sadiecatie
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2022
- Messages
- 659
Chapters
Day 0 - Intro and Planning
Day 1 - Travel
Day 2 - Vancouver
Day 3 - Embarkation Day
Day 4 - Day at Sea
Day 5 - Glacier Day
Day 6 - Skagway
Day 7 - Juneau
Day 8 - Ketchikan
Day 9 - Day at Sea
Day 10 - Debarkation Day and More Vancouver
Day 11 - Travel home and Final Thoughts
Intro and Planning
Welcome! I have always found trip reports to be so helpful in my Disney vacation planning, so I’m going to attempt to pay it forward here - I hope this is helpful, or at least entertaining, to those who choose to read
The cast of characters:
While we’re a Disney-loving family, this trip was not only our first DCL cruise, but our first cruise period! After our last WDW trip in July 2022, we were discussing our ideas for our next family vacation and Christian brought up an idea he’d mentioned in passing over the years - Alaska. I’d never given a lot of thought to visiting Alaska, but it was a bucket list trip for him. I said that if we were going to do it, it seemed like a cruise was a good way to go (I am not someone who likes to “rough it” in any sense), and once I looked into it just a bit and realized that Disney sails to Alaska, the choice was all but made.
We kept the idea of Alaska in mind but were just waiting to see if/when things would fall into place (it started as “that would be a fun trip at some point in the future”). Then, I ended up taking on a last-minute course overload in the fall (meaning extra income I could put into the vacation fund), and in early January DCL released the military rate for the week we had in mind in June. I jumped on it and the trip-planning officially began! The next couple months were spent researching and booking excursions, watching countless DCL/Alaska Youtube videos, and just generally impatiently waiting for our trip to finally arrive.
My research in planning for the trip started with figuring out how to actually get to the port. We live in Ohio, so we would obviously need a flight, but we were trying to decide between flying directly into Vancouver, or flying into Seattle and taking the Amtrak train up. Initially, Seattle sounded like a good option - the flights were generally cheaper, we love Seattle (Christian spent a summer there during grad school and we would love to return and visit again), and the Cascade line sounded like a beautiful ride up. However, in actually breaking all of the plans and costs down, the Seattle option ended up not being any less expensive and adding more moving parts (ie more travel legs where we could run into delays or other snags). To make the train times work, we would have to arrive earlier and leave later, meaning extra hotel nights, and I believe the return trip would have actually been by bus (not that there’s anything wrong with taking a bus, but part of the appeal was the train ride itself). In the end, we decided that flying directly into Vancouver would be more convenient and less stressful to bookend our vacation.
I’ll break down our travel plans and accommodations in my next post, but I did want to mention how much the DIS community helped in my planning! It was so nice to be able to hear others’ experiences and post random questions that came to mind as I worked through things. I’m a major planner type person, and you guys really helped me figure things out for our first cruise and feel like I had a solid handle on what the experience would be, so thank you!
Day 0 - Intro and Planning
Day 1 - Travel
Day 2 - Vancouver
Day 3 - Embarkation Day
Day 4 - Day at Sea
Day 5 - Glacier Day
Day 6 - Skagway
Day 7 - Juneau
Day 8 - Ketchikan
Day 9 - Day at Sea
Day 10 - Debarkation Day and More Vancouver
Day 11 - Travel home and Final Thoughts
Intro and Planning
Welcome! I have always found trip reports to be so helpful in my Disney vacation planning, so I’m going to attempt to pay it forward here - I hope this is helpful, or at least entertaining, to those who choose to read

The cast of characters:
- Sarah - me
- college instructor and Disney princess aficionado
- Christian - my spouse - engineer and Star Wars/Marvel nerd
- Audrey - my 8-year-old daughter - soon-to-be 3rd-grader and world’s biggest Stitch fan
While we’re a Disney-loving family, this trip was not only our first DCL cruise, but our first cruise period! After our last WDW trip in July 2022, we were discussing our ideas for our next family vacation and Christian brought up an idea he’d mentioned in passing over the years - Alaska. I’d never given a lot of thought to visiting Alaska, but it was a bucket list trip for him. I said that if we were going to do it, it seemed like a cruise was a good way to go (I am not someone who likes to “rough it” in any sense), and once I looked into it just a bit and realized that Disney sails to Alaska, the choice was all but made.
We kept the idea of Alaska in mind but were just waiting to see if/when things would fall into place (it started as “that would be a fun trip at some point in the future”). Then, I ended up taking on a last-minute course overload in the fall (meaning extra income I could put into the vacation fund), and in early January DCL released the military rate for the week we had in mind in June. I jumped on it and the trip-planning officially began! The next couple months were spent researching and booking excursions, watching countless DCL/Alaska Youtube videos, and just generally impatiently waiting for our trip to finally arrive.
My research in planning for the trip started with figuring out how to actually get to the port. We live in Ohio, so we would obviously need a flight, but we were trying to decide between flying directly into Vancouver, or flying into Seattle and taking the Amtrak train up. Initially, Seattle sounded like a good option - the flights were generally cheaper, we love Seattle (Christian spent a summer there during grad school and we would love to return and visit again), and the Cascade line sounded like a beautiful ride up. However, in actually breaking all of the plans and costs down, the Seattle option ended up not being any less expensive and adding more moving parts (ie more travel legs where we could run into delays or other snags). To make the train times work, we would have to arrive earlier and leave later, meaning extra hotel nights, and I believe the return trip would have actually been by bus (not that there’s anything wrong with taking a bus, but part of the appeal was the train ride itself). In the end, we decided that flying directly into Vancouver would be more convenient and less stressful to bookend our vacation.
I’ll break down our travel plans and accommodations in my next post, but I did want to mention how much the DIS community helped in my planning! It was so nice to be able to hear others’ experiences and post random questions that came to mind as I worked through things. I’m a major planner type person, and you guys really helped me figure things out for our first cruise and feel like I had a solid handle on what the experience would be, so thank you!