Thursday, July 17, 2008

Alaska Cruise Trip - Day 1

      My husband and I recently returned from a wonderful trip. We took a cruise to Alaska on Princess Cruises' "Star Princess" ship.   We left out of Seattle on July 6th and returned on the 13th.   It was a great trip and I'm going to be blogging about each day of the trip.  I will include pics and stories about the trip as well tips for people who might be thinking about taking a cruise to Alaska in the future. 
      We left home on the 5th of July and flew to Seattle on Virgin America. This was our first time on this airline and it was pretty interesting.  It has all kinds of mood lighting and purple plastic on the interior and each seat gets their own entertainment system that includes movies, television, video games and a food ordering system.  The movies and premium television require payment to use them but most everything else is free. 
       The plane wasn't very full and we had a great opportunity to upgrade to first class for a very low cost so we took advantage of that.  We were served a nice meal and got to use all the entertainment services without paying extra.  I watched "Horton Hears a Who" and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Chad watched "Sweeney Todd" but was sad that the movie didn't end by the time the plane landed.  Most of movies available were too long for our flight to Seattle.  But we had a nice time being pampered and it was a great start to our trip. 
       Once we arrived in Seattle we caught a cab to the Red Lion on 5th Avenue.   It cost 30 dollars for the cab ride from the airport.  The hotel is located in the center of downtown Seattle and surrounded by restaurants and shopping. It's a great location for anyone who wants to see downtown on foot.  It's very nice and updated and I would definitely stay there again. We settled in and then decided to take a monorail to the space needle. The monorail was only 2 blocks from the hotel so that was very convenient. We got to the space needle very quickly and bought tickets to go up to the top.   It was very fun and we enjoyed the beautiful view. The sunlight at that time was great for picture taking too. 
        After leaving the Space Needle we were starving and tired so we took the monorail back to the hotel area and ate dinner at P.F. Changs.   After that we went back to the hotel and went to bed early so we would be ready for our big day ahead of us.  It was nice to arrive in Seattle the day before the cruise. It took a lot of the stress out of getting to the ship on time and we had extra time in case our luggage got lost or the flight was delayed. 

The Space Needle

Chad enjoying the space needle

The view to the south from the Space Needle

A very interesting building that we could see from our hotel room

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So far so good - of course with our background, you might want a cliff hanger at the end of each day to tease the next. For instance, "Right before we fell asleep, a wolf knocked at our door."

:)