Our three stops in Alaska were all back to back days. Unfortunately, the middle day was the day when I was sickest, and the lack of sleep I got the night before didn’t help. I’m not sure why I was so fitful – maybe just because I was sick – but it was the only night when I was pretty much up all night long, and then I woke up super early for a special event that was my most-looked-forward-to part of the trip.

Back when Jason and I first planned our Planniversary, we booked our cruise for May 2020 on Royal Caribbean. We’d always sailed Celebrity before, but on the dates we needed, Celebrity didn’t have any itineraries that took a side passage down Endicott Arm to see Dawes Glacier. I’d heard about this particular side trip, and how you could see the glacier and potentially see it calve, and that was a definite Must on our trip. So we booked RC, and then there was covid, and then our trip was canceled and rescheduled over and over again, each time losing money in our RC account until it was just not worth it to book with them. Honestly, Royal Caribbean left a really bad taste in both our mouths, so with the last booking, we went back to our standby. (Since then, I’ve seen photos of the food on RC, and bleagh, I’m glad we go Celebrity!!) Happily, Celebrity had available itineraries that went to Dawes and also sailed in/out of Seattle this time around!

Anyway, we had to get up super early for this part of the trip. It was very cold, and we were all dressed in jackets and beanies and such. I wished so badly for gloves, the only cold-weather gear I hadn’t brought! The ship doesn’t go all the way to the glacier, but instead it goes as far as it can safely before turning around, and you see Dawes in the distance. Ice chunks from previous calving float all around you, and the landscape is awe-inspiring.

Tbh, I was initially a bit disappointed in Dawes. We were far enough away that it was hard to see, and there was no calving – or so I thought. Later, when I uploaded my photos, it turned out that I actually managed to capture a moment when several chunks of ice had just dropped off the glacier into the water, creating a huge splash (photo with boat above). I just hadn’t seen it with the naked eye. Now that was cool! Plus, I got some of my favorite photos on this part of the trip.

That portion of the day took place around 6am, and we got into Juneau about midday. By this point, I was in the worst part of my cold, and considered bowing out of the excursion completely. The tour sounded a lot more strenuous than I could handle while sick – a mile trek into the rainforest up a 600-foot elevation gain during one stop. But the tour was also listed as “mild” (our photo safari the day before had been “medium”) and so I realized that the elevation gain and “trek” were all going to be done via vehicle. Not what I’d planned when we signed up, but doable for sick-Manda. We loaded up on a (very crowded, not particularly comfy) bus and headed off to Mendenhal Glacier and the Tongass National Forest.

Of the excursions we went on this time around, most were small-group tours. This one was the exception, taking two busloads of about 80 total people out to the two locations. It was four hours long, lots of driving, and nothing like I’d been expecting. If I hadn’t been sick, I would’ve been extremely disappointed. As it was, I just wanted to take some pictures, go back to the boat, and sleep. Heh. The glacier was beautiful, but we had less than 45 mins to explore the park. The rainforest and the gardens we went to were also beautiful, but we literally had five mins of free time to take photos at the top of the mountain and about ten mins down in the gardens. Four hours of excursion, and a total of an hour of it wasn’t sitting in uncomfortable vehicles.

Lesson learned: large group excursions aren’t really the way to go. We definitely preferred our small group excursions in Ketchikan and Skagway! At least I got a few good photos out of it, even if there weren’t nearly as many as I would have liked to have time for!

For more/better photos, see my Instagram: @pookasluagh