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Jason Palmateer

Age: 34
Occupation: Educator
Number of Cruises: 1
Cruise Line: NCL
Ship: Sun
Sailing Date: August 1st, 2004
Itinerary: Alaska

My wife and I decided for our honeymoon to take a cruise to Alaska. This was one of the things my wife had always wanted to do, and after consulting with our travel agent, we had decided to go on the 7-day cruise, round-trip from Vancouver, on the NCL Sun. This was our first cruise, but we did have some expectations from talks with other couples who had cruised before and from talking with our parents. Our overall impression of the cruise is a very mixed bag of both good and bad. There were some things we enjoyed greatly about the cruise and our honeymoon, and there were some things that we were not as pleased about.

Getting There
We live in Baltimore and instead of flying directly to Vancouver, we decided to take some more time out in the Pacific Northwest. My wife had never been further west than St. Louis and I had never been further west than Mt. Rushmore, so instead of flying to Vancouver, we flew out on Wednesday to Seattle on Southwest. The difference in airfare was over $500, so it is an option to think about if you want to save some money. We flew out early in the morning from Baltimore and arrived around noon in Seattle, giving us a bit of time to explore Seattle. We spent one night in Seattle and then took Amtrak from Seattle to Vancouver. We highly recommend this. The train ride from Seattle to Vancouver was beautiful, as the train spent most of the journey bordering on Puget Sound and the ride was very comfortable.

Since our cruise started on Sunday, we had 3 days in Vancouver. We stayed at the Hycroft Bed and Breakfast in the Granville area of Vancouver. It is truly spectacular. The breakfasts there are to die for and the hospitality of the hosts was wonderful. We both really enjoyed all of our time in Vancouver. If you have the time in Vancouver, you should definitely see Stanley Park, Grouse Mountain, walk around Gastown and Granville Island and try all of the various restaurants in Vancouver (especially the Memphis BBQ place, which is better than 99.9% of the BBQ places in the South). If you don’t book your travel through NCL, it really is to your advantage to get to spend at least a day or two in Vancouver. Even with 3 days there, my wife and I are looking forward to getting back there in the future and exploring more of Vancouver and hopefully getting to Victoria.

Getting On-Board
On Sunday morning, we arrived at Canada Place around 11:30 AM. Everything was well organized for getting our cards and checking in. The only strange thing was that since this was our honeymoon, I was using the video camera to videotape as much as I could. After going through customs, we headed to the boat and I was recording our progress. We turned a corner and all of a sudden, a few of the NCL crewmember were telling me to turn off the camera. As far as I could tell, the only thing was that we were next to the ship and there was the place where the NCL crew takes your photo. Kind of strange that this was a “high” security area, but I guess they don’t want people to know how they take photos or something along those lines. We did the photos and then were told we could turn on the camera again. We got on board, cleaned our hands with the antiseptic gel and we off to our room. The staff seemed friendly, although no one offered to help us locate our room or take any of the luggage we had with us.

Room
We were both very pleased with our cabin. Initially, our cabin was going to be a cabin with a window, but our travel agent called us a few weeks before our cruise and got us an upgrade to a balcony. That was clearly worth the money we paid for the balcony. The room itself was nicely laid out and very functional. We were able to unpack all of our clothing (we had approximately 2 weeks of clothing, due to our time in Vancouver before the cruise and Seattle afterwards) and stow away our luggage below the bed. The bed was plenty comfortable and the couch next to it was also nice. The balcony was nice, with two deck chairs and a great view. The bathroom was very functional and amazing how they packed everything in it. We joked about how it was better than our first hotel in Seattle, but that’s a story for another time. That first day, we also met our cabin steward. He was very nice and the staff always took good care of the room. We never got towels made up as animals or anything like that, but we didn’t have any problems with our room. Overall, we felt very comfortable in our cabin and have no complaints about NCL.

Public Areas
The public areas on the ship were also nice in our opinion. Since this was the NCL Sun, most of the main public rooms were brightly lit. The Observation Lounge was very nice and we enjoyed reading there while the ship was at sea. The Stardust Lounge was also nice, although it looked like it might have been a bit overworked, as some of the chairs looked older than they really were. I did think the library on board was a bit small and the hours they kept were kind of limited, which was too bad, since they had a nice selection of games to play and books to read. The Atrium was picturesque. Our biggest complaint about the public areas though was the smoke from smokers. While I know that the cruise line cannot control the actions of the smokers, it did make some areas less than desirable and I know there were some areas of the ship we would not spend time in (casino, Dazzles) due to the cigarette smoke.

Food
Before I begin talking about the food, I do want to say that our expectations were high in the area of food. Both of our parents talked about how great food was on a cruise. While the food was plentiful on the cruise, it really was hit and miss about the quality of the food. Since we arrived on the ship very early (we boarded around 12:30), we were able to get lunch and since the only place that was open was The Garden Café, we ate there. As we figured out, Café is just a fancy French word for College Dormitory Cafeteria. We thought the food was average, but we chalked that up to the fact that they were in transition between the last cruise and our cruise and that the good food would be coming up lately. After everyone arrived onboard, they had a going away BBQ. While some of the items were wonderful (pretzel rolls), other items were lacking any quality (ribs). I think that in a way summed up what we got to experience on the cruise.

My wife and I always had breakfast in the Garden Café and they were the best meals that were served in that location. My wife was a particular fan of the potato rounds they served and I was glad that the bacon was all you could eat. The only problem was that seating was limited at times in the Café and in the morning, they hadn’t always finished cleaning the back deck for additional seating. But overall, there were no problems about breakfast (thankfully, we were only one deck below the Café, so it was easy enough to get food and bring it back to our cabin).

Lunches were the poorest meal of the day universally. Again, we would normally have our lunch in either the Garden Café or the Great Outdoor Café. The food was always plentiful, but the quality varied greatly. Some of the lunches were very tasty, while others were just not very good. The only really good lunch we had was in Juneau when they had an outdoor BBQ going on and the food was good for that (again, the pretzel rolls made the event).

Dinners, on the other hand, were normally very good, but I won’t go as far as excellent. We had three meals in the Seven Seas Dining Room, one each in the Four Seasons Dining Room, Pacific Heights, Ginza East Meets West and the Teppanyaki Restaurant. The three meals we had in the Seven Seas were very good. The first two nights there were excellent, although the flank steak on the last night was just not up to the standards I would put on flank steak. Pacific Heights is a free dining room, with healthy lifestyle choices. The food in there was above average, but nothing to rave about. I got meat loaf, and while it was certainly good, I’m not sure if I would have preferred to have meat loaf from Boston Market. For the places that we paid to eat at, the dinners were excellent. My wife and I enjoyed the Teppanyaki greatly, as everything was well prepared and our chef was nicely interactive with our table. The East Meets West was also excellent, with wonderful service and a beef tenderloin to die for. Unfortunately though, the night I was looking forward to most (lobster night) was the most disappointing meal I had on the ship. We decided to try The Four Seasons and that might have been our first mistake. The lobster that we both had was very tough and just not tasty at all. Second, the service was exceedingly poor. While most of the other diners had their server take their lobster out of the shell, our server never offered us that. We had to ask for our dessert menu and she didn’t take care of our drinks or anything else in a timely manner. While I shouldn’t allow for one event to mar the rest, I have to admit that it left a very sour taste in my mouth.

Snacks on board were also hit and miss. The ice cream bar was very good, but the hours were only during the afternoon, as they did not serve ice cream at all during the evenings. Around 11 at night, the Garden Café would bring out leftovers from earlier in the day (including flank steak one evening and a great Crab Bisque another night), but much of what they had out was well overcooked (or overheated). My wife and I would most of the time call up room service if we wanted a late night snack of pizza, fruit and chocolate mousse.

Activities and Staff
Overall, the activities aboard the Sun were ok, but not as great of a variety of activities as one might expect. My wife and I partook of trivia every day and that was enjoyable and a good way of getting to know some of our fellow passengers and some of the entertainment staff. However, that didn’t appear to be many other activities like that. There were no public tours of the boat and very few arts and craft activities. Every day, there was a crossword puzzle in the library, but since the library’s hours were random, that was hard to do on an everyday basis.

The nightly shows were better than average, but nothing great either. The juggler on our cruise was enjoyable. My wife and I really enjoyed the comedian, who did a great job of having material that was appropriate for everyone on the ship from the kids to the older folks. We did feel like the cruise director was a bit over the top and seemed like the type of woman you wouldn’t want to cross in a dark alley, but that might just have been her appearance on the cruise.

I think the thing that disappointed my wife and me the most though was that everything in the ship seemed to have some price to it. We were there on our honeymoon and randomly met other newlywed couples on the ship. However, there was nothing onboard for newlyweds (or anyone else for that matter). When I asked about this at the front desk, I was told that they did nothing for honeymooners, and that if I wanted anything done, I could pay extra for their special “honeymoon” package. While I understand that they are there to make a buck, it seemed like the entire attitude was “we aren’t going out of our way for you”. I know in talking to other couples that honeymooned on other cruise lines, that there was either a special cocktail hour or some other mixer event, but none on this cruise. That would have been a nice touch.

Other minor things included the fact that the “fabulous” chocolate feast was held in the afternoon for about 30 minutes. I know that we missed it, since it was from 3:30 to 5, but when we got there around 4:15, we were told we were too late. In addition, on the last day of the cruise, we tried to get a t-shirt, since we got a coupon for a discounted (not free, just discounted) t-shirt for prebooking our excursions. We were told since that desk had closed for the rest of the cruise, we couldn’t get one. Again, just not the way you want to be treated when you have spent a fair amount of money for going on the cruise.

Destinations
Honestly, the cruise could have been much worse, but I doubt no matter how bad the cruise was, it couldn’t take way from Alaska. It is wonderful and if you are ever thinking about taking a cruise, you have to go to Alaska at least once. I know my wife has already said that she wants to go back. You should make sure to get a balcony room, so that you can sit on a deck chair and just look at the scenery go by. I can’t say how much we both loved everything we saw in Alaska.

Our first stop was Ketchikan. At Ketchikan, we did the Saxman’s Village Totem Pole tour, which was great to see totem poles being made and all of the different artwork. We also did the Lumberjack show, which also was very enjoyable. The next stop was Juneau and we did the Whale Watching Tour, and that was great. I doubt we were out in the water more than 15 minutes before we saw some whales and throughout our 3-hour journey, we saw whales, seals and other Alaskan wildlife. We highly recommend that if you do go to Alaska and have never seen whales before, you have to do that. In Skagway, we did the entire tour thing of the White Pass Railway, the Salmon Bake and the Gold Rush Camp. That was very enjoyable too. The railway was a great journey to see the way pioneers flooded to Alaska back in the 1880s. It was rather expensive, but well worth it. We found that you could save money by just going into town and finding other tours that do the same thing and if you want to do, that’s great, but it was very convenient to do things through the boat. Just know you will pay more for that. As for the towns, they were all very similar. The same stuff was offered in all of the stores and you would even see the same stores in every place. That was kind of disappointing, as it seemed like there was no originality in those three ports.

However, since NCL is cheap, they make sure you have at least one unique experience and for us that was Wrangell. Wrangell is so small, it isn’t even shown on all the tourist trap junk you can buy in Ketchikan, Juneau or Skagway. I think most people thought that Wrangell was a waste of time. We, on the other hand, thought it would have just been better for everyone to stop a place like Victoria or Sitka. Wrangell is trying to develop a tourist industry and they have a very nice museum of the history of southeast Alaska and the Petroglyph Beach is unique and very interesting. However, it didn’t have a lot to it (none of the normal jewelry, tourist trap t-shirt places are in Wrangell) and it did feel like NCL was only going there because the docking fees were really cheap. For those people that like staying on the ship, you can just consider the time from when you board the ship in Skagway to the time you dock in Vancouver as time at sea.

Leaving
Leaving the ship was also easy. We were near the end of the unboarding process, since we were taking Amtrak to leave Vancouver. The only real problem we had was actually collecting all of our luggage. We had 5 pieces and when we went to collect it, the 5 pieces were scattered throughout the room they were using, which made things difficult. When I mentioned it to one of the NCL representatives there, she shrugged her shoulders, like “oh well, that happens.” The other minor problem was that everyone was trying to leave at the same time and Vancouver didn’t seem to have enough taxis to meet the demands at that time, so we waited over an hour to leave Canada Place.

Overall
As I said in the beginning, this cruise was really a mixed bag of good and bad. My wife and I had a great time and would highly recommend Alaska to anyone that wanted to go there. On the other hand, I would not recommend NCL at all. I felt that NCL did an average job of everything, which while not being horrible, definitely did not live up to our expectations of what a cruise should be about. On a cruise, you want (and deserve) to be pampered and have the time of your life. What we found on NCL was that if you wanted to be pampered, you were going to pay for it (by going to the spa or paying extra for one of the fine dining experiences). For how good the food should be on a cruise, NCL fell way short of the mark. When you paid for the extra restaurants, you got great food, but you shouldn’t have to pay for that on a cruise. While the staff was nice, they never seemed to go out of their way to make anything on the trip that special. It wasn’t a bad experience, and I’m not saying that this cruise might not be right for you or your family, but you do have to beware of the fact that this isn’t the “perfect” cruise or cruise line. My wife and I are looking forward to cruising again and we look forward to cruising again in Alaska, but I can’t say that we will be doing that on an NCL cruise.

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