2024-08-16: Sealife & Cruise Ships

Darrell, Amanda, and Michael woke up around 8:00am this morning and headed down to the hotel lobby for breakfast. We let Patrick sleep a bit longer to help him recover from the cold he was fighting. We grabbed a plate of food and brought it back to the room for him. We got cleaned up and packed all our gear. Patrick was feeling better this morning. Not 100%, but definitely on the mend. We checked in with Tim, but found out he was now ill and hadn’t slept much. We were supposed to meet up with him, but he wasn’t feeling up to it unfortunately so we carried on without him. We checked out of the hotel at 10:00am. We asked if the hotel could hold onto our bags while we explored for the morning/afternoon. They asked what our travel plans were. When we mentioned we were boarding the cruise, they offered to take our bags to the ship for us. How convenient! We gave them our suitcases and headed into town.

Seward has a free shuttle that runs through town. We made our way to the shuttle stop across the street and only had to wait a few minutes for a shuttle to arrive. Unfortunately, the shuttle didn’t have four seats available. The driver told us there would be another shuttle in 5 or 10 minutes. He drove off an we waited. It was a good 25 minutes before the next shuttle arrived. Again, he said he only had three seats available. But, as he said that, a couple of people got off the bus which opened up enough seats. The driver gave some information on the area while he drove between the stops. A few minutes later, we arrived in front of the Alaska Sealife Center.

We bought tickets for the Sealife Center and started exploring. They are a rescue organization that tries to rehabilitate animals that have been orphaned or injured. They had a couple of seals, a bunch of birds (including puffins!), and a couple of sea lions. There were displays about how they track the animals, climate change, fishing in the area, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill. They also had a few tanks where you could touch some of the sea life such as anemones, sea stars, prawns, and crabs. We spent a couple of hours exploring the center.

We checked in with Tim again, but he still wasn’t feeling up to getting together with us unfortunately. We wandered down 4th Avenue to find a place for some lunch. We ended up in a restaurant called Chattermark. The selection wasn’t huge but it had a couple of unique items on the menu. Darrell ordered a reindeer meatloaf which was pretty tasty. Amanda ordered the fish & chips which came with a piece of halibut and a piece of salmon. It’s unusual for salmon to be used in fish & chips. She enjoyed it but found the salmon a little overcooked which is probably why they don’t usually use it in fish & chips.

After lunch, we still had over an hour to kill before we could check in for the cruise. We decided to walk back to the harbor area instead of taking the shuttle to kill some time. We made our was a few blocks East to the waterfront. We passed several campground areas and were looking at the license plates to see where people had travelled from. We walked past some pillars that once supported a pier before the 1964 earthquake destroyed the area. We walked along a little creek where we saw some salmon swimming upstream which was pretty cool. Seward is a neat little town.

We made our way to the cruise terminal and arrived shortly after 3:00pm. Tim came to the terminal to say goodbye. We chatted with him for a while and said our goodbyes. He was heading back to Anchorage via bus in the evening before flying home tomorrow. At 3:30pm, we checked in for the cruise and made our way on board. We dropped our backpacks in our rooms and started to explore the ship. We were on this ship back in 2019 so were fairly familiar with it already.

Three of our four suitcases showed up and we got ourselves unpacked, We were wondering why Michael’s suitcase didn’t arrive with the others when we realized he bought a knife as a souvenir in Anchorage. His suitcase probably got flagged for having a weapon. Sure enough, we got a call a little later asking us to come down to open the suitcase so they could take a look. We headed to deck 2 and Michael handed over the knife. They will give it back when we get off the ship.

We finished unpacking and relaxed in the rooms for a bit before heading up for some dinner. The ship started pulling out of dock as we were finishing dinner. The kids wandered off to a meet and greet for the teenagers while Amanda and Darrell headed to an upper deck to watch the ship sail through Resolution Bay. At 9:15, Darrell and Amanda went to the welcome aboard show in the theatre while the kids went to play dodgeball with the teen club. The show introduced the Radiance orchestra and the singers and dancers. We met our cruise director Marvin. Then a comedian, Graig Murphy, took the stage. He was pretty good and made us laugh at several jokes.

After the show we all returned to the room and got ready for bed. It had been a busy day.