by JoanM

Created on: April 08, 2009

A vision of starting a cruising company began with three Norwegian shipping companies in 1968 joining to form the Royal Caribbean Line. Two years later the first ship began service, with more ships following over the years, ships were "stretched" making longer ships and mergers took place. The name was changed and even larger cruise ships built. There are now 21 cruise ships in the fleet with 16 different destinations, from Asia to Australia and Canada to the Caribbean amongst a few. The Serenade of the Seas was launched in 2003 and this was the cruise ship on which we visited Alaska and on which my review is based.

We had planned to return to Canada when we retired and see the Rockies and my husband thought to tie it in with a cruise to Alaska would be the icing on the cake. Consulting a travel agent in Glasgow who advertised Canadian holidays we had an itinerary planned and then up graded a few things and that was it, our holiday was booked! You can book online or through other travel agents.
We were able to log onto the website and book some shore trips and ordered our wine! The website gave us lots of information on what to expect and photos of the ship and cabins.

~Embarkation~

Ending up in Vancouver after a week long wonderful experience which I doubted to be improved on, and after a few days sight seeing we arrived by taxi at the cruise ship terminal. We were relieved of our cases very quickly, they already had our names and state room number attached, and we entered the building. It was like a huge warehouse and was very busy. We had to queue for this and queue for that but after filling in Waiver forms, having our photographs taken and finger prints we were ready to embark. That had taken 45 minutes from arrival so no worse than at the airport, and we were going into America. Walking up to where we would enter the ship were photographers and we posed to have our photographs taken, the first time of many we discovered!

We were greeted by lots of staff, so very friendly and helpful, and we were directed to our stateroom where we left our hand luggage - containing a few clothes as advised, in case our cases didn't arrive before dinner, and then made our way to the Windjammer for lunch. The corridors had lots of artwork and I discovered later that it was in themes, may be red, yellow, black and white, blue etc. I was amazed at the beautiful surroundings, in the centre of the ship was a open section where you could look up and down and see the glass staircase,

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