In May of l994, to celebrate our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary, we booked a trip through Cruise Holidays on the Princess Cruise Line. We left Kansas City and flew into Seattle and from there we took Alaskan Air to Anchorage. We spent the night in Anchorage and took a tour of the city the next day. We saw where the Great Alaska Earthquake of l964 took place. The following day, we boarded a dome-covered train in Anchorage and traveled all day to Denali National Park. The highlight of this trip was seeing beautiful Mount McKinley (Denali) so clear that the crew of the train stopped the train to take pictures and were just as excited as were the passengers. We saw many moose and bald eagles and spent the night in Denali. The next day, we went by bus on a tour of Denali Park and in the afternoon we had a demonstration by one of the winners of the famous Iditron race and his sled dog. We left the next morning and went by train to Fairbanks where we spent two nights. We went on a riverboat where we toured an Indian village and saw how they smoked fish and made their own clothes. We then took a plane out of Fairbanks back to Anchorage. There we boarded a tour bus that went to Sitka where we boarded the ship. Our cruise took us through the inside passageway and we saw the beautiful Glacier Bay from our own private veranda but we were too early in the season to see any whales. During a stop in the city of Juneau we took a helicopter that landed on the Mendenhall Glacier. We spent about 3 hours on the glacier with a guide. The guide said it snowed about 300 days out of the year and that year it had snowed approximately 200 ft. right where we were standing. The guide took our picture standing in front of the American flag, which made us feel like we were standing on the moon? We concluded our trip by docking in Vancover, BC and took a bus back to Seattle where we flew home. We met a couple from Harrisonville, Missouri on our trip but never dreamed we would see them again. Due to some mix-up in luggage we got theirs and they got ours so we met in Harrisonville the next morning for coffee and have remained friends to this day. This trip has been one of the best trips we have ever taken to date.
Mendenhall Glacier
Regal Princess
Glacier Bay