Let's talk about the ship, because the ship matters. We booked the Emerald Princess specifically for her size and for Skywalkers — because that's how we do it. Big enough to have everything you want, small enough that you're not spending half your vacation just navigating the hallways. You can actually find your people, remember where the good bar is, and not feel like you're commuting between decks just to get a drink.

Built in 2007 and part of Princess's Grand class, the Emerald has the layout and the vibe dialed in. The Piazza atrium is the heartbeat of the ship — coffee in the morning, cocktails at night, live music floating through the space at all hours. The dining is solid across the board, the pools are actually usable, and the service is the kind that makes you forget you're on a floating city with 3,000 other people.

And speaking of people — we've got friends all over the world, and they're always invited. That's part of what Loving Life Having Fun is all about. Our friends Sean and Sharon from the UK joined us for this one, which made the whole trip even better. More people to share a drink with at Skywalkers, more laughs at dinner, more memories.

Now — the crown jewel. Skywalkers Nightclub. Perched 18 decks up at the very stern of the ship, Skywalkers is a glass-enclosed nightclub with 270-degree views of the ocean and the wake stretching out behind you. It's one of the few ships in the Princess fleet still rocking this iconic space — and if you've never danced above the ocean at midnight with nothing but dark water and stars in every direction, you're missing something. The sail away party kicks off the whole adventure right — deck party, drinks flowing, the Vancouver skyline slowly shrinking behind you as you head north toward Alaska. It sets the tone perfectly. We were hooked from the first horn blast.

And because we don't do anything halfway — we splurged on a full aft-facing suite, cabin D736. Go big or go home. Waking up to nothing but open ocean stretching out behind the ship from a private balcony at the stern? Worth every penny. If you're going to do it, do it right.

Vancouver is one of those cities that earns every superlative thrown at it — mountains behind you, ocean in front, and a downtown that somehow manages to feel both world-class and walkable. We rolled in as part of the Alaska cruise and made the most of every hour. The Capilano Suspension Bridge is a must — swaying 230 feet above the canyon floor with old-growth forest all around you is the kind of thing that recalibrates your sense of scale. Stanley Park is best done on two wheels; we grabbed e-bike rentals right at the park entrance (the Souls don't make the trip on a cruise, so rentals it is) and spent hours looping the seawall with the skyline on one side and the water on the other. Gastown's cobblestone streets and the steam clock are worth the wander, and Chinatown is a neighborhood that rewards slowing down. Loving Life Having Fun means showing up somewhere like Vancouver and actually exploring it — not just checking it off a list. Vancouver has a way of making you wish you had booked an extra day.

Ketchikan does not ease you in gently — it just hits you with everything at once. The town clings to the side of a mountain with the water right there at the bottom of the main street, fishing boats tied up practically at the doorstep of the shops. Creek Street is the one everyone talks about, and for good reason — a boardwalk built on stilts over Ketchikan Creek, lined with colorful historic buildings that used to be the town's red-light district back in the day. Now it's galleries, gift shops, and the occasional salmon fighting its way upstream right below your feet.

Ketchikan is the self-proclaimed Salmon Capital of the World, and they're not wrong to claim it. The fishing here is serious business — charter boats head out every morning, and the docks smell like the real thing. The totem poles are everywhere and they're the real deal, not tourist props. The Totem Heritage Center has some of the oldest surviving poles in existence, and the Saxman Totem Park just outside of town is worth the short trip. This is exactly the kind of place Loving Life Having Fun was built around — somewhere that hands you a story whether you're ready for one or not.

The rain is part of the deal. Ketchikan averages over 150 inches a year — it's the wettest city in the United States. Pack accordingly and lean into it. The mist hanging over the mountains and the way the light hits the water when it's overcast is genuinely beautiful in a way that a sunny day just can't replicate. This place has a mood, and the weather is part of it.

Skagway is a town that wears its history on its sleeve and doesn't apologize for it. This was the gateway to the Klondike Gold Rush — the place where tens of thousands of prospectors poured off ships in 1898, looked up at the mountains, and started walking. The whole downtown is a National Historic District, and it feels like it. The boardwalks, the false-front buildings, the saloons — it's not a theme park recreation, it's the actual thing, preserved because it never really stopped being itself.

We grabbed e-bike rentals for the day — the Souls can't make the trip on a cruise, which is always a reminder of just how good the Souls actually are, because these rentals were a different experience entirely. But they got the job done, and the job was worth doing. The ride out to Dyea is the one. Dyea was the rival port town to Skagway during the Gold Rush — today it's a ghost town at the end of a winding road through the Skagway River valley, with the Chilkoot Trail trailhead sitting quietly at the edge of the wilderness. The scenery on that ride is the kind that makes you stop pedaling just to look. Mountains, river, forest, silence. Loving Life Having Fun doesn't always mean the loudest room — sometimes it means a gravel road through the Alaska backcountry with nowhere to be.

The Gold Rush Cemetery is the other anchor of the day and genuinely worth the time. Soapy Smith is buried there — the most famous con man of the Gold Rush era, shot dead in 1898 in a confrontation that's still talked about in Skagway like it happened last week. Frank Reid, the man who shot him, is buried nearby. The whole place has a weight to it that's hard to explain until you're standing in it.

Back in town, the White Pass & Yukon Route railway is one of the most dramatic train rides in North America if you have the time. The main street has the usual tourist shops but also some genuinely good food and cold beer, which after a day on rental bikes in Alaska is exactly what you need.

Juneau is the only state capital in the United States you can't drive to. No roads in, no roads out — you arrive by boat or by air, and that geographic isolation gives the whole place a feeling that's hard to put into words. It's a real city with a real government doing real things, and it's also completely surrounded by wilderness in every direction. The Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the country, presses right up against the back of town. Glaciers are visible from the streets. This is exactly the kind of place Loving Life Having Fun was built for — somewhere that hands you a story the moment you step off the ship.

We spent our day in the air. A floatplane out of the harbor, lifting off the water and banking over the Gastineau Channel — and then the mountains open up and the scale of what you're looking at becomes something you genuinely weren't prepared for. The Juneau Icefield stretches across the horizon, a vast white expanse feeding dozens of glaciers down into the valleys below. We flew over several of them, and from the air the whole system is visible at once — a landscape so big and so old it makes everything else feel small. One of those glaciers gets its own section on this site, and it earned it.

Taku Lodge was the destination. A historic wilderness lodge accessible only by floatplane, sitting on the bank of the Taku River with the Taku Glacier visible in the distance. They've been flying guests out there since the 1920s. You land on the water, step out onto a dock in the middle of the Alaska wilderness, and eat fresh-grilled salmon while bald eagles circle overhead. That's not a metaphor — the eagles are actually there, working the river, doing their thing. The salmon is wild-caught that morning. The whole experience is the kind of thing that makes you realize how much of the world you haven't seen yet, and how good it feels when you finally do.

The flight back over the glaciers closes the loop. Juneau from the air is a different city than Juneau from the dock — you understand the geography in a way that walking the streets alone never gives you. Both are worth having. This is what Loving Life Having Fun looks like at 1,500 feet.

Some stops you walk off the ship to find the adventure. This one comes to you.

Dawes Glacier is a scenic cruising day — the ship moves through Endicott Arm and the glacier fills the view from the rail. No tender, no excursion bus, no dock. You stay on board, and the glacier gets closer until it's just there, massive and unhurried, doing exactly what it's been doing for thousands of years.

The color is the first thing that stops you. That deep, impossible blue that lives inside glacial ice doesn't look like anything else in nature. It doesn't look like water. It doesn't look like snow. It looks like something that has been under pressure for ten thousand years — because it has. The face of the glacier is jagged and enormous, and the cold radiates off it across the water in a way you feel before you expect to.

The channel walls rise on both sides. Snow-capped peaks frame the scene in every direction. Floating ice chunks drift past the hull — some small, some the size of a car — calved off and carried along by the current. If you're patient and quiet at the rail, you can hear the glacier. A low crack, a groan, the occasional deep boom of a calving event. It's not loud. But it's real.

We watched from the aft balcony and from the deck rail, and the whales were out — keeping their distance, but there. The whole scene felt like something the channel was putting on just for the people standing at the rail that morning.

This is what Loving Life Having Fun looks like when the adventure doesn't ask anything of you except to show up and pay attention.