Our Alaskan CruiseTour in May 2008

I should start by pointing out that my wife and I love to travel and see new places.  Its a big world out there and there are lots of foreign countries with many historic places and things to see.  But the USA has plenty to offer as well, and if I'm going to visit other countries I want to also visit my own and see all 50 states.  Now, I have been to 41 and Alaska was one of the last 10 I had left to see.  Down to 9 left.

Alaska had been on my list of places to see for quite a while.  And as I knocked off the places ahead of Alaska, one by one, it slowly kept moving up to the top of the list.  Then one day my wife announced that there was going to be  a family wedding in southern Oregon in May and she wanted us to go.  That started the wheels turning and I figured if I was going to be right down the street, so to speak, that it was the perfect time to ease on up the road a bit to Alaska, being so close.  My bad......Portland is only about half-way and its just as far from Atlanta to Portland (2,718 mi.) as it is from Portland to Anchorage (2,644 mi.).  But it was too late.  I had my excuse and I began my search for the perfect cruise/tour to Alaska.

The first thing I had to do was find a way to work around the wedding date and it was clear early on that the trip had to come after the May 10th wedding date.  It was almost too early for a trip to Alaska and the earliest date I could find was May 12th, but that left no time to visit family and my wife has never been to Portland or Seattle, Washington so I wanted to work in some time to show her Portland and Seattle.  There was a trip leaving on May 15th and that gave me just enough time to squeeze in everything.

So, our trip begins with a wedding in Grants Pass, Oregon, followed by a 101-mile drive up the Oregon coast to Portland and a day in Seattle before we fly to Anchorage.  The 12-day cruise/tour makes it an 18-day trip ending on Memorial Day, 2008.