It will be:
7-day Alaskan Explorer aboard Holland America Eurodam
8/24 – 8/31/2019
(Note: It’s next year (2019) and not this year (2018)…

This cruise has an almost identical itinerary (except for Sitka) to our first ever cruise aboard Norwegian Pearl. The reason we decided to do another Alaska cruise was that:

1. We just wanted to do another cruise!
2. It’s a quick 7-day round-trip from Seattle. (Since we live in Seattle area, no flights involved.)
3. We still work, so we can’t take long vacations every year.
4. Glacier Bay was nice enough that we don’t mind seeing it again.
5. There’s another HAL 7-day round-trip from Seattle, which goes to Sawyer Glacier instead of Glacier Bay, but it’s on Oosterdam (sister ship to Westerdam) and we wanted to try a different ship.

It would be interesting to see how things have changed in the cities we’ve visited before (or how much the glaciers have receded…!)

It’s still a looooong time away… Can’t wait!

We didn’t want to, but alas, it was time to disembark. 😦

But we had one more excursion before our flight home to Seattle. We boarded the bus for our Everglades Airboat Ride tour, which took us to Sawgrass Recreation Park.

They had some rescue animals, like Florida panther, leopards, fennec fox, and snakes. Most of them were exotic pets that the irresponsible owners could no longer care for. It also had some alligators; one albino and one that was humongous. They also had some baby alligators that they let you hold and pet.

After looking through these animals and listening to the caretakers lectures, we went on an airboat ride on the Everglades.

We did see one alligator. Apparently, it was the first one they’d seen in several days, so I guess we were lucky, but we already saw some crocodiles in Costa Rica, so that took some excitement out of the encounter. LOL

After the airboat ride, we were supposed to get back on the bus, which will take us to the airport. However, one lady was missing. We waited for a while, but as we had a couple of people who had a flight that was leaving in less than 2 hours, we had to leave her behind. We later found that the lady somehow ended up following a different tour group… Oh well. Hopefully she eventually found her way to the airport and got reunited with her belongings that she left on our bus.

The bus dropped us off at Fort Lauderdale Airport at around 1 pm. We still had 6 hours to kill, so we decided to go to downtown Fort Lauderdale for lunch. They have a free trolley to the downtown, so we waited for it, but it wouldn’t come, so we decided to just take a taxi. Big mistake. The driver kept getting lost (probably on purpose)… After ending up in a dead end twice, we told him to just get us off. 😦

I thought we were pretty close to where we wanted to go, but because we weren’t quite sure where we started, we got lost. We walked along a pretty canal (with very expensive looking boats lined up), but we couldn’t find any restaurants we wanted to eat at. All the restaurants we passed by were full of loud, drunk people.

We hoped to run into the downtown trolley to take us back to the airport, but it never came, so we had no choice but to take a taxi again. But there were no taxis at the taxi stand. After some wait, one taxi finally came, but there were 2 other couples in front of us in the line. With no other taxis in sight, we decided to share the taxi (it was a van), even though we were all going to different places. We found that one of the couples were on the same cruise as we were, and the other couple was on a different Holland America ship. Small world.

After dropping those couples off at their hotels, we finally returned to the airport. I was hot, hungry, tired, and miserable, and was ready to go home.

As our plane took off, I saw a Holland America ship leaving the port. I couldn’t tell which ship it was (there were three Holland America ships at the port that day), but later confirmed that it was indeed Westerdam. It was nice to get one last glimpse of our ship.

And that’s the end of our cruise. I’ll post more photos and videos, as well as more detailed reviews of the ship and the ports, later.

Today, we sailed the Caribbean toward Fort Lauderdale, passing Cuba.

I’m sad to say tonight is the last night of our cruise… Now we must go back to reality. No more getting multiple course meals served three times a day, no more room stewards to make our beds and give us clean towels, no more stepping out to our huge balcony for the view of the ocean. 😦

We handed out thank-you cards to some of the wonderful crew and said our good-byes, then we packed. On our flight to San Diego, we ended up exceeding the weight limit by 7 lbs. and had to pay extra fee, so we made sure to pack all the heavy stuff in our carry-on luggage. Hope we don’t have to pay extra this time.

Tomorrow, because our flight doesn’t leave till 7 pm and we have quite a bit of time to kill, we signed up for the Everglades Airboat Ride, so I guess we have one last fun left before our vacation ends.

We really enjoyed our cruise on Holland America, and we hope to do another one soon. We’ll probably do a quick 7-day Alaska cruise from Seattle next.

Today was the last port day of this cruise (nooo!)

It was Georgetown in Cayman Islands. It’s a tender port, so we took a tender (life boat) to the shore, while the ship remained anchored offshore.

We took a mini bus to Dolphin Cove. The mini bus appeared to have been a former public bus in Japan, as it still had Japanese signs, like no smoking and wear seat belts. They must have bought the used van from Japan or something.

In Dolphin Cove, we swam with a dolphin. We pet the dolphin, danced with dolphin, got a kiss from the dolphin, got a belly ride and boogie push. It was quite an experience.

After the dolphin swim, we got on a boat and went out to Stingray City sandbar. It’s a shallow water where stingrays hang around, and we were able to touch and feed them.

Tomorrow is the last sea day before it’s time to disembark…

Today was another At Sea day.

The sea was still somewhat rough, and I spent most of the morning and afternoon in bed, watching episodes of Downton Abbey on TV.

The sea got calmer in the evening, and I managed to have dinner in the dining room.

Afterwards, we went to a cocktail reception for suite passengers, but that was a total waste of time. The Cruise Director introduced the Hotel Director, which was the host of this reception. At least that’s what we think she did. The place was loud with everyone chatting and the speakers were facing away from us, so we didn’t understand a word she said.

In any case, that was the end of the reception, and the rest were just everyone chatting. I think most people were just here for the free cocktails. We left to see the tonight’s show, which was a mildly funny comedian.

I really don’t have any pictures to post today, so I’ll post this.

I guess they are switching to a different vendor to run the ship’s shops, and unfortunately, this was the last cruise for the current vendor and they tried to sell off all the remaining merchandise, so we only had limited merchandise, then they closed the shops early. Starting with the next cruise, they’ll have a new vendor and new merchandise, but that won’t do us any good. That was one bummer of this cruise, as I wanted to buy a coffee cup with the ship’s name on it.