Radiance Alaska Review (WITH LOTS OF PHOTOS)

Hi everyone,

I will start with a disclaimer: I am not a travel writer, nor am I a cruise expert. I will do my best to review my cruise but will use lots of photos to explain my points. A picture is worth a thousand words I guess.

I had only been on one cruise before this one, and it happened to be on the same ship, the Radiance. It was a South Pacific cruise out of Sydney over New Years, while this review relates to a Northbound Alaska cruise out of Vancouver, so VERY different cruise experiences.

I will start by telling you all a little about myself and fellow cruisers.

My name is Daniel, and this holiday was with my family as a 40th birthday celebration for me. I have three kids. A Daughter of 12 (going on 21), a son of 10 and a daughter a couple of months short of her 7th birthday. Needless to say there wont be too many photos of my eldest daughter as the photos of her do not meet with her approval for publishing online!! :rolleyes:

The one place I have always wanted to go, was Alaska, so this was a great opportunity, but coming from so far, I added in a few days taking the kids to Anaheim and then a few days in Vancouver pre cruise. Unfortunately due to work commitments I could not extend the trip to include a land tour after the cruise.

Bear in mind that with the ages of my kids, I planned excursions around their interests and what would keep them entertained as well as budget, so I did not include any flight seeing, helicpter etc excursions in my plans.

I am not going to pretend I can live up to the standard of some of the amazing reviews I have read on these forums, but I hope you enjoy anyway...

Looking forward to your review! I have an 11 year old daughter and we are going to cruise on Radiance in just a few days!!

Can't wait to see your review. I cruised to Alaska a few years ago and loved it! Your review may bring back some memories!!!

So our holiday began with a little bit of traveling through time.

Wake up at 5am and leave house at 6am for drive to airport.

Check in for flight by 7:15am.

Flight left Melbourne for a direct flight to LA at 9:30am.

After a 14 hour flight, we traveled back in time and landed at LAX at 6:15am the same morning!!:eek:

So by this time we have been awake for 18 hours (as it was a day time flight so difficult to sleep on the flight) and we have the day ahead of us.

I had prebooked and paid for Prime Time Shuttle to transfer us from LAX to our Hotel in Anaheim. It was a shared van that I booked, but the 5 of us were the only passengers. The service was good, with the shuttle waiting for us at the correct time.

There were many different shuttle companies and they were all the same price roughly. I was happy with Prime Time shuttle and figured I would use them again if I returned. I have since decided on trying a different company if/when I return as I had booked and paid for prime time shuttle for all other transfers and although it all worked out fine, at one of the transfers I was left waiting for close to 40 minutes.

Overall I have no complaints with Prime Time Shuttle, but would just give another shuttle a try next time.

We transferred to our hotel in Anaheim, which was the Howard Johnson Hotel.

As expected, our room was not ready due to our very early arrival, but we were directed to the mustard colored building in the photo below, which is Mimi's Cafe, for breakfast. The hotel does not have a restaurant on site, but this cafe is right next door and was fantastic. We went back there for breakfast a couple of times even though there were other places close by. It was that good.

We did not want to sleep and mess with our body clocks even more, so we got a cab to an Outlet mall in Anaheim and did some shopping.

I am not sure if Australia is ridiculously expensive, or if USA was very cheap, but we shopped up a storm. After a few days in Anaheim I actually went to Wallmart and bought another bag to bring everything we bought home. :eek:

We got back to our hotel in the afternoon, and checked into our family room, overlooking the Disney Parks so we could watch the fireworks at night from our room.

Unfortunately the room had such a bad smell we had to move, but the staff at the hotel were amazing and sorted out the issue very fast. We moved down 2 floors but still had a great view.

Spent the rest of the day swimming to stay awake.

That night we did the tourist thing, and went to a place I wanted to eat at since I first saw it on a previous trip to Florida in 2009.

We headed to.....

It was really good. We were quite upset that we had plans so well worked out that we would not be able to go back there for another meal.

Now back to the hotel for bed so we could hit the theme parks tomorrow.

Looking forward to this review!

When I booked this trip, I looked at the sailing dates and booked everything else around it.

Only after this did I realise that I would be in Anaheim over the Memorial Day weekend, and have to contend with the crowds.

I took my family to Orlando to the theme parks over 4th July and coped so I figured with forward planning we would get through everything we wanted to see.

The Disney threw a spanner in the works. Not only would we have to contend with Memorial Day crowds, but Disney would stay open for 24 hours and have a grad night.

We decided to leave the Disney Parks till Monday and Tuesday, and go to other parks on Saturday and Sunday.

On Saturday morning the jet lag kicked in, and although we hoped to get up and go to Knotts Berry Farm when the park opened, we overslept and only woke at 10:30am. We rushed to the park and got there by mid day. I also had pre purchased Fast Lane tickets, so we could bypass many of the long lines that had formed at the main rides and attractions.

For those that travel far to go to the themeparks, and have limited time, I would highly recommend the extra cost of these Fast Lane tickets.

While my youngest daughter, who is totally fearless, wanted to ride on everything, her height precluded her from some of the thrill rides, so my wife took her on the "kids rides" while I took the other kids to ride the thrill rides.

I must say that the wooden roller coaster at Knotts is probably the most insane roller coaster I have been on in my life, but I loved it. And it was my sons favourite ride.

My daughters favourite was this one.....

And I also made a few friends while walking around Knotts...

We left the park when it closed. Tomorrow we go to Soak City, the water park.

Oh - I know already I am going to read every bit of this review and enjoy it. I grew up in Southern California and went to Disneyland at least 3 times a year if not more. Now that I live 1500 miles away I rarely get to Disneyland anymore. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do when I finally get to go back on those rare occasions.

We are on the Radiance in July Southbound so the review will be great too.

This turned out to be a great day for many reasons...

It was very early in the season and the park had only just opened for the Summer a few days before, and when we got there 15 minutes before the park opened, it was a little cloudy, so there was not that many people there.

We literally had our choice of ANYWHERE in the park we wanted to "set up camp" and could go on any slide without any lines.

The lines picked up a little in the afternoon, but it was never really crowded.

This is where we set up our seats.... As you can see, the place is empty.

This ride was lots of fun.....

Soak City closed at 6pm and we headed back to our hotel.

This was the second, and only other free night that we had to go out for dinner (as we would be in the theme parks on all the other nights in Anaheim) and I wanted to go to The Cheesecake Factory.

I had a Burrito at the Cheesecake Factory in D.C. many years ago, and wanted to go back for another.

Then I figured I can have a Burrito when I am back in Australia, but I can't go to one of our new favourite tourist restaurants, so we went to Cheesecake factory and got a couple of different cheesecake slices to take back to our hotel for desert, and rather went for dinner back at.....

Tomorrow we head to the Disney Parks for 2 days. Memorial day tomorrow but we will manage the crowds and then Tuesday should be a little quieter.

I had it all worked out.

Get up and go to Mimi's Cafe for another great breakfast befpore heading to the parks in time for park opening. We will go to the Disneyland Park on Memorial day because it is larger and closes an hour later so we have the extra hour to help us with the Memorial day crowds, and we will go the California Adventure Park on the Tuesday when it will hopefully be a little quieter.

Well, I am not sure if being on vacation caused my brain to stop working, or if I can blame jetlag, but we arrived at the park gates just before park opening at 9am only to discover that the park opened at 8am!!!

Oh well, we headed in anyway and followed my plan as best as we could to see and do everything possible in one day. And we managed. We went on every ride that we could (one was closed for refurbishment and one broke down all day) and in fact our favourite ride (Splash Mountain) was so quiet near the end of the day that we stayed in the ride and rode it over and over again. The attendant just asked when we got to the end if we wanted to ride again and we just never got out the ride.

I am a very big fan of Disney and always wanted to take my kids. I took them to Disney World Florida a few years ago, but wanted to take them back now that they are a little older and could appreciate it more.

I must say, that although I loved my time at Disneyland, Disney World is on a whole different level, just in terms of size!!! This worked in our favour as we got to see it all in our limited time.

I will be pretty selective with the photos I add. I have so many photos but will rather add lots when we get to the "meaty" bits of this review, the cruise.

For those of you that don't know, Disney has what is called a fast pass. This is not something you pay extra for, but anyone can access them with their park ticket. There are certain rules and not all rides or attractions have them, but for those that do, the fast pass is a great way to avoid long lines.

Just plan your day at the park carefully so that you can get the fast passes you want and not waste time.

We used the fast pass system well, and did everything. Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, Star Wars, Toy Story, Autopia etc. I became a kid again, and loved every second of it.

The Parade, led by the US Marines band....

On the Tuesday we went to Disney's California Adventure Park. The newest section of this park, Cars Land, is a must see. The detail was amazing and the main ride, the racers, was superb.

This ride fills up fast and even the fast passes get used up, but we got there when the park opened and went straight there and only had about a ten minute wait.

I used fast pass for other rides, but what we did as a family to save time waiting in line was all stand together in the single rider line, and then go in separate cars and meet after the ride ended. I don't know why more people dont do this to save the hours of waiting in line.

Once again we stayed at the park until it closed, then walked back to our hotel and packed up.

Our shuttle was picking us up at 7:15 in the morning to take us to the airport.

I decided to fly out of Orange County rather than LAX. LAX would have been a direct flight to Vancouver, while out of Santa Ana we would have to fly via Seattle, but the ease of the airport compared to LAX, and with a very small price difference in ticket prices, it was a no brainer.

We fly out of Orange County, land in Seattle, and 50 minutes later leave Seattle for our flight to Vancouver.

I was a little concerned about the short layover, but it was not a problem at all. I checked my luggage right through to Vancouver and when I had to change planes, the gates were so close it was a 2 minute walk through the airport to get the second flight.

As I mentioned above, I have tons of pics of these first few days, but lets be honest, you are here to find out about the cruise and the ports, not Disneyland.

I will give much more detail from now on, starting with our few days in Vancouver pre cruise....

When do we get the cruise part? Waiting for more!!!

Hi Daniel,

I've sailed Radiance to the Pacific islands & Voyager to NZ out of Sydney & we are doing Alaska on Radiance south bound in August followed by a week in Canada, then another 2 Radiance cruises all the way home to Sydney.

Will look forward to getting another Australians take on the Alaskan experience.

I'm hoping the Aussie dollar stays up against the US dollar for another few months at least!

When I booked this trip, I looked at the sailing dates and booked everything else around it.

 

Only after this did I realise that I would be in Anaheim over the Memorial Day weekend, and have to contend with the crowds.

 

I took my family to Orlando to the theme parks over 4th July and coped so I figured with forward planning we would get through everything we wanted to see.

 

The Disney threw a spanner in the works. Not only would we have to contend with Memorial Day crowds, but Disney would stay open for 24 hours and have a grad night.

 

We decided to leave the Disney Parks till Monday and Tuesday, and go to other parks on Saturday and Sunday.

 

On Saturday morning the jet lag kicked in, and although we hoped to get up and go to Knotts Berry Farm when the park opened, we overslept and only woke at 10:30am. We rushed to the park and got there by mid day. I also had pre purchased Fast Lane tickets, so we could bypass many of the long lines that had formed at the main rides and attractions.

 

For those that travel far to go to the themeparks, and have limited time, I would highly recommend the extra cost of these Fast Lane tickets.

 

 

While my youngest daughter, who is totally fearless, wanted to ride on everything, her height precluded her from some of the thrill rides, so my wife took her on the "kids rides" while I took the other kids to ride the thrill rides.

 

 

 

 

I must say that the wooden roller coaster at Knotts is probably the most insane roller coaster I have been on in my life, but I loved it. And it was my sons favourite ride.

My daughters favourite was this one.....

 

And I also made a few friends while walking around Knotts...

 

We left the park when it closed. Tomorrow we go to Soak City, the water park.

I saw you on this cruise! can't wait to read your review! so much fun!

Hi Daniel,

 

I've sailed Radiance to the Pacific islands & Voyager to NZ out of Sydney & we are doing Alaska on Radiance south bound in August followed by a week in Canada, then another 2 Radiance cruises all the way home to Sydney.

 

Will look forward to getting another Australians take on the Alaskan experience.

 

I'm hoping the Aussie dollar stays up against the US dollar for another few months at least!

Hi avalon007,

You will love the Alaska cruise. You already know the Radiance, so you will know full well that it is an amazing ship for Alaska with all the glass. Such great viewing from just about anywhere.

I really want to do a Transpacific cruise and my son is begging me to book one. He loves the sea days.

I think the next plan is a trip to Hawaii for a week, followed by a cruise home. :)

As for the Aussie Dollar, if it stays pretty much where it is now, you will not believe how cheap things are. Obviously the very touristy spots like Disneyland were still quite expensive (for food etc) but everywhere else it was very reasonable.

I saw you on this cruise! can't wait to read your review! so much fun!

You did???

Hopefully just passing by or at the M&M, and not during my embarrassing performance during the Quest show. :eek:

PS. To those of you that are reading this review, don't expect too many photos from the Quest!!!

Okay, moving right along....

Vancouver is one city that I have wanted to see for a long time, because it is consistently just beating out Melbourne as "The Most Liveable City in the World". I wanted to see why.

Unfortunately, by the time we got to our hotel it was 4pm on Wednesday afternoon, and I wanted to board the Radiance at about 1pm on Friday, so I had a very limited amount of time to "see it all"

Thanks to some amazing people on tripadvisor, they helped me plan my time in Vancouver really well, so we got to see quite a lot in the limited time.

We switched planes in Seattle, and I was hoping that the weather in Seattle was not an indication of what we could expect over the next 2 weeks while in Vancouver and the cruise.

We got a cab to our hotel in Vancouver, where we were staying at the Holiday Inn on Howe Street. While I enjoyed our stay at the Howard Johnson in Anaheim, the hotel was a little dated, and arriving at the Holiday Inn was like a breath of fresh air. It was clean and the check in staff were fantastic. We were taken to our room, which was a family room. It was huge, and had a separate bedroom adjoining which was perfect for my kids.

The breakfasts in the hotel were also really good with great service and good value meals.

I would definitely recommend this hotel for the above reasons, however if I came back I would probably try a different hotel just because of the location.

This hotel is perfectly located to get to all the places we wanted to go (we walked everywhere) but walking along Granville Street at night seemed a little dodgy. Not unsafe, just not very comfortable to walk around with my kids, past all the bars, nightclubs etc.

We knew that we would have lots of daylight hours so set off on a walk through the city towards Gastown, of course stopping off at what seemed like every store for my elder daughter to shop.

GasTown was nice. we enjoyed walking through the cobblestone streets and seeing the history first hand.

Of course we had to stop and have the obligatory "steam clock photo"...

I have been very fortunate to have been able to travel to many places in the world, and collect fridge magnets and baseball caps from every place I have been to. (Now that I have discovered cruising, I hope to get to LOADS more places around the world).

We stopped in at a few of the souvenir shops in Gas Town so that I could add to my collection. My youngest made a friend at one of the stores....

I did quite alot of reading on cruisecritic as well as on tripadvisor before this trip, and also asked some people in the stores in Vancouver where we should go for dinner in Gas Town. I walked past quite a few really nice looking restaurants, but we decided on one that I had previously heard about...

What can I say about this place.....

Well the bread that they brought to the table was REALLY good. The beer was nice and cold.

And the second beer that they gave me for free because of the unbelievably long time it took to get very average food was also nice and cold.

Basically, it is what it is. A nice location. A nice idea. Full of tourists. Very average food and service.

There were so many other places nearby that looked really good that I would give this place a miss if I was to return.

By the time we finished dinner we were all pretty tired, so instead of doing the walk along the water towards Stanley Park, we decided on doing that the next day, and took a leisurely walk back to our hotel with a quick stop for a Starbucks on the way.

Tomorrow we have a full day in Vancouver.

Great review! Can't wait for more.

We fly to Vancouver one week from Thursday so I am LOVING this timely review!!!

We woke up quite early to get moving on a full day so we could see as much as possible.

We had breakfast in the hotel, which as I mentioned in my introduction to this hotel, was really great value, great service and great food.

My original plan was to go to Stanley park, and then also walk along the sea wall (is that what its called) to Canada Place. From Canada Place I would go to Capilano suspension bridges and then watch the sunset from the top of Grouse Mountain.

Well that all changed, and we decided to switch it up.

We caught the free shuttle to Capilano suspension bridge right outside our hotel. It was a great drive up North to the suspension bridges, where I got to see alot more of Vancouver that just the downtown area.

There is a fee to get in to the Capilano Suspension bridges and park. I do not recall what it is but I think it cost me close to $100 for the whole family of 5. According to Tripadvisor, there is the Lynn Canyon park which also has a suspension bridge and is free, but I wanted to go to Capilano for the experience of the tree top walk and the cliff walk as well as the suspension bridge.

I can honestly say that this was one of the two highlights of Vancouver for me. It was beautiful to walk through the forrest, on the tree top walk, and see some magnificent scenery and nature. The main suspension bridge is great to walk across, but that is just the tip of the iceberg compared to some of the scenery.

Once you enter the park, they offer guided tours, but we decided we wanted to do it on our own as a family and bypassed the tour that was just beginning. The walk starts with some beautifully carved and painted Totem Poles before you reach the end of the suspension bridge.

I would have liked the bridge to be quiet for a better photo op, but I suppose that was never going to happen that late in the morning. Still, it worked out just fine, because with many people on the bridge it gave it some extra movement when walking across, which just added to the experience. At the end of the bridge there is a small area with some tables and a place to buy a coffee or hot chocolate. A good place for a quick caffeine pick me up before the easy walk through the tree tops.

Some of the scenery before reaching the "Treetops Adventure"

The view from these balconies must be pretty spectacular...

Over the suspension bridge....

The tree tops adventure is an easy walk on wooden platforms between the trees. It is amazing to see how the entire structure was built without any harm to the trees. It also had some really good educational aspects to the walk, with regular signboards providing great information about the forest, water consumption, vegetation etc. There is also the Natures Edge Boardwalk, which is very much like the tree tops adventure. It is a wooden boardwalk that takes you through the forest and back towards the suspension bridge.

Here are a few photos taken while on the treetops adventure and Natures Edge Boardwalk...

Once back over the bridge, there is the Cliffwalk. This is a platform that extends out from the cliff, overlooking the huge drop to the creek below.

Even if any of you have a fear of heights, I would recommend this park for a few hours.

My youngest daughter is totally obsessed with dogs and horses. Well all animals actually, but dogs and horses even more so. So after the Capilano Park, we headed for Stanley Park, and instead of trying to walk around the huge park with such short time, or getting on a shuttle, we decided to take the kids on a tour round Stanley Park by horse drawn carriage.

As I could only post 6 pics in the last post, here are a few more photos that relate to the previous post....

Next stop....Stanley Park....

Great pictures! Looking forward to the cruise part.

From Capilano, we got back on the free shuttle back to downtown Vancouver.

The driver dropped us off near the Westin Bayshore Hotel, which is right next to Stanley Park. (I actually had a booking there, but I had to change my travel dates, and it was full during my new dates)

We took a walk into Stanley Park, and headed towards the horse carriages.

There was some great views along the walk....

Now as I mentioned in a previous post, my daughter is obsessed with horses, and made sure we got seats right up front so that she could be as close to the horses as possible...

Of course sitting up front, while offering great views, has its drawbacks....

Some sisterly love.....

The horse drawn carriage is a great way to see the main highlights of Stanley Park in a short amount of time. It stops for photos at many of the key highlights, and also makes a 15 minute stop at the Totem Poles.

Some sights along the way....

Excluding the stops at the totem poles and along the route for photos, the carriage ride is just over an hour long.

Here are some photos taken along the ride through Stanley Park....

Due to the fact that we were on the final carriage ride for the day, we did not go all the way back to where we started, but instead the ride ended near the stables in Stanley Park, very close to here....

We took a walk through sections of Stanley Park, admiring the beauty, before heading out of the park, and starting our walk along the sea wall towards Canada Place.

I had hoped we could finish this walk, and then make our way to Denman Street to find a place for dinner, but it was already getting quite late, and we did not want to rush this walk, just to get it done. We wanted to take it slow and enjoy the sights and scenery with the city skyline in the background.

We would end up walking past Canada Place and back into gas Town and find a place to eat there instead.

The walk along the sea wall towards Canada Place was a nice, relaxing walk. The backdrop of the city skyline with the views over the water were fantastic.

Coming in to land.....

Looking back over the water towards Stanley Park....

We found a place to eat but I can not recall the name. It was a quick "take away" type of meal which we ate sitting at tables on the sidewalk.

We had stopped for coffee along our walk and added something to eat with the coffee, and also stopped for another coffee at Starbucks at Canada Place, so we were really not that hungry for dinner.

We then took a walk back to our hotel.

We knew that we would be leaving Vancouver the next day so decided to take a walk around the area. The hotel staff said that it was not a really nice area to walk around with the kids because of all the clubs and bars, but we decided to go anyway as we would not get the opportunity again, and we would be with the kids to keep control over them.

As I mentioned previously, it was not unsafe, however seeing loud, drunk party goers walking the streets was not really something I wanted to expose my kids to that much so we stayed off this street as much as we could, and made our way to do some window shopping on Robson Street.

My daughter wanted to go there the next day before heading to the ship as there were a few stores she had not conquered yet!!!:rolleyes:

As they were stores that are not in Australia, I did not mind, and we could at least get an idea of where to go the next day.

Great review, can't wait to see your photos of Alaska

Vancouver looks stunning! I would really love to visit here someday even if I'm not cruising out of here. Is it me or do all of the buildings look really similar?! :p