ALASKA ADVENTURE 2024: An Inauspicious Start - June 28

When I was a kid, one of my parents' favorite movies was "The Out-of-Towners" (1970), starring Jack Lemmon. I don't know how well it has aged, but I remember it being the very funny story of ill-fated travelers, a husband and wife, who suffer a cascade of misfortunes. Some of our family vacations have felt an awful lot like that - without the hilarity! Our "Alaska Adventure" (2024) began that way in its first 24 hours.

Debbie and I first began dreaming of going to Alaska in August 2019. That's when we visited Glacier National Park in Montana. We both agree it was one of the best vacations we ever took, being awed again and again by its incredible beauty and grandeur. Every view, every vista, every landscape, was gorgeous. Some of the people we met at Glacier told us, "If you like it here, you'd love Alaska. It's like Glacier National Park on steroids!"  

So Alaska was added to our bucket list. We decided we would like to go there "someday." But with our increasing health concerns since 2020, we realized that we had better not put off a physically demanding trip like that too long. When a spot opened up in our calendar for the summer of 2024, we determined we'd better take the opportunity to visit The Last Frontier. 

After doing quite a bit of research, both on the internet and in talking with friends and family who had made the trek, several of them during the summer of 2023, I knew I wanted to book a cruise tour with Princess which would involve a Voyage of the Glaciers cruise as well as time spent in the interior of Alaska. There are many such options, but we finally nailed down an "Off The Beaten Path" tour for June 29-July 12 aboard the Royal Princess, departing from Vancouver and terminating in Anchorage.

In the months leading up to our trip, we made a lot of plans and preparations. We watched YouTube videos of our ship and several of our destinations. We wrote up packing lists. We googled questions. We bought items we figured we would need. We booked our shore excursions. And, before we knew it, the time had come to depart.

Because a trip of this magnitude hinges on getting aboard the ship on time, we decided it would be prudent to fly on Friday for our cruise departing on Saturday and stay overnight at a hotel in Vancouver, even though this added several hundred dollars to our trip. We didn't want to miss the boat! (I mean, ship.) In spite of this wise move, our trip still almost began in disaster.

We arrived at the Cleveland Airport in plenty of time, nearly three hours before our scheduled departure, passports at the ready. Yet even before going through security, we noticed a problem. Our first flight to a connection in Dallas, still a couple of hours before boarding, was already listed as delayed. We soon began getting a succession of texts from the airline telling us that our departure was being pushed back again and again. Debbie checked with the airline's customer service attendant, and we were told our plane was experiencing a mechanical difficulty and had not yet even boarded in Dallas for its flight to Cleveland! We strategically rebooked our next flight from Dallas to Vancouver to a later time because we knew we would never be able to make our original connection.  

To make a long story a little shorter, our plane finally arrived a couple hours late. We flew to Dallas, where we were then held on the plane on the tarmac for about a half hour, waiting for a gate to open. We raced through the Dallas airport to another terminal to catch the later flight to Vancouver we had rebooked. We just made it, but that plane, too, was delayed with mechanical difficulties! We boarded late but were then de-planed for maintenance because the problem had not been fixed. It was awfully hot sitting at the gate because the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) was not working. One of its jobs is to air condition the plane while it is on the ground.

I will confess to having a bit of panic attack at this point. As we were reboarding the plane, I noticed a little sign that said all international flights arriving at Dallas after midnight would have to hold the passengers on the plane until customs opened at 5 a.m. Doing some quick math, I realized that we would now be arriving at Vancouver around 1 a.m., and if Canadian customs had the same policy, we could quite possibly be kept on the plane for hours after landing. On a potentially un-air conditioned plane. After the day we had had, I honestly didn't think I could handle that. I asked a flight attendant if my suspicions were correct, but before she could give me an answer, the pilot made an announcement: "I am NOT taking this plane to Canada tonight."  Apparently the APU still wasn't fixed, so we deplaned for a second time.

Now nearing 11 p.m., it was settled that the plane was grounded for the night and we would leave on a 5 a.m. flight on another plane. There went any chance of staying at our pricey nonrefundable hotel in Vancouver. The airline offered to put us up at a Dallas hotel for what would be, like, 2 hours, but fortunately the silver lining for us was that we knew a night owl in Dallas we would like to spend some time with!

Debbie called our son Daniel and he immediately offered to come pick us up. Daniel and his friends AJ and Missy were soon there. We left the airport and went to a convenience store for some quick nourishment, stopped to see their new place they are moving into this summer, and then chilled at their old place until it was time to return to the Dallas Airport. Getting to go through airport security again was a bonus, especially the TSA patdown/impromptu prostate examination.

Back aboard our same-as-the-previous-night's plane, we soon learned it still had the same problem: the APU had remained unfixed again. It was getting hot again. The pilot offered that anyone who felt it was unsafe and wanted to get off could do so. Several took him up on it. I had never heard of this before and was seriously considering it. but we took our lives in our hands and went for it instead. We wanted to go to Alaska! To my surprise, we touched down safely in Vancouver - just 11 hours later than originally scheduled.

We used our vouchers from the airline to get breakfast at a Canadian institution, Tim Horton's. The airport in Vancouver was nice, but the pigeons inside did weird me out a bit.

We booked transfers to the cruise ship from the airport because we had been planning on doing that from the hotel that we never got to stay at. The bus had problems finding space near the port for us to be dropped off nearby.  Finally, the driver just let us out on the street to make a run for it. After several wrong turns and a bit of confusion, we got through the security and screening process and were aboard the Royal Princess by 1 p.m. in time for our 4 p.m. departure. After an inauspicious start, our Alaskan Adventure was ready to begin!