2021 will be a big year for us as there’s a big birthday coming up in it and it will also mark the 25th anniversary of our first date. We’d been talking recently about needing to find one or two big cruises for that year to mark the occasions. We like to find excuses.
For the 20th anniversary of our first date we’d travelled to the southern hemisphere for the first time; that was our so-very-awesome Star Princess, South America cruise. And last year we’d used the excuse of our 10th wedding anniversary to head back to Asia on Diamond Princess. Which, by the way, was also so-very-awesome.
So, in the last couple of weeks we started taking a look at itineraries for two years time. It’s not that easy to find many listed, as it turns out. We’d been talking about the Middle East and India areas because that’s one part of the world we’ve not been to at all but couldn’t find anything at all in the first few months of the year that we liked; everything was either too short a duration or only barely tickled India with the bulk of port stops being in the U.A.E. We’d like to visit the U.A.E. at some point but it’s not got the appeal of India. We’re hoping that something attractive appears for later in 2021 when cruise itineraries are added to over the course of this year.
This led us to considering again South America, Asia, and Antarctica regions. Antarctica is one we really need to plan for because we’re after something that marries up luxury with expedition; the bigger ships we like to cruise with won’t do landings and the really good expeditionary ships seem to lack some of the finer things we like about cruising. We’re also aware that the Polar Code which governs access to that region of the world by cruise ships will be getting more restrictive in a few years so we want to wait to see what the upshot of those changes are.
Filtering some cruise search results by the wonderful Asia region suddenly highlighted something we’d not considered: Alaska.
Alaska’s not in Asia, is it?
No, don’t panic. Your geography knowledge is sound. Alaska, at time of writing and barring some really interesting tectonic shifting before you read this, is not in Asia. The cruise we spotted started in Japan (which is in Asia), cruised across the Pacific, hit Alaska, and ended in Canada.
There’s a reason we’d not considered Alaska until this point: it’s next to impossible to find a cruise itinerary for that region that is longer than 7 days. What’s so special about 7 days? Well, for us, as we work for a living, a cruise that far from home means we have to typically tack on an extra day from our annual leave allowance either side for travelling. We accept that for fortnight-length trips but for a week we can’t really justify it.
We’ve gone and booked this cruise. Yokohama to Vancouver.
Other than the departure port of Yokohama everywhere else will be new for us. In addition we’ll be crossing the International Date Line which is something we’ve never done before. While my wife has been to Canada, I haven’t so that will be something else to check off. Of course, there are the Alaskan glaciers to view so that will make glaciers spotted in four countries (we’ve already seen them in Norway, Iceland, and Chile). And there’s also the chance of seeing the Northern Lights at that time of the year and at those latitudes especially since photos have been going up on social media channels recently of the spectacle getting seen from Star Princess in that region.
Yes, we’ve seen them before, but you’d have to be some kind of oddball if you ever got bored of looking at them. Besides, we’ve only seen them from Iceland. They could be completely different in North America. It’s the sort of thing we have to find out.
The ship is the Sun Princess so, yes, unsurprisingly, it’ll be another Princess Cruises cruise. What can we say? We know what we like. We’ve never been on Sun Princess or any ship of her design before so that will be another thing to check off. She’s a Sun-class vessel, fairly old as far as ships go these days having been built in 1995. She’s got one sister ship in the Princess fleet – Sea Princess, – one in the P&O (Australia) fleet – Pacific Explorer, – and one in the P&O (UK) fleet – Oceana. At around 2000 passengers she’ll be one of the smallest ships we’ll have travelled on too and it will be very interesting to see how her layout and features compare to what we’re used to on the Grand-class vessels we typically cruise on.
One thing we’re quite excited about will be the room. We’ve decided to splash the extra cash on a Mini-Suite. Effectively, this will be two normal-sized rooms rearranged and with some additional features such as a separate bath and shower. The balcony, though narrow, extends for the width of the two rooms giving it plenty of space. Images from the Princess site’s Sun Princess page are below:
We’ve discovered completely by accident over the past few years that when we book cabins on cruise ships we tend to go for Deck 10, Forward, and this particular cruise will be no exception. We love Star Trek but we honestly never realised that we were subconsciously channelling the location of the Enterprise D’s lounge and bar until recently when we also noticed that our cabin was in the cleaning area designated Section 31 on the ship. It’s good to be a nerd.
A peruse of YouTube has also led me to this video of a room on Sun Princess taken a couple of years ago with identical layout a little farther back on the ship.
To see all our upcoming cruises as well as all the places we’ve already cruised and on which ships please check out the Cruise History page.
Featured image for this post is of the Sun Princess at Nagasaki, taken by Suzumiya Haruka, and released under a CC By Attribution 2.0 licence.