National parks, natural beauty and a bit of Disney wonder! PRE-TRIP AND DURING TRIP REPORT COMPLETED About This Page:

[goofysdtr]

UGH! The waiting would drive me nuts! Hoping you have a flight back home by now!

[KSSteve]

Loving your TR. I am currently planning our trip to Seattle for our cruise on the Wonder for next July. Fortunately, we will be driving from Phoenix to Seattle, which is only a 2 day drive. Much less driving than our cross country trip to Florida in 2009.

[Wendyismyname]

I've been looking forward to this trip for I think as long as you guys have!! Cannot wait to hear more!

Originally Posted by chezp

For someone like me who lives in such a small country – seriously, from Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall in the south west of England to John O’Groats in Scotland, which are basically the two tips of the mainland United Kingdom, it’s only 874 miles by road. That’s really nothing when you start looking at distances in the States. :

Hmmmmmmmmm..........I didn't realize it was that close??

[duck addict]

Originally Posted by chezp

Well, you're ahead of me there, as I've never made it to Scotland yet. We will be visiting Edinburgh for the day next year and that'll be my first ever visit there.

You mean I got to Scotland before you

[chezp]

Originally Posted by lsugirlinutah

What an amazing adventure! If you are still planning to come to Salt Lake, I live in a suburb (20 or so minutes from Provo). If you want a PP to take you to dinner, let me know! I would love it!

We are still going to be there. We'll be staying the night in Orem on Sunday 11 September. If you'd like to meet up, then drop me a private message, as we always love to meet PassPorters.

[chezp]

Originally Posted by Wendyismyname

Hmmmmmmmmm..........I didn't realize it was that close??

Very good!

[KMB733]

Reminds me of waiting to book on Southwest! At least you got you outbound flights book. Can't wait to see what happens with the return flight!

[Colexis Mom]

Glad you were able to get your flight in! So stressful trying to schedule everything and wait for openings!

[unewillow]

Goodness...that's A LOT of planning. So looking forward to reading your TR and seeing your (sure to be gorgeous) pictures.

[chezp]

Pre-trip report – part four: are we ever going to find a return flight home with our miles?

Something that was released at the end of 2010 were the shore excursions for Disney’s cruises to Alaska. I know there had been a lot of expectation amongst those of us going on the Alaskan cruises and I was personally delighted to see them finally published. At first, I was very excited, and slightly overwhelmed, by the choice of excursions. The cruises would only be making three stops. In order, those were Skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan, and for each stop, there must’ve been at least 50 excursions. I printed out the summary of all of them and it ran to about 70 pages!

Firstly, we narrowed down the list, taking out all of the tours that were particularly active. Words like “hiking”, “canoeing” or “ziplining” immediately got zapped from the shortlist, as obviously did any that were aimed at children or teenagers. That still left us with quite a selection, so during the Christmas and New Year break, I settled down to read the details of all the remaining ones. I quickly narrowed them down a lot further – and I mean a lot further. There wasn’t one in any of our destinations that was immediately grabbing me and screaming out to me.

What didn’t help was the price of the excursions. As you’d expect from Disney, the prices were high, but they were way higher than I’d expected. Some of them, admittedly the real signature and once-in-a-lifetime experiences, were $500 plus each, but many of them were more than $200 each, which was more than I’d expected, and I’m sure it’s much more than we paid for the excursions on our Med cruise.

It probably didn’t help that I already had some ideas in my head about what I wanted to do in each location. In Skagway, my heart was set on taking the White Pass Route railroad, and there were some all day excursions, adding in other things that did offer that. However, while researching, I discovered that there would also be a steam service running on the day that we’d be in port. I couldn’t see that on the shore excursions list, so I figured we’d probably book that directly. At least then we could do a round trip, rather than the train one way and a coach on the way back. With the timings they were giving, it would still give us time to look around Skagway before the train would depart. Eventually the steam train did appear as a shore excursion, but for a staggering $60 each more than booking it directly!

When it came to Juneau, whale watching was a must, as I knew that it was a big thing here. Mark loves whales, and the last time we tried a whale watching cruise off the shore of Monterey, it was a nightmare, to put it mildly! It was so rough out there, it wasn’t true. Although we had some whale sightings, it was in between Mark throwing up over the back of the boat, and I was almost comatose after taking seasickness tablets.

I found a Disney shore excursion that covered that and a visit to the Mendenhall Glacier, which is what I wanted to do, but again the price was extremely high, so I started to dig around and look for an independent operator. It’s not something I’d usually do, but as cruise ships are the main source of income during the summer, nearly all of them made a huge point of saying that they’d never once missed getting anyone back to their ship, which gave me a lot more courage. Perhaps a smaller boat would also be better, as with fewer people on board, we should have better viewing opportunities.

Ketchikan was the only one I was struggling with. I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do here, although the Saxman Totem Park appealed to me. I got as far as a shortlist and that was it. I figured we’d work out what we wanted to do in time for the booking window to open at the beginning of June. After all, we had plenty of time yet....

Our Disney Dream spring breakwas fast approaching, so all my attention went into planning that. After all, I had my initial plans in place for this trip and all I needed to do was find that elusive return flight home... I kept an eye on the Virgin Atlantic website. I’d regularly see flights in November and the occasional one in October, but nothing whatsoever for September.

I was starting to get a bit crazy and started looking at all the other destinations that Virgin fly to in the States. Nothing for San Francisco or Las Vegas either. There was availability for Washington DC, New York and Miami, but all of those would mean connecting flights from one coast to the other and that would lose us our final day of precious Disneyland time.

Finally, a flight appeared on the day we wanted from Chicago. At first, I wrote that off as well, as that would involve a flight from LA as well. Then I started thinking about it. Chicago isn’t that far away from some of the national parks we’re due to visit. Perhaps if we reconfigured our trip, we could fly back from there instead?

Over the weekend of the Royal wedding at the end of April, I did a lot of work on fathoming out to redesign this trip to fit in with a flight back from Chicago. It took some time, but finally I was there. The plan would remain the same until we got to the Grand Tetons and then we’d still head to Bryce and Zion Canyon, but we’d then head for Monument Valley, before visiting Arches National Park and on to Denver. From there, we could get a Southwest flight over to Chicago. Sorted!

Now to see if the free return flights with our miles were still available from Chicago. Thankfully they were! I went ahead and booked them, paying the $520 tax (about £325, a bit cheaper than on the way out anyway... ) and then we got the option to book our seats. Now I could see why they were offering them for free on miles – not a single seat was taken so far in Upper Class! We literally had our pick of the whole cabin, so we selected our seats and were done. Finally, a return flight home – I couldn’t have been happier.

The next thing to do was to try and find somewhere to stay during our time in Los Angeles. Instead of now having a flying visit there and taking a flight the next morning up to Vancouver, if we wanted to go to Disneyland (and of course we did! ) then we’d have to do it at the start of the trip, as we wouldn’t get back there again. It was a shame, as it would dramatically cut our time in Vancouver, but decisions had to be made and Disney won the battle.

As Disney Vacation Club members, there was an obvious place to start looking, and those were the Villas at the Grand Californian. We’d stayed at the Grand Californian on our last visit to Disneyland in October 2008 and loved it, so I was delighted when they announced that they’d be building a DVC extension. I was less enthused, when I found out that there were only about 50 units. Surely that meant that booking them at seven months out, for those who don’t own there, would be almost impossible? Well, only one way to find out...

I rang Member Services and asked for the nights of Friday 26 and Saturday 27 August and I was amazed to discover that a one-bedroom villa was free for the Saturday night, so I went ahead and booked it. I asked to be put on the waitlist for both a one-bedroom villa and a studio for the Friday night, figuring that so long as we could get into the Grand Californian, moving after one night, although a pain, would be OK.

Imagine my amazement when I went to check online the next day on the Member website, more to see if our reservation for the Saturday night was there, only to see that we were now booked in a one-bedroom villa for the Friday night as well! I was seriously impressed with that.

Next: time to book those excursions and the elusive Palo brunch...

[lauriep]

Definitely starting to shape up. The cruise will be such a relief in the midst of all traveling. No packing up and moving every day.

[B.M.]

Glad you were able to get a return flight and sort out more details of your trip!

[Wendyismyname]

You were so lucky getting that waitlist so quickly!

[HollyH]

Great plans, Cheryl! We just got back from our Alaskan Cruise and loved it!!! You're going to have an amazing time!

I'm going to be paying close attention to the rest of your itinerary as Yellowstone is on our wishlist (which is growing longer by the day ).

Oh, and btw.....we saw several humpback whales from the decks of the Wonder. The Capt. is pretty good about announcing it when there is wildlife to be seen.

[DrDolphin]

WOW - what stress about your return plane tickets - but YEAH for Chicago and southwest from Denver... glad you got all that worked out, and SCORE on the Grand Californian!! I know what you mean about Alaska excursions, pricey and LOTS of options (as I am finding out with our cruise next May).