Well, Melissa and I went to the Fairfax AAA office on Saturday (before it got all too snowy) to meet with a travel agent and plan our honeymoon.
I’m happy to say that everything is booked, and—while still quite expensive—it’s a lot more affordable than I’d thought it would be.
So here’s what we’ll be doing:
We’ll be leaving on Wednesday, June 1 from Washington Dulles International Airport for Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (with a connection in Toronto—for aircraft nerds like myself, the first leg will be on a Canadair Regional Jet and the second leg on an Airbus A321). We’ll get to Vancouver around 1:00 pm local time, so there will be some time for touristing that day.
On Thursday, June 2, we’ll be taking a day-long ferry and tour package to Victoria, which is the capital of British Columbia and billed as “The most English city outside of England.” Apparently it has good gardens (?).
On Friday, June 3, we’ll do some more touristing around Vancouver before boarding the ms Statendam for a seven-day Hubbard Glacier Discovery cruise by Holland America.
The cruise, of course, includes innumerable amenities to keep us occupied, but here are some of the places the ship will go (and we’re sure to check out):
On Saturday, June 4, the cruise will pass through Alaska’s Inside Passage.
On Sunday, June 5, we’ll stop in Ketchikan, Alaska.
On Monday, June 6, we’ll stop in Sitka, Alaska—the capital of Alaska when it was under Russian control.
On Tuesday, June 7, we’ll stop in Juneau, Alaska—the current capital of the state.
On Wednesday, June 8, we’ll stop in Haines, Alaska.
On Thursday, June 9, we’ll be on a scenic cruise by Hubbard Glacier and Yakutat Bay.
On the morning of Friday, June 10, we’ll arrive at our final destination—Anchorage, Alaska—where we’ll spend most that that day and the next doing the tourist thing again. We’ll be flying from Anchorage back to Washington Dulles on the afternoon of Sunday, June 12 (with a connection in San Francisco—again, for the aircraft nerds, the first leg will be on a Boeing 757-200 and the second on an Airbus A320).
Anyway, needless to say, Melissa and I are looking forward to this—and we’re quite happy that AAA was able to arrange something so fun and complex at a reasonable price. Try pricing a cruise, one-way air fare to Vancouver and back from Anchorage, and two nights at a hotel in both cities all by yourself. You’ll discover that, first off, it’s really friggin’ complicated, and, second off, it’s really friggin’ expensive. Going through AAA was neither (well . . . it was still really friggin’ expensive, but not nearly as expensive as the ‘do-it-yourself’ method).
And my father will surely mention it if I don’t, but it was his idea to do this through a travel agent.