Crystal Serenity 2016 North West Passage Cruise

We cleared the Crystal North West Passage cruise wait list with a guaranteed C1 cabin! We're going. It is very expensive, so here is hoping it is a great trip. Just when I had thought we'd take some time off traveling, I am checking 2 items off my long term bucket list!

According to the Cruise Critic roll call, the people who have been booked for months are already shut out of the limited excursions Crystal offers. When you visit such remote, non-tourist spots you don't usually have a lot of capacity or choice. I have to assume that in all of the remote ports, Crystal's shore excursions are the only thing to do ashore. In fact, my understanding is that since a number of them are zodiac wet landings that if you are not booked on a Crystal shore excursion that you aren't going ashore at all. Well, hopefully at some point we'll be able to arrange something with Crystal so that we'll be able to go ashore at every opportunity. Usually on expedition type cruises, the ship's staff and crew just does this without selling extra tours but not so on here. Also, they usually build in the flexibility to go where and when it is advantageous to be, so they don't sell excursions. Anyway. Time will tell. Crystal has never done this before. No one has done this before with such a large cruise ship. There are about a half dozen complimentary community visits and fingers crossed they will have capacity on those for every passenger aboard who wants to go.

Well, stayed tuned. Although this is far from a road trip, I plan to blog about it here instead of in a stand alone blog. We are shut out of Crystal's Denali pre-cruise, but have hopes and plans to do our own version independently, so it should start out as a road trip anyway. We booked Amtrak home from New York at the end. That should be an easy day home! Knock on wood. We re-used those infamous Delta miles to book one-way First Class seats to Anchorage. Fingers crossed! After they never got us to Orlando, you can imagine my trepidation, but Clay was gung-ho to give Delta a chance to redeem themselves.

It's very exciting...