“You’re going to Alaska?” said everybody incredulously, when I told them of my vacation plans. “But it’s so cold! And there’s mosquitoes everywhere!” Well, perhaps that’s true outside... but inside a warm, cozy cruise ship, does it really matter? I thought not. In fact, as summer temperatures shot up to the 100-degree mark here in Reno, I felt better and better about the idea of zipping smoothly through picturesque glaciers while being pampered in the style of a fine hotel. So my grandma and I (because I have a very nice grandma) went on the Star Princess Inside Passage cruise, which sounds dirty but is actually a scenic tour up the Alaskan coast, and much more fun than you’re thinking.


ROOMS

I’d heard the jokes about teeny-tiny cruise cabins, and I was pleasantly surprised by our double-occupancy mini-suite (322 sq. ft.). As you walk in, the bathroom and closet are in an alcove to the left; then there’s the sleeping area with two twin beds and nightstands on the left wall. On the right, there’s an armoire, with two televisions (one facing the beds, one facing the sitting room), some shelving, and a mini-fridge; beyond this is a sitting area with a loveseat, chair, and coffee table. Sliding-glass doors lead out to the balcony, where there are plastic tables and chairs set up and a non-slip vinyl carpeting; frosted partitions provide privacy and shelter against the wind. Each mini-suite also comes with a small safe, with a PIN number you can select.

The bathrooms are large enough for one person, but not two. There is an emergency pull cord in the shower if you need assistance (though I can’t imagine what emergency would be worse than summoning the steward to view your naked, soaking-wet body). Complimentary shampoo, conditioner, soap, and lotion are provided as often as you require (and I know, for I purloined the toiletries every evening. I can’t help it – they’re just so cute). I did have a problem with a special request: I asked several times for an extra bath towel to be left each morning, and every time, the steward would leave an extra towel the next morning and then promptly forget thereafter. However, the rest of the service made up for it. Like stateroom fairies, the cleaning staff slips in while you are away, making up the bed or turning down the sheets, whisking away dirty towels and replacing them with fluffy new ones. You also get a little chocolate on your pillow each evening when they turn down the sheets, which gave me more pleasure than it probably should have.


PORTS OF CALL

The 7-day cruise originates in Seattle on a Saturday. Passengers may begin boarding the ship at noon (but you can start checking in before then, and I recommend getting there about an hour early to get through all the paperwork), and the ship sails at 5:00 p.m. For the first full day, the ship is at sea heading north; the next day, there is a stop at Juneau, for the first of many gift-shop raids. The following day, the ship lands at Skagway for nearly the full day, then reverses direction, heading south to Tracy Arm, where the glaciers are. On the next day, there is a short half-day stop in Ketchikan, and the day after that, there is a brief evening stop in Victoria, B.C. The following morning, the ship docks again in Seattle, frantically clearing everybody out – because, at noon, they start all over again.


FOOD

Oh, the food! Half the reason for going on a cruise is having the excuse to guiltlessly cram yourself with as much food as you can keep down (of course, if you can’t keep it down, that just means more room for the next meal). The Star Princess offers its guests several dining options. If you like, you can choose the traditional “fixed seating,” where you sit at the same table with the same boring windbags every night in the Amalfi Room. Or, with Personal Choice dining, you can dine at one of two restaurant-style dining rooms (Capri and Portofino – the menu changes daily, but the same dishes are offered in both rooms), where you walk in whenever you like and sit with different people each time. You can request a smaller table for your party only, but it’s quicker to sit with others at a large table. The dining rooms serve five-course meals, usually with a theme; being a sucker for novelty, I sampled escargot, whole crayfish, clams Casino, zander, and pumpkin-turnip soup, as well as old standbys like steak and prime rib. You may have as many desserts as you wish. In addition, the Horizon Court buffet is open nearly 24 hours a day, serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight buffets. The Trident Grill and Prego Pizza are also open during lunch and dinner hours for quick snacks (hot dogs, pizza, etc.).

All of these are included in your cruise package, but there are a couple of restaurants that involve paying an extra “cover charge.” Sabatini’s is a trattoria-style Italian restaurant; according to the diners I talked to, they bring out massive quantities of food, 17 courses total ($15 cover). Tequila’s is a steakhouse, but since this is a cruise, you can have as many steaming slabs of beef as you want ($8 cover). An ice-cream bar is also available on the food-court level.


DRINK

If I were writing a poem about the Star Princess, I would rhyme “cruise” with “booze.” Alcohol is the big moneymaker for the cruise lines; the sales pitch, of course, is that everything’s included in the price, but this most definitely does not cover alcoholic beverages or even soft drinks. Sodas cost $1.50 a can; you can also purchase an unlimited soda pass for $22.50 (which is a lot of soda). Coffee, hot tea, and iced tea are, however, free.

Bars are everywhere: piano bars, nautical pubs, contemporary lounges. The drinks are generously sized, and fairly reasonably priced. I paid $4.00 for a gin and tonic made with Bombay Sapphire gin, which is cheaper than I’d get it here in Reno. Martinis are around $5.00, and specialty frou-frou umbrella drinks are around $5.00 as well, though they are impressively large. You have to sign for every drink you buy, but I can assure you that this does not mean you’ll pay any attention to the cost of the booze; once you sign a few times, you don’t even bother glancing at the total. Which, I suppose, is entirely the point. They do automatically add a 15% gratuity on, so don’t feel obligated to tip; but no cruise employee will turn down cash, if you do choose to tip.


ENTERTAINMENT

I had serious doubts about the sort of entertainment you’d find on a cruise ship. What – shuffleboard tournaments? Bingo matches? And, to be sure, there are those. But there is so much more, too. The key to filling your cruise days with fun and frolic is the tragically named Princess Patter, the indispensable daily newsletter that contains the day’s schedule of events, shore excursion times, and other helpful information (like when to set your clock forward or back). At first, I mocked the Patter, but after a day or two I was carrying it around with me like everyone else, whipping it out to consult it regularly.

During the day, they offer a multitude of classes, demonstrations, competitions, and seminars. I urge you to go to as many of these as you can stand, because they’re really fun. On a whim, I took the line-dancing classes and loved them; ballroom dancing is also offered. You can show up to as many or as few classes as you like, and partners are not required. I also watched a fruit- and vegetable-carving demo, took a scarf-tying class, watched a slideshow presentation on glaciers, made carnations out of tissue paper, watched an ice-carving demo, and participated in a trivia challenge. One thing you’ll want to avoid is the “shopping seminars,” run by a frighteningly intense couple. I listened to a few minutes of one: they’re just infomercials for the local gift shops at the next day’s port of call. Don’t waste your time on these when there’s so much more to be doing.

First-run movies are offered at varying times each day. Our June 2003 cruise included “Catch Me If You Can,” “Chicago,” “About Schmidt,” and “The Two Towers,” so there’s something for most people. The movies, as well as other programming, also play on the ship’s TV channels. The ship receives CNN and ESPN, as well as some generic nature-show channels and a channel that replays lectures given during the cruise.

In the evenings, there’s a variety of entertainment for your viewing pleasure. The Star Princess has a troupe of singers and dancers, who put on three separate one-hour musicals over the week. These shows are ensembles of different musical numbers, rather than full-length shows, which keeps it interesting and allows for the greatest possible number of dramatic costume changes (which, of course, is what everybody’s there to see); this season’s selections include a “history of Broadway” collection and a “dances of the world” production. The dancers are lively and energetic, though the four main vocalists are unremarkable, and the overall quality is superior to what you’d find in a Reno casino. In addition, each night features one or two regularly rotating comedians, ventriloquists, and magicians. There are so many, in fact, that it takes a bit of strategic planning if you want to catch them all!

A “Vegas-style casino” is tucked away on the promenade deck. I walked through it and wasn’t terribly impressed; the casino features none of the newer machines that are popular where I live, and consists mostly of one-armed bandits and video poker. Table games are also offered in the central pit area. I was told that the odds in the ship’s casino are intentionally worse than regular casinos, which doesn’t surprise me. Still, plenty of people appeared to be happy to lose their money, so the option is always there.

The Skywalkers Nightclub is more or less the only evening option for the younger crowd. In theory, you must be 18 to get in, but I never saw them check for I.D., and I was only carded once at the bar; in any case, it’s ridiculously easy to obtain booze if you’re underage, so don’t let that prevent you from a wee-hours foray to the club. The music, however, is terrible; the DJ seemed not to have grasped that the same boatload of people were attending the club night after night, and persisted in playing the same wedding-reception fare we know and hate: “Mony, Mony,” “I Will Survive,” “Brick House,” and so on, every night. Novelty-dance songs ran rampant. This is a lot more fun when you have had several of the specialty frou-frou umbrella drinks, but even when you are sober, you will feel drunk while dancing. This is because Skywalkers, which doubles as a mild-mannered observation deck during the day, is up on the seventeenth floor, so when the ship pitches and yaws, the floor tilts alarmingly. Most of the other lounges close at around midnight, but Skywalkers generally stays open until 2:30ש:00 a.m.


EXCURSIONS

There are several ports of call on this cruise, and tours are offered for each one. Tour prices range from $25.00 to $400.00, depending on how wild and crazy you want to get. Adventurous types can take helicopter tours up to the Mendenhall Glacier, go kayaking or mush a team of sled dogs across the ice; the more sedate can opt for leisurely streetcar or horse-drawn buggy tours, or simply stroll into town for a bit of shopping and exploring. The towns are more or less alike: all are heavily dependent on the tourist trade, and all feature identical “authentic” souvenirs at identically astronomical prices. My grandma and I went on the Skagway Historical Streetcar Tour, and toured Victoria’s famous Butchart Gardens (which I’ll be reviewing separately). You can also arrange for independent tours directly, once you land; this is significantly cheaper but also riskier. If you’re on an official ship tour and you get detained, the ship will wait for you; if you’re on your own and you get stuck somewhere, you’re on your own. For most people, the safety net was worth the extra surcharge, but I did see a few brave souls making their own arrangements for day trips.

One of the “ports of call” isn’t a port in the sense that you can get off the ship. Tracy Arm is a glacial fjord, which the ship cruises up, turns around, and comes back down, before proceeding back along the Inside Passage. Here, shivering in the icy dawn, is where you’ll see vast walls of ice, shading from pure white to Otter-Pop blue; harbor seals frolicking on the icebergs and playing in the water; and even bald eagles. Whales can’t swim in Tracy Arm because their sonar doesn’t work in the sediment-clouded water, but you will see whales at other points throughout the cruise during this time of year. I talked to a Hawaiian woman who was really excited because she saw a squirrel (“holding a nut and everything, he was so cute!”), but those of us who don’t get to see whales every day saved our awe for the humpbacks.


AMENITIES

The Star Princess features lots of healthy-type stuff for those who pooh-pooh nonstop buffet gluttony. A small but serviceable gym is located on the top deck; a basketball court, ping-pong tables, and a small running/walking track are also nearby. The Lotus Spa offers insanely overpriced massage and facial services; a 1-hour massage will run you $120.00. Four pools and numerous hot tubs are scattered around the top deck, but at least one of the hot tubs was always out of order; the pools themselves are on the small side, mainly designed for splashing rather than lap swimming. Only one pool is covered, and since we were in Alaska, after all, that was the only pool that saw much use on our cruise. An onboard infirmary is also located near the gym and spa, which keeps limited office hours, but they are on standby for emergencies.

The Star Princess also offers a small but well-stocked library; passengers are invited to take up to two books at a time, and are requested to return books by the final night of the cruise. There is an Internet café, which costs $0.35 per minute; however, the connection is so torturously slow that even I gave up after one session (pages frequently take 60-120 seconds to load).


IN CONCLUSION...

This cruise ended up costing about $2,000.00 per person ($0.00 for me, $4,000.00 for my grandma). This works out to about $300.00 per day, which is not too bad for a nice, well-maintained room, exceptional food, and an onslaught of entertainment of all kinds. If you want to, you can do nothing but hang out in your room watching TV all day, though it would be a shame to miss out on all the activities and entertainments on offer. To quote my hairdresser, as he gave me a pre-cruise cut and style: “If you don’t have fun on a cruise, it’s your own damn fault.” So if you’re looking for an unusual vacation, book passage on the Star Princess, and prepare to jump, jive, and whale away through seven days of chilly cruising fun.


Recommended: Yes

Best Suited For: Couples