Holland America’s Eurodam from Seattle to Juneau and back with four intermediate stops. Large ship with 2100 passengers and 850 crew members.

1. The logistics of taking a boat this size on a one week trip are amazingly complex (see my immediately preceding post) and appear to have been carried out without a hiccup.
2. Traveling with 2000 strangers for a week is weird.
3. Only 15% were over 75, but I was surprised at how many came with walkers or wheelchairs and looked to be ill or fragile.
4. The food was much better than I thought it would be was both good news and bad, in that it was impossible not to eat much too much.
5. Especially on a cold weather cruise, exercise is hard to come by.
6. The housekeeping and wait staff are largely Indonesian. They are excellent, but they say good morning and thank you and smile too much and it gets annoying.
7. There are a lot of activities, but few I had any interest in.
8. Several private companies run on board promotions that I found annoying.
9. The bed was very comfortable, as were the bathroom and shower facilities. The staterooms were fine.
10. Everything was remarkably clean.
11. 50% of the crowd on this cruise were on an Evangelical trip with bible studies, etc. This made the trip, I assume, quieter than usual.
12. Perhaps because of the size of the ship, getting from place to place can be very confusing.
13. The prices in the ship store are surptisingly reasonable.

I probably have more thoughts that will come to mind. It was a good trip and an interesting experience. Do I like cruising? That may be the question, but I don’t have an answer. If you want to see coastal Alaska, you really need to go by boat. But this is a very big boat. I don’t know how it compares with a smaller boat where you may get to know more fellow travelers, or a warm weather cruise, or a river cruise. I have no better idea how I would like those than before I got on the Eurodam. But I may one day find out.