Our Alaskan Voyage on Queen Elizabeth

Based on our voyage aboard Queen Elizabeth   Cruising Alaska is unlike most other voyages. The experience is shaped less by cities and ports than by wilderness, weather, and the immense scale of the landscape itself. Forested mountains rise directly from the sea, glaciers sit in mountains along the coastline, and marine life appears suddenly and unpredictably along the ship’s path.   We don’t consider ourselves cruise experts, nor do we approach Alaska as a checklist destination. These reflections are drawn from our own experience sailing to Alaska aboard Queen Elizabeth , following a long year of walking, travel, and time spent in northern landscapes. What follows is not prescriptive advice, but practical guidance shaped by lived experience - including what surprised us, what challenged us, and what ultimately deepened our appreciation of the journey.   Rather than strict advice, think of these as observations that may help shape expectations before sailing through one ...

  “No! There's the land. (Have you seen it?) It's the cussedest land that I know, From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it To the deep, deathlike valleys below.   Some say God was tired when He made it; Some say it's a fine land to shun; Maybe; but there's some as would trade it For no land on earth - and I'm one.”   Robert Service, The Spell of the Yukon   Call of the North   By the end of our voyage aboard Queen Elizabeth , what stayed with me most was not a single port, moment, or species. It was the feeling of having been drawn once more to the north.   That is not easy to explain, though I have now spent years trying to write about our love of northern landscapes. We have hiked in northern British Columbia. Sean has lived in the Yukon. We have walked across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific and then kept going northward toward the Arctic. Even so, the coastlines, the mountains, the wildlife, and the weather of this region continue to resist n...

  “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away.” Pascal Mercier   Final Morning on Queen Elizabeth   There was no Daily Program waiting for us that morning, no “Notes from the Navigator” slipped quietly under the door to frame the day ahead. Instead, with our return to Vancouver imminent, what arrived in its place was our final invoice and onboard account.  Which really isn’t the same thing – one is interesting, the other is practical – though I understand why we had to get this. It had been delivered early, sometime before we woke. We glanced through it briefly, then slipped it into our packs, knowing that the charges would settle themselves through the card we had registered at the start of the journey. There was nothing left to plan now, nothing left to do beyond undertaking our own departure.   Despite the late night before, we were awake early. We moved slowly at first, taking our time, assuming that w...