Alaska here we come , Ovation 22 -30 September.

[Traveler]

6 hours ago, Matt said:

Caught up on the rest of your cruise. Looks like you had a great time. Hope the trip home wasn't terrible

Going back was quite OK,  we stayed one extra day in Seattle , quick flight to LA and 14 hours flight back , most of the time we slept so not bad.

[Traveler]

Embarkation and some thoughts.

Last day came quick, although we got another day day before our flight we still had to go to the airport to rent a car.

I schedule a transfer with RCL (28 $ PP) and we did self carry of the luggage , we both love the fact that the luggage is with us until the last minute and no need to think what to leave for the morning and how to pack the left over to take with us. What we did not took into consideration is time we had to wait for the elevators. As always I was sent to bring some food , as lesson learn from pervious cruises we took some cutlery the evening before so I will have less things to carry. Around 7:50 am we went out with the luggage to go to floor 5 and wait for our number to be called. it took us 25 minutes to get into elevator and even that it was to first take the elevator up and only then go down , for sure we saw issue with the elevators before (which made us just use the stairs) but at the morning it was something else. Once we finally went down we continued to the terminal , it was very easy and no elevators were needed  .Exiting the terminal was very quick , the immigration officer just wanted to see we have US visa (for the last time as we just got a waver) and after 5 minutes we were out. We locate the shuttle , no one bother to checked if we have tickets or not, once the buss was full it started the way to the airport which took around 25 minutes. The shuttle is arriving to the shuttle bus center and no to the terminal itself which means you need to walk for extra 10 minutes to arrive to the terminal. We took the shuttle to the rental center and got our car. We knew the hotel will not be ready yet so we secure our suitcases and went to a near buy store to purchase several things in our list. For hotel we took the Holiday inn express and suites in shout center , its 10 minutes from the airport , new hotel and walking distance from many restaurants and a mall. its just a cross from the Green river and adjust to the green river trail which we did part of it. 

 

We got to do early check in , the hotel rooms are very nice (bigger than most of the holiday inn express which I stayed in) it also had a small refrigerator and microwave and most important two , yes two working elevators. We walked over to the local cheese cake factory for lunch and later got back to the room . Tons of restaurants around but we were tired and went with something we knew will be good. 
At the morning we eat the basic breakfast did checkout and went back to the airport , everything went OK and we went on a 2 hour flight to LA followed by 13 hours flight back home which went mostly by sleeping and watching some movies.

Several thought :

The ship - Ovation is a nice ship , there were some places it felt crowded but I guess it its due to the weather mainly.
Elevators - Something was wrong there , at least two elevators did not worked and it elevator seems to be very slow , good we could use the stairs most of the times
MDR - We went to the MDR only once since we were with My Time Dinging and it only started around 7 PM , the one time we went we got a very nice service and the food was tasty and enough , the main issues are the lines to the MTD if you reserved a time slots , the lines were crazy.
WJ food - The WJ buffet was never crowded which was nice , food was OK , it seems that quality went down comparing to pervious years , somethings were missing.
Cabin - We were at ocean view cabin , it was clean with ton of places to store our luggage and other stuff.
Bar services - No issues , never crowded and the service was very good.
Entertainment -   We saw several show , nothing to write home about , missing a big Broadway and ice show , the Spectra show was very nice from technical perspective. 
Weather - Weather was not as cold as we thought - light coat was enough, no need special things for Alaska beside a good per of tracking shoes.
Shore excursion - If there is one thing we are sorry not to reserve is an helicopter trip to the glaciers , we did planned to visit the glacier but it got canceled , I hope we will still be able to do it before it will be gone. I would suggest to make sure your cruise to Alaska is entering to one of the glaciers.
 

Until the next time .

 

[Traveler]

Oh forgot about Internet.  

As expected for Alaska it was very slow and I was glad I did not had to connect using teams or VPN as it would not wor. Also in land , using Tmobile got me very poor connectivity.