A year ago last January, we traveled to Argentina with the intent of embarking on a cruise to Antarctica. It was an ill-fated trip (see The Trip That Was… and Wasn’t! posted 1/14/22) that left us reeling and wondering if we would try such a journey again.

As time went, on we began feeling the urge to travel again and came across a Road Scholar river trip on the Amazon scheduled for this March. Their website said there was limited space available so we decided to take the plunge and gave them a call. It turned out that the limited space was for one person. So that trip was a no-go.

At this point, we need to insert a little travel history. We have been a lot of places; most being self-guided ground travel. We have generally turned our noses up at cruising, both river and ocean. That attitude is mainly the result of a one-week cruise we took in 2009 with people we didn’t know very well. “Never Again” was our mantra after that experience. However, we did relent and took a small boat cruise through the Galapagos Islands which ended up being an outstanding experience.

In 2018, we decided to give it another try and took a two-week repositioning cruise from Vancouver BC to Tokyo. Except for a couple rough sea days along the Aleutian Islands, it was a very nice experience. The highlight, though, was Japan. We were only there for two full days before flying home, but we were enchanted by the warmth of the Japanese people and their fascinating culture.

About the time the Amazon became a no-go, we received some advertising from Holland America cruise lines about cruising in Asia. Well, we had committed to traveling somewhere, we said why not Japan?

So, we’re headed to Tokyo to meet the MS Westerdam and start a tour of Japan by cruise ship. It’s a long one (six weeks) with seventeen ports in Japan, two in Taiwan, and one in South Korea. We’ll cross the North Pacific to stops in Kodiak, Sitka, and Ketchikan before cruising the inside passage to debark in Seattle.

The adventure begins – keep an eye out here for postcards from our journey.