Alaska Shore Excursions
 

I will be taking an Alaskan cruise in Aug 07 with my family on a Princess ship. I am interested in off-shore excursions in Skagway, Juneau, & Ketchikan. Any suggestions?

You need to do your homework, there are 100's of excellent tours to consider. I suggest you look over your shore excursion list and narrow down your interests, determine your budget, then post some of your choices. You will get more specific information.

You might also want to explore those offered on shore (not via the ship) as they will be quite a bit cheaper and often are the same providers.

I think you can't miss with the White Pass train in Skagway and a whale watch in Juneau (check out Orca Enterprises.com.--Captain Larry is the best). I thought Ketchikan was good for shopping, not much else. Only my opinion. I know lots of people like more adventuresome stuff, so I can't opine on that!

We did this same cruise last August. I would highly recommend whale watching in Juneau. We saw many, many humpback whales which was really neat. Also, the food onboard was a nice surprise-delicious!

We had planned to do a bike ride in the mountains in Skagway that was canceled due to bad weather, but we ended up with a different route which kept us on flat ground. Saw lots of beautiful scenery and wildlife.

The only thing we did in Ketchikan was the lumberjack show which was a little (okay, a lot) cheesy. Wish we had done something more active.

Hope you have better weather than we did. It rained in every port which made visibility poor, and the ship wasn't able to cruise Tracy Arm which we were most looking forward to. We stopped in Victoria, B.C. on the way back which was beautiful!