Alaska John Denver Music Cruise Day 1

We walked around town a bit this morning, before catching the hotel shuttle to the cruise ship .  Boarding was very fast since there were no lines when we arrived at 12:15. We ran into the couple we had met on the Anchorage to Denali train, and exchanged stories about our recent adventures.

I spent some time this afternoon walking around the ship, learning the layout.  It's smaller than most Princess ships, holding about 1950 passengers, where most Princess ships are in the 2800 - 3200 passenger range.  After being so used to Princess' standard layout, this one is markedly different. For example, on Princess the Promenade deck, the main "highway" where you can go from end to end, is always deck 7; on this ship it's deck 6. One nice feature is you can walk around the entire ship on the Promenade deck here, and it is very wide.  We suspect there were no chairs on the deck because NCL holds it's lifeboat drills there, so they need room for people to stand. The main atrium is quite small and there is a notable lack of shops on board.  It does have plenty of elevators which go all the way to the top deck. 

While we were watching for others in our music group to arrive, we were fascinated by 3 eagles who were flying around the dock area!  They were very chatty, screeching repeatedly while standing on the dock railing. So cool!

This evening we enjoyed dinner with the "train couple" before attending a group orientation session by the musicians who will be doing the concerts.  Each registered couple was surprised with a memory book listing all the cruise ports and the lyrics of John Denver's Alaska songs, along with beautiful photography and bios of the performers.  And we learned about where events will be held this week along with other pertinent information.   First concert is tomorrow afternoon!