Review of our 2013 cruise/land tour with Holland America (Zaandam)

DH and I went on a two week cruise/land tour with Holland America and, all in all, we had a great time. I definitely recommend Alaska as a travel destination. We have cruised before, but this was our first time on Holland America. Our previous cruises together have all been on Royal Caribbean (I had also cruised Princess and Carnival with my parents). It was also our first time taking an organized land tour. It was DH’s first visit to Alaska, but I had been on an Alaskan cruise 20 years ago with my parents (on Princess).

I wanted to write a review of our trip because I love reading other people’s reviews so much when I am preparing for a trip. After some introductory remarks, I will write a day by day review with pictures. I will have to add installments as I get time – hopefully it won’t take me too terribly long to complete it. I kept meaning to take notes along the way, but never did, so I am going by memory. I have a tendency to get a little too detail oriented, so I apologize to those that prefer short and sweet. :) Feel free to ask questions along the way.

We cruised first and then did the land portion. We would have preferred to do the land portion first, and then the cruise, but for our package it was quite a bit cheaper to do the cruise first, so that is what we went with. But, if price were not an object, I would recommend land and then cruise.

With a couple of exceptions, we were not blessed with the great weather that so many people have been experiencing this summer. What we kept hearing from the locals, was – “Finally, our normal weather is back” and “You are getting to experience true Alaskan weather.” While I would have preferred some of the unseasonably warm and dry weather (I grew up in the desert and get cold easily), we didn’t let it stop us. It did prevent me from getting some pictures I would have liked, however, because I was afraid of ruining my camera in the rain. On the plus side, we didn’t have a problem with the mosquitos.

I am so glad that we brought good rain gear with us, as we definitely used and appreciated it! We brought raincoats with hoods, rain pants and waterproof hiking shoes. The only thing I forgot, which I actually ended up buying on the trip, was a pair of waterproof gloves. I had brought gloves, just not waterproof ones. I had packed a mix of warm and cold weather clothes and didn’t have much use for the warm weather items – but, you have to pack them because you never know. On a side note – I am in love with all the great convertible pants that are out there now. I had a pair that could be long, short or capri. While I only wore them as long on this trip, they are a great space saver for having options. My only real complaint about the clothes items I brought were that my fleece jacket was not really warm enough for me at times. Also, sometimes, after putting on all my layers, I felt like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man!

Our cruise was on the Zaandam, departing from Vancouver on June 23 (we flew in a day early).

Looking forward to your review and photos.

Looking forward to hearing about your trip.

We had a direct flight to Vancouver and arrived around 1 pm. The entry into the customs area is nicely decorated and I wished that I had my camera available, but I didn’t want to hold up traffic digging it out of my carryon. Getting through customs went smoothly and fairly quickly. We caught a taxi to our hotel. I know a lot of people take the skyway train to save money, but we didn’t want to have to deal with hauling our luggage, especially since I was traveling with an injured shoulder. To us, it was worth it to pay the taxi and have door to door service. We enjoyed chatting with our taxi driver on the way.

We stayed at the Blue Horizon Hotel and I definitely recommend it. We got checked in without a problem and went up to our room. Our room was on the 20th floor and had nice views. The balcony is small (no furniture), but we enjoyed stepping out on it to look around and take pictures and feel the fresh air and hear the city sounds. If the balcony door was closed, the room was pretty quiet – the only traffic noise I heard was when an emergency vehicle would drive by with its siren on. In any hotel in the downtown area there is going to be the potential for traffic noise, however, so if that bothers you, bring ear-plugs. The room itself was very big. The bathroom, however, was very tiny, but everything was nice and clean and it had a great shower. It is located on Robson Avenue, which is a busy street full of shops and restaurants. One of the main reasons that I picked this hotel, besides the price and the reviews, was that it has a London Drug Store just a few steps away, which was perfect for picking up some items we needed for our cruise.

After checking out our room, we decided to go do our shopping at the drug store, but first we needed to get a snack. We walked along Robson Street to Thurlow Street and found a place where we could get pizza by the slice – Megabite Pizza. It is more of a carryout place with just a few seats, but we were able to get a little table on the sidewalk out front. They had sesame seeds on the crust, which was a little different, but the pizza was pretty good. While eating our pizza, we spotted a cute cupcake store (Cupcakes by Heather & Lori), also on Thurlow (on the other side of Robson), and decided that we had to check it out. They had little mini versions of their cupcakes, but we each went with a full-size version – we thought that we should get into practice for all the eating we’d be doing on the cruise. J The cupcakes were delicious! This, too, was a carryout venue, but we managed to snag one of 2 tables on the sidewalk out front. It was fun to watch everyone eyeing the cupcakes as they walked past.

By this time, I was already in love with Vancouver. I love cities like this that have a vibrant and active downtown area (New York is another such city). There is a palpable energy, which is infectious, and I also love the people-watching.

After having stuffed our faces, I mean restored our energy, we headed back towards London Drugs. I, however, had to make a detour into a Roots store and buy a souvenir sweatshirt, first. Once at London Drugs we tackled my shopping list which included a case of bottled water to take on the ship with us. Another item was a bottle of liquid hand soap. I read about another cruise critic member doing this and I liked the idea and have done it on our last two cruises. I know many people will think it is silly, but I’m mentioning it in case someone else finds the idea useful. I hate using bar soap for washing my hands at the bathroom sink. It always seems to get so mushy and messy. I don’t do this on a road trip where we are changing hotels a lot and would have to tote it around with us, but on a cruise you are in the same place for a week, so why not. I pick it up in the port city, that way I don’t have to worry about fitting it into my checked baggage.

After returning our purchases to the hotel, we decided to go walk around. We ended up walking down to the Coal Harbor area. Vancouver is very hilly and it was a pretty steep walk downhill. We stumbled upon the Mill Marine Bistro, which has a large area of outdoor seating overlooking the harbor, and decided to grab some dinner (what? - we had worked our appetites back up with the walk). J It turned out to be good that we were not overly hungry yet, or in a hurry to be anywhere, because it took forever. First, we had trouble getting a waiter to come to our table after the hostess had seated us. Then, after we had already been waiting awhile for our food, the wait staff came around to tell people that the kitchen was really backed up and it would be another ½ hour before any food was served. We didn’t mind the wait since we were enjoying the nice weather and the views, including watching several sea planes take off. The food was very good, once it finally arrived.

After dinner we walked over to the seawall and walked along it for a while. We took a different route back to our hotel so that we could see some different scenery, which included a walk through Harbour Green Park and its beautiful plants and flowers.

*I'm having trouble with photobucket and photo size. I resize the photo in photobucket and save it, but when I put the link in here, it shows up in the original large size. Has anyone else had this problem and if so, did you come up with a solution?*

Enjoying your review and photos!! Thanks!!

I am also enjoying your review, narrative and photos.

Keith

Can't wait for your next installment! Thanks for taking the time to share your trip with us..

Pictures from the park in Vancouver:

So excited to read about your cruisetour! We arrive in Vancouver in just under two weeks prior to our departure on the Zaandam for our own 14 day cruisetour adventure and we are also staying at the Blue Horizon :D

Which cruisetour itinerary were you on?

I'm looking forward to reading the details of your trip and have already taken some notes. :)

I can't wait to hear more about your trip!

Enjoying your review. 50 days til we sail to Alaska!

Thank you to everyone that has commented. I really appreciate the comments - it helps me to keep going. :) Those of you getting ready to go on your trip - I hope you have a great time!

Kiwi_girl - that is so cool that you are doing the same trip as us (at least the first part of it). I think that our cruisetour was DC9 (I hope I'm remembering that correctly - I don't have anything with me at the moment that has it written down). I don't know if I'll get finished posting before you leave, but I'll try.

We slept in this morning and had a delicious breakfast of oatmeal and scones/muffins from the restaurant at the hotel, while sitting on their sidewalk patio.

Fortunately, the front desk staff loaned us their stapler & tape to attach our Zaandam luggage tags to our bags, because I had forgotten to plan for how we were going to do that! We grabbed a taxi to take us to the port – Canada Place. We dropped off our big suitcases and our water (with a luggage tag attached to it) with the porters and headed on in. Don’t worry if you forgot to bring binoculars, they have a stand selling them as you wait in line to go through customs! Even though you are in Canada, you are actually going through US Customs. By screening as you board the ship, you avoid having to go through customs at your first cruise stop in the US. We did have to wait in a fairly long, slow moving line. I didn’t pay attention to the clock, but I would guess that it was about 30-45 minutes. Once we cleared customs, the actual check-in with the cruise line went very fast. Before we knew it, we were on the ship! (After having the obligatory welcome aboard photo, of course).

We first went to our cabin to drop off our carry-on luggage. We had booked an interior room on the Main Deck in cabin 2605. Again, if money were no object, a balcony would be nice, but I couldn’t justify the cost difference, especially since we had decided to spend a week on land, as well. I liked the location of our cabin. It was mid-ship, not too far from a self-service laundry room, very quiet and was convenient for getting on and off the ship since that was usually done from the Main Deck. Some ladies across the hall from us had balloons on their door all week, which made it easy to find our cabin!

As I mentioned, our room was an interior room. They have a curtain behind the bed that makes it look like there is a window there. For the first couple of days, DH and I kept having the strongest urge to open the curtains, even though we knew it was just the wall!

The room had good storage. Each nightstand had 2 drawers and the dresser had 3 drawers. There were 3 closets. One was only for hanging items (you could put shoes on the bottom, however) but the other 2 had a combination of shelves and hanging rods. Some of the shelves were convertible so that you could use them as shelves or fold them down to have more hanging room. Our big suitcases fit under the bed and our little suitcases went into one of the closets. There were some hooks on walls, as well, which came in handy.

There was a safe in one of the closets. I’ve ready that some ships have the password style safe, but ours was the magnetic strip kind. You could use the cabin key card to open and close it. However, you had to use the same key card to open it that you used to close it. So, if DH locked it with his card, I couldn’t open it with mine - I had to get his card from him each time I wanted access to the safe.

I had read about the fact that there is only one electrical plug in the room (on the dresser-top), so we brought a little surge protector that had 3 plugs in it to use, which worked great.

Our bathroom had a shower only, rather than the tub that most rooms had. We were fine with this. I was worried about the shower curtain being a problem (sticking to you), after having been spoiled by the sliding doors on Royal Caribbean, but it never was. I felt like I had plenty of room in the shower. The first time that we used the shower, we discovered that it was not draining properly. However, we called maintenance and they fixed it right away and it was fine the rest of the week.

The bathroom had quite a bit of counter space, a fairly roomy medicine cabinet and some hooks on the door. I was surprised by the fact that there was not a fan for the bathroom, so it did get a bit steamy in there when showering. We started leaving the bathroom door ajar to help with that. The first couple of days I did notice a faint sewer smell in the bathroom but it either went away, or I got used to it, because I stopped noticing it.

(note - the hairdryer that you see on the wall is an old one. I don't know if it even works or not. They have a normal hairdryer in the top drawer of the dresser in the cabin.)

Here was one area where we noticed a big difference from our experiences on Royal Caribbean – we never even met our room steward on this first day. It wasn’t until the next day when DH went back to the room for something mid-day that he ran into them (a team of 2). I only saw them 1 or 2 times the whole week. On RC our room steward was around the first day greeting people. During the cruise we would see him all the time and he always greeted us by name. Our HA stewards did a good job as far as servicing our room, but it was a different experience.

After checking out our room, we headed to the MDR for the Mariner’s Welcome Aboard Lunch. We were seated right away at a table for two and had a nice relaxing lunch. After eating, we went exploring. We immediately made 2 discoveries – 1) that the bank of elevators outside the MDR had been taken out of service so that they could be used for luggage delivery and 2) when you come out of the MDR on deck 4, you must either go up or down a level in order to get anywhere. You can’t walk across deck 4 from one end of the ship to another. So, since the elevators weren’t working, that meant that one had to use the stairs. This would be a real problem for someone that can’t do stairs. (On a side note – I was surprised that I did not see a single motorized scooter on the ship the entire time. There were also very few wheelchairs).

We started our exploring on the upper, outside decks. I think it is neat how the ship is seemingly parked on a downtown city street – not off in some industrial area. After snapping some pictures, we moved indoors because it started raining. We spent the afternoon looking around the ship, unpacking our luggage and attending the muster drill (which involved standing on the covered promenade deck for about 40 minutes).

After the muster drill we went back to the cabin until time for sail away. Once we realized we were moving, we went back out to the Promenade Deck to watch the view. I would have liked to have been on an upper deck for going under the Lions Gate Bridge, but I was afraid that we would go under it while I was trying to get there, so I stayed put.

After watching us sail away for a while, we headed to the MDR for dinner. We did the anytime dining (can’t remember the formal name for that). We went at different times, usually without a reservation, and never had to wait more than a couple of minutes to be seated. Some nights we sat at a table with other people, but that was fine with us. There was not a separate line for people with reservations versus those without. (There are 2 check-in desks, but only one was ever used).

The quality of service in the MDR varied - sometimes it was pretty slow. The food tasted pretty good. My favorite items were the chilled soups. There was an apple soup in particular that was wonderful. I ate quite a bit of salmon during the week. There were two nights that we ended up eating in the Lido, but I prefer the food and the dining experience in the MDR. One funny thing that happened one night in the MDR - we noticed that our menus had the same choices as the night before. We weren’t sure if it was supposed to be that way or not, so we asked our waiter. He said no and went off to get us new menus with that night’s offerings in them.

After dinner we walked around some more and then called it a night.

This was a relaxing day at sea. We slept in, got ready and then grabbed breakfast in the Lido. I enjoyed the Lido for breakfasts. Among the items I especially liked were the fresh-squeezed orange juice and the omelet station.

Throughout the course of the day we looked at the shops on board, did some more exploring, ate lunch in the MDR, found a comfy place to sit and read and attended the cupcake tea (held in the MDR).

The Zaandam is older and smaller than what we’ve sailed on recently (our last cruise was on RC's Allure – loved it!). But, one thing that it definitely has going for it are all the public spaces with seating near large picture windows. This is especially important on an Alaskan cruise since 1) there is more to look at outside than your typical Caribbean cruise and 2) the weather can sometimes make it hard to sit out on deck. The Zaandam harkens back to the more classic/elegant days of cruising.

The show that night was called Northern Lights. It was a musical revue featuring the Zaandam singers and dancers. The songs chosen are supposed to be celebrating the beauty of Alaska. It was a stretch to find the connection for some songs, but we still enjoyed them. The staging and choreography was a bit amateurish, (especially after seeing the shows on the Allure), but the singing was actually very good and we enjoyed the show. There are 3 show times: 6:30, 8 & 10 pm. We went to the 6:30 showing. The show was short – no more than 45 minutes, if that long.

The show lounge has a main level and a balcony. This night we sat on the main floor. The furniture in the showroom is too tightly spaced. There is not enough room between the rows. Also, there is not enough of a slope to the floor, so it is hard to see over the people in front of you. We found out later that the balcony is a much nicer place to sit.

After the show was over, we stayed in the theater awaiting the Captain’s Toast. It was supposed to start at 7:30, but got started late. The captain (a young man) came out and spoke and then introduced his top officers. They also brought out the employee of the month. The waiters handed out free champagne.

After this, we went to the MDR for dinner and then called it a night.

Thanks for posting. Your pictures are great. You mentioned a couple of parks in Vancouver that I didn't know existed and have been living here since 1970. I sailed on the Zaandam last year for 14 days and again this spring for 12 days. Both times, I had a different Captain than you have pictured. Looking forward to the rest of your installments.:D

Wonderful

I am enjoying the review and all the lovely pictures.

I am also enjoying your photo essay. Looking forward to future enstallments as we haven't done a cruise tour despite having been to Alaska three time.

Am enjoying reading your review.

Thank you for sharing your great photos.

Vancouver is a beautiful city.

We just returned from a two-cruise trip to Alaska (Princess Diamond followed by the HAL Zaandam). I enjoyed reading so far, and agree with what you've said about the Zaandam. Nice, quiet open spaces, dated rooms, and the theater isn't sloped enough to see.

Continue please!