Back from the Pearl 5/24 to 5/31/09- GREAT cruise

[judyf]

Well, I did this once, I will start over again as I lost the first one, it was my mistake as I hit preview instead of submit then back spaced to read the posts.:(

 

We are back from a wonderful cruise on the Pearl. We had a great 11 vacation days 4 in Seattle and 7 on the Pearl. I will post a full review asap as I love when others take the time to post their reviews and I like to pay back with posting a review and hope it helps others. Getting back to real life gets in the way, we came back to a hard times. I need a vacation now after vacation

 

We had the red eye flight back Sunday night from Seattle arrived in Newark. NJ at 6:30am got home at 8:30am Monday, we had been up since 6am Sunday getting off the Pearl.

 

Our plan was to go straight to bed for at least 4 hours to get on a schedule for work today, but we got bad news when we got home the phone was ringing as Jerry's Cousin passed away and the funeral was yesterday at 10am so we quickly washed up and threw on some clean cloths and got to the funeral parlor at 10:05am, a 40 minute drive for us. We didn't get home till 5:30pm. We slept till 8pm then got up and stayed up to 11pm, to get on track. I wish I took today off too. :rolleyes:

 

Everything was great but one of the best things was the calving we saw at Margerie Glacier as another poster stated it was amazing.

 

We were watching and listening to the small calving from our port side balcony and a few things makes this really wonderful for us.

 

Number one is that we were all talking about this huge piece of ice/snow coming down. Jerry keep saying it would and I said no as it was on top and there were many pieces hanging lower and they looked like they might come down.

 

Number two is that we left our balcony as the ship turned and we could have been in the elevator or a hall way.

 

Number three I had my camera video ready and got great shots of the whole thing. Amazing is the word. It all just came together for us.

 

This is one of the moments we were it the right place at the right time.

 

Other great things for us was the whale watching with Orca's in Juneau, we saw many whales jumping out of the water, our guide said they were putting on a great show for us, we saw about 5-6 pairs of mother and baby whales all showing off.

 

Then the Skagway train ride with Chilkoot was all I expected and more, snowbanks higher then the train and the GREAT thing here is we were on the last train up before the mudslide closed the tracks. We saw a brown bear about a car's lengths away and we got to play with the dog sled puppies and dogs it was great.

 

Then another best of all was the tour on the Aleutian Ballad, it was the best, we saw about 30 plus eagles so close to us, we didn't know where to look there were so many. It was unreal. Also got some great pictures and video.

 

Well this quick run down got really long. I will post my review and pictures asap.

 

If you have any questions just ask and I will try help where I can.

[SBwannaB]

We were on the same cruise and had a wonderful time. It was my first with NCL and we were very impressed. We loved our balcony room and spent a lot of time out there. One highlight for us was the Misty Fijords floatplane ride in Ketchikan. It was great. We took the bus/train ride to Fraser out of Skagway and didn't get to ride the train back, but we went further into Canada to a beautiful lake. We did not feel cheated at all. You are right, now we need another vacation!