellent gardens on one site, they do charge a hefty fee for entry on top of the required travel time and expense. Unless you literally have Butchart on your bucket list and will never return to these parts (many RT Seattle cruises allow an easy Butchart visit for example), it's a waste of both your time and money. You can spend a fraction of the money visiting all of the great gardens in Vancouver, even if you take cabs between all of them, and fill every daylight hour with pretty plants right here. Free Rose Gardens at both UBC and Stanley (which also offers the Shakespeare and Rhododendron gardens among the more tree-filled parts of the park), VanDusen Botanic is even better than UBCs from a garden perspective (traditional English Hedge Maze, but UBC does have a better Arboretum with the Treewalk), you can save a buck or two with a combo ticket for VD and Bloedel (the rest of QEP is all free). Nitobe is an even better Japanese garden than the one at Butchart (which is the middle one of three designed by the same man, so it's not even the best one in Greater Victoria!) and you can take in a traditional tea ceremony at Nitobe if you time your visit right. Sun Yat-Sen is literally the best Chinese Scholar's garden anywhere outside Suzhou - it was completely constructed of traditional materials by Chinese master artisans using entirely traditional methods for Expo 86 and fully renovated just before Covid (still costs less than $20 with free docent tours to explain the ludicrous complexities of its construction!) Even the freebie park next door, which shares the Koi pond, is pretty damn nice despite being built inauthentically on the cheap. Anoither way to think about this - if you were visiting London, England would you even think for a second about visiting a site in France, Belgium, or the Netherlands for the day? If not, abandon Butchart plans, because whether flying or taking Eurostar you're looking at a similar logistical effort to do that as to get to Butchart for the day from Vancouver!

This question, like what to pack, always comes down to only one sensible response - always assume and pack for the worst, whether that means your preferred seasickness meds or ample layers of clothing. The odds are more in your favour of smooth waters going Inside, but there's no guarantees.

Try perusing the local tourism site. In terms of things to do here you can't easily do other places, visiting Khutzeymateen grizzly sanctuary ranks right up there - depending when/where you went in Alaska, you might already have seen plenty bears though!

Well, the rules on the DUI thing changed considerably for the worse between this thread's first go-around and your resurrection of it - in 2018 the DUI 'standard tariff' bumped up to include up to 10 years in prison making it now a Serious Crime by Canadian legal standards. While theoretically the date of your offence is taken into account - so at 13 years ago, you should be treated as if the rules in place back then were still in place, i.e. you can still benefit from being 'Deemed Rehabilitated' and all the discussion above applies including most relevantly 'will my DUI even show up during my immigration check?' Not a lawyer, don't even play one on TV, but the obvious new wrinkle from DUIs becoming Serious Crimes for a first-time visitor is that CBSA people are not perfect and any given officer might not know they should check the dates carefully if they see you 'ping' as having a DUI. Even if they do realise your case should be 'grandfathered in' as an older offences, being Deemed Rehabilitated is still entirely at their discretion! When the change first happened, I saw quite a few reports of folks who had been coming and going for years being turned away - and every one of them who tried to fight the system claiming 'you let me in before, you should have applied the old rules this time again!' got nowhere because Deemed is always a 'this time' discretionary entry... However, from the rare, anecdotal reports I've heard since the change nothing has changed in terms of 'common sense' being applied - if you have a flight booked back to the US that day, it's less paperwork and expense to the Canadian taxpayer if you are allowed to simply get yourself to that flight under your own recognizance,and since we share all of our border-crossing info with the US, verifying that you got on a plane that day is a simple matter. But if you are literally denied entry, sending you right back onto the ship would be the cheapest thing for us even if becomes very expensive for you. I think the exact same 'carrier' rules apply as with planes, so by bringing you here they have to take you away again if you're rejected but they can charge you through the nose for doing so! I see you're in Wisconsin, so if you're asking for yourself or someone else local, you could try taking a day trip to the Soo and asking to be assessed at the border - if you successfully get one 'Deemed Rehabilitated' note on your file there's a better chance future CBSA officers will say 'Good enough for Doug, good enough for me, eh?' and continue to allow you entry. And if you get rejected, even if there's a cruise already booked this season you might have time to apply for a TRP (~US$170) - there may not be time to apply for full criminal rehabilitation (~US$840) even if your cruise is next year.

You're welcome - and yes, you can buy a Day Pass at the ticket machines, and by doing so you also definitely avoid any chance of being hit with the $5 AddFare on the way back downtown... All travel is one Zone on Sundays, but a Day Pass costs the same regardless ($11.25, or $8.85 if you're over 65). Suggestion - consider visiting Queen Elizabeth Park on the way back into town, or maybe having dinner at Seasons in the Park there before heading out to the hotel again at the end of the night. The highest point in Vancouver, lovely views across the city (especially nice for a late sunset dinner), free gardens that are the closest thing to Butchart you can do without leaving the city. Get off at King Edward (less uphill walking than from 41st/Oakridge), and if the hill still looks too steep hop on a passing bus up Cambie.

'Easiest' is one of those loosey-goosey, everyone has their own definition terms that is genuinely hard to say without being a mind-reader... best guess is that it's either going to be: a) pre-book a limo with a meet & greet fee so the driver will wait in case you're delayed by e.g. a chat with CBSA because you're bringing walrus tusk souvenirs across the border without a CITES importation form, as this will never involve a long wait like the cab queue often can; or b) if you're mobile enough and don't have too much luggage, self-disembark with your own bags and take SkyTrain. The latter is reliably the fastest method (no traffic issues), requires no prebooking, and also has the lowest possiblity of anything going wrong - bags never leave your side, no chance they get put in the wrong place, no delays waiting in any queues at all, absolute worst case is that you just miss a departing train and have to wait for the next one... which might be 10-12 minutes on a weekend, but never worse than 7 on a weekday so is probably still faster than a car from the pier. It's definitely the cheapest, at no more than CAD$4.55pp, which makes it the very rare trifecta of fastest, cheapest, and best by most reasonable definitions. The only downside is if 'easiest' to you requires someone else to schlep your bags for you as much as possible - you can't get a porter to help you on and off the train! That's where the limo service kicks in - and unless you are a solo traveler, a limo may actually still be cheaper than cruiseline transfers (with 3+ people, guaranteed a limo is cheaper as well as faster and almost certainly easier to find than "Which of these six buses is the one for Red Two Group going directly to YVR at 9am, not on a City or North Shore tour first?")

While it's obviously best to always use the currency of the country you're in as a general rule, the hassle of exchanging funds locally is more than offset by the extra value provided you tip the same number of dollars - short of criminals who can't get a passport, every Canadian I know who lives within a couple of hours drive pops over at least now and again for Trader Joes, cheaper booze, Amazon Dot Com orders sent to a mailbox etc. so having to wait a while before spending your USD at face value to gain a ~33% premium, or cashing them in for a few points on the dollar at the currency exchange, is fine here in Vancouver for example. But if you do have both, it's certainly polite to ask! As to the shopping hours, while most of the 'Diamonds R Us' type shops run primarily for tourists will open when there's enough people around to make them big bucks, 6am is a real stretch even for them, especially with the hassles of recruiting folks in a post-Covid world for low-income, no-tipping, seasonal positions like a cashier. Always best to direct your funds toward actual locals anyway - I believe Tongass Trading opens 8-6 throughout cruise season, and while Ketchikan isn't huge you can easily kill an hour of two just wandering around checking out some of the local historic buildings (wiki list of those on the heritage register here) before things open.

Dunno how I missed this first time around! OP @Sea-n-Ease, my opinion on embarkation is consistently to do it as late as you possibly can. You can drop bags literally any time until they stop accepting them - the only difference is when you are too early, during the time when folks are still having things unloaded from the ship, the regular bag drop becomes a more casual 'longshoremen with a cage down in parking' affair. If this is one of the 'Royal Class ship arriving and leaving a bit late because of when low tide is' days, that does mean their Disembarkation will run later than normal, and Embarkation therefore start later for folks boarding that ship. For the folks on the other ship though, assuming those times are correct it can fit under Lions Gate more flexibly like almost every other ship based in Vancouver that isn't Royal class, so I expect a normal pattern - folks getting kicked off by 9:30 at the latest so the ship can be zeroed out. Honestly though, depending where you pulled those times from it could be a total non-factor because they're wrong - Princess are notoriously incapable of planning for tide times, every season we see the arrival and departure times of all the Royal class vessels start shifting, and sometimes even when they've finally remembered that the ships only fit under during a really tight window they still don't alter the whole season worth of data at the beginning but spread it out, giving folks notice a month ahead of time that they are actually sailing in and out at 3am not 5pm! There's literally one accurate place - the official timetable from the Port of Vancouver on this page - and even that isn't always accurate for Royal class on a future date unless it lists something unusual (any overnight visits, and arrivals/departures outside a 6am-6pm zone, are almost certainly corrected for tides - but anything inside that 6-6 period could simply be what Princess originally booked last year and haven't gotten around to checking tide timetables yet before revising!) Assuming your times are correct though, if you show up at 2pm there probably will be more people than usual at that time of day for the same total pax load just because ship 2 couldn't start boarding until later, but you'll still lose out on absolutely nothing onboard (there's never any exciting activities on embarkation day, and tax still applies in port so even if you have a booze package every drink'll cost ya something!), gain time in one of the best cities on the planet, and even if it takes you ~90mins to get onboard will still still have only spent basically the same amount of time waiting around as if you went straight to check-in at 10am! The only added risk by having a a fun half-day in Vancouver is if you do something silly, like being over on the North Shore at 1pm and expecting to get back to the pier for 2pm - yes, in theory those Capilano shuttles allocate a 30min drive time and in no traffic scenarios that's accurate, but with very limited route options even a minor slowdown on the bridge could cause serious problems. Even midday can see backups, because the bridge centre lane is dynamically controlled from ~9am to 3pm, so as soon as southbound cars threaten to cause backups on Highway 1 they flip the middle lane to southbound to clear them - while commuter hours are consistent, which way gets 2 lanes and which way just 1 can be a crapshoot in-between! So go do that right away if you're mad keen - if you are sensibly here for a pre-cruise night in a hotel, try dropping bags earlier, at 9am, and hopping right on the shuttle outside the pier, so you can be safely back downtown by noon. But if you don't have Cap on your bucket list, just stick to sensibly close by downtown attractions - FlyOverCanada is right on the pier, the Harbour Centre viewing tower a few minutes walk, the cobbled streets of Gastown start barely a quarter mile away. As long as you know that from where you are at 1:45pm you can walk to the pier in <15mins, as long as you don't walk into traffic your risk of missing the ship is perfectly well managed!

Love me a train ride, but I'm 100% with Bruce on this one - absolute minimum the day before on a long ride like that! Empire Builder was still only up to 64% on time as of last quarter, and on an almost 48hr ride which arrives barely in time for making a same-day cruise (11:29am on the current schedule), even three hours late and you are in serious danger of missing the boat! Transpo from King St to your hotel then on to the pier next day - cabs, Uber etc. if you use their apps are probably the simplest options to get people with typical cruise luggage where they're going. From a downtown core hotel to 66 you will likely find it cheapest and easiest to also use a cabuber to the ship next day; if you're out in an airport hotel though, one of the shuttles like Seattle Express might be a bit less if you're a couple rather than a big family.

In terms of advice, especially specific times, I'm not going to say 'definitely do X' because only you know your exact tolerance for queue-standing vs. panicking that you may not make your gate in time... but it sounds like rolling into the airport at 4:00am might be more your thing, especially if you insist on doing check-in old school. Using check-in-at-the-counter is extra risk, because at this stage even people who have zero clue and show up 5 hours early can be in the lineup! Until they get told that they can't proceed to bag drop yet there is no check to remove anyone from the system ahead of you even if they shouldn't be there, and unless you're flying first class or similar you can't do anything to reduce your time wasted at check-in by other people. Always check-in in advance (sign up for the Fairmont membership program before your arrival and you'll get free WiFi in your room; use the free airport WiFi; but given you're staying at the Fairmont I would simply visit the self-service kiosks the night before when you arrive at the hotel - as long as it's less than 24hrs you should have no problems checking-in and they print out proper sticky bag tags and paper boarding passes if you're the kind of person who likes those - personally I still prefer a paper pass, no worries about cellphone battery life!) Also, take the opportunity of your hotel location to wander the airport briefly the night before - check the signs, find bag drop, find where your gates are, minimise any confusion at oh-dark-hundred! By getting all that out of the way the day before, you can walk from your hotel straight to bag drop - personally I'd aim to leave the hotel by 4:30am here, so that you can make use of a T-90 YVR Express security slot just in case there's any kind of Security backlog. Even if you can't pick a time less than 90mins preflight, the 'slot' has official leeway of 15mins so if you choose a T-90 slot you can actually roll in at T-75 with no problem. Passing through Security in the 4:30-4:45 bracket, you will almost certainly still find a queue at CBP - but with doors open and folks already moving through. There are lots of kiosks, they're much more common in airports all over the world these days, so even factoring in a few first time users, folks who put their passports and boarding passes back in mom's purse, that sort of inefficiency, it's still a very short turnaround for each person so once the queue starts moving it does flow nicely. With NEXUS we do get a smaller queue for our trusted-traveler kiosks at CBP as well as at Security, but we walk right past the Regular Joes so have a decent idea how much busier that side is and it always looks smooth (they've had more than enough time to clear the backlog). Our preferred time to fly to the US is that first batch of 6/6:30am flights, and we roll in on the first SkyTrain of the day (5:09am - so a flight we need to check a bag for needs to be 6:30, to get to bag drop in time). We do have to hustle, but I'll take that over standing about in a queue for ages!

No problem - we just won back 'best North American airport' from Skytraxx after briefly losing it to Seattle, so it's safe to say once more that YVR is the least-worst airport on the continent of all time (we had like ten in a row until Covid!) so enjoy! As to the CBSA screening, yes, it's all about your Port of Entry so on this trip that means Victoria unless the weather is too rough to dock. You won't be aware of any immigration unless something pings on your file - pax manifests get submitted remotely in advance, we run the checks before you arrive, and anyone who's been naughty will be identified for a meet'n'greet with CBSA on arrival in port (announcements for passengers X,Y,Z to go to Location A - everyone else can just walk off). In terms of Customs, you will likely be issued a card in your cabin to complete and hand in aboard at least the day before the Victoria stop - again, if there's anything of concern on the cards those pax will be flagged for a chat with CBSA. So while it's possible you might see an officer or two at the pier on arrival in Vancouver, just in case anyone buys some expensive stuff aboard on the last night that they should be declaring, having completed both Immigration and Customs means you probably won't need to do any more paperwork.

You're confusing both the country of the agency concerned and the location! CBSA = Canadian border folks, who screen at the pier because most ships cruising in have arrived from US waters; CBP = US border folks, who prescreen US-bound flights at YVR starting at 4:30am (with a shift briefing, so no actual work for at least 10mins, and a huge queue of folks on those 6am, 7am, even 8am flights who have no idea about CBP hours so showed up to check-in only to find locked doors after they'd gone past Security... it usually takes until 5am to clear that first backlog, which is why I like taking the first SkyTrain - arriving 5:09am - to YVR for a flight before 7am)

Loads - basically any seafoody resto, any time of the year, as we have 7 different zones in BC with differing availability so there's almost always some around. If you want a resto that's very likely to have fresh seafood in general, try Fanny Bay Oysters near the central library. They've got their own boat for true 'tide to table' cusine as they term it, a Michelin Guide 'recommended' nod, are very convenient for most downtown core hotels, and will also sell you seafood To Go as they operate a marketplace as well as resto in the same location.

Gangway off the ship is a 'stacked ramp' job, no stairs; inside the terminal building you have elevators, escalators, and stairs that need used (you will not be allowed onto the escalator, or I believe the stairs, unless you have a hand free - staff guard the top for health & safety reasons). Elevator queues can get bad because every wheelchair and scooter user as well as folks with too many bags have to use them.