A Bitter Sea Dog’s Guide to Surviving Alaska – A Celebrity Millennium PHOTO REVIEW

If you want to enjoy a Pollyanna account of Celebrity’s modern luxury, you’d be better off looking elsewhere. There’re a few “weekly-winners” member-reviews stickied to the top of the Celebrity forums that’ll probably do the trick. As for this review, you’re just better off accepting the fact that I’m old, I’m bitter and generally drunk when I write these. I’m longwinded. A mangy ole sea dog who is better left in the corner undisturbed. I don’t like learning new tricks. And I’m married.

Recently, Mrs. Winks and I returned from an Alaska land/sea tour that included a 7-night cruise aboard the Celebrity Millennium - southbound, from Seward to Vancouver. And this photo review is going to show and tell it like it is… how we fought hard to tame Alaska, and how Alaska fought back, and won. It’s not a pretty tale.

By way of preface, believe it or not, most of what you’re about to read in this review is true. Mrs. Winks will back me up on this. We did embark on a 7-night cruise from Seward to Vancouver on the Celebrity Millennium. We did survive a four-day pre-cruise land-tour that originated in Anchorage. And there really was a Mama Bear. Also, just to get it out of the way, the food on the ship, on almost every occasion, sucked. (Contrary to the time-honored Cruise Critic belief: food quality is NOT ALWAYS subjective. And we are not picky eaters. But more on that later).

Alaska is a strange place, filled with strange people and strange occurrences - like sunlight ‘til 2 in the morning. So some of these tales are going to seem unbelievable at first. But as Mama Bear told me when our glass-domed train stopped traffic in downtown Wasilla for a solid 40-minutes to offload a fellow land-tour passenger by ambulance stretcher, “This state is not for the weak hearted. Your cubs have to kill it. Or this State will kill your cubs – and you.” At which point she slowly drew her middle finger across my throat and uttered a wet, gasping sound. But yeah, more on all that later.

Shall we begin?

While the weather on this trip had been uncharacteristically clear up to this point, as the Millennium pulled into the state capital of Juneau on Day Three, we were greeted with heavy overcast. During the ship’s docking procedure, I notice from my vantage point on our aft balcony that I was unable to see the top of Mount Roberts. That’s a good thing. The tramway ride, that we were scheduled to take later that morning, had begun operation, but the iconic fire-engine red cable cars immediately disappeared into a thick, white cloud after rising only about 200 feet from the station. I took a long sip of the Ocean Café coffee Mrs. Winks graciously got me when the buffet first opened and celebrated my relief. “This is perfect,” I whispered. “There’s no way the seaplanes are taking off in this pea soup.”

I’ve been dreading the seaplane excursion ever since Mrs. Winks booked it back on our Celebrity Equinox cruise last November. The Equinox’s Future Cruise department had offered a paltry 5% discount if we booked our next-cruise’s shore excursions while still onboard.

Always in the hunt for bargains, Mrs. Winks jumped at the opportunity, maintaining that since the seaplane “flightseeing adventure” was one of the most expensive Alaskan shore excursions (it cost more than our commercial seats from NYC to Seattle!) the 5% discount would represent the most significant monetary savings play. Like our shore excursions were a sports bet - and we were getting odds or something.

I, on the other hand, was not at all excited about this seaplane adventure. Having just read a large non-fiction volume detailing numerous fatal accidents in the Grand Canyon, most of which involved flightseeing adventure aircrafts, I was less than gung-ho about viewing Alaskan glaciers, or anything for that matter, from the bucket seat of a single prop airplane. Premonitions of engine failure, the pilot’s slow and painful death, our failed attempt at wilderness survival, the bear attack, and the inevitable resorting to cannibalism, or at least, minimally, a bad case of motion sickness, were the nightmarish vision filling my head. Wouldn’t we just be better off staying on the ship?

“You will love it,” said the Future Cruise reservationist gingerly grabbing our credit card. “It’s one of our most popular excursions, and generally sells out well before the ship even sails.”

“And it’s the most expensive,” chimes in the gloating Mrs. Winks. “We’re really going to pocket a lot of scratch on this one.” (Actually only $30, as it turned out).

My “Is there a website where I can check their safety record?” inquiry was drowned-out by the congratulatory cheers and round of high-fives that soon followed.

It was still early, but as luck would have it, I run into Mama Bear on the line for Bloody Marys at the breakfast buffet. “So we’ve cancelled our choreographed group sky-diving session and are flying our own individual seaplanes back up to Denali instead,” she tells me while waiting for her drink order.

“You all have pilot licenses?” I ask, astonished.

“Of course, well, except for Adriana. Hers lapsed and she refuses to take a new eye exam until someone drops a more stylish designer-line of aviator goggles.”

“You must be so disappointed,” I say, since she’d told me several times during the land tour how much her family was looking forward to attempting a highly-technical, open-accordion, vertical formation sky dive that has never been successfully completed before.

“I know, I know. But we took a family poll, on SurveyMonkey, using our unlimited onboard Xcelerate Internet packages, and determined that we’re just not being challenged enough, as a tribe, by its level of difficulty. Not until they let us execute it from a lower altitude, anyway." She sighs. "But besides, Denali’s only visible a few days a year, so we’re not going to pass that up.”

It’s true. We have hit Alaska during an unusual weather window where North America’s highest mountain has not been socked-in by clouds for days. I wish her luck as the server hands her a bar-tray loaded with Bloody Marys. She winks and heads back to her family suite. “Have fun at your little fish fry.”

After our morning eye-opener, we take our time getting off the ship. We spend a few minutes exploring Alaska’s capital city, which is surprisingly small and rustic. Anchorage, where are tour started, is much more cosmopolitan by comparison. We walk Juneau’s main drag and window shop, resisting the temptation to enter the fudge store, even though the tantalizing smell of baked fresh gooey goodness hits you a full half-a-block away. Ultimately, we are basically killing time, waiting to see if the cloud cover breaks over Mount Roberts, simply because it doesn’t make sense to take the tram ride up there if we’re not going to enjoy a postcard-worthy view.

At one point, we end up back along the docks and pass by our floatplane vendor’s storefront. My spirits soar upon seeing no aircrafts are parked at their marina! Looking skyward, I confirm what I hope to be true. Too cloudy to fly! Phew. I can’t wait to get back to the cabin and listen to the shore excursion desk’s cancellation message on our stateroom phone. This cancellation is going to make us rich!

“What are you smiling about?” asks Mrs. Winks, waking me from my fantasy. “Just thinking about Mama Bear, and how funny it would be to see her family’s open-accordion style anything,” I postulate.

But by about noon, my worst fears are realized. The sun slowly burns-off Juneau’s cloud cover, and we can finally see the tramway cable cars docking at the mountain top terminal some 4-thousand feet above town. Dagnammit! Where is all that Alaskan rainy weather everyone on Cruise Critic warned us about?

We have to go, because it turns out the tramway tickets were also a pre-cruise purchase, thanks to the 5% discount discussed earlier, so we decide to ascend ASAP, before our fellow passengers also discover the weather is lifting.

It’s a fun 6-minute ascent, despite the best efforts of the tram operator to ruin it for us. He’s actually a local school teacher on summer break, who insists on banging on a ceremonial frame drum to welcome us aboard “his” cable-car. He explains how local natives welcomed the white man, mostly fur trappers, to their villages from canoes with this ceremonial drumming - before they were systematically exterminated; but this has nothing to do with cable-car physics (my pet interest) and how exactly we’re not going to die during this ride, so I basically tune him out.

Up on top of Mount Roberts, we welcome a mist-interrupted view of Juneau’s cityscape and our cruise ship docked below. There are shops, a museum, and a movie screening about regional history. Some guy has a photo booth where you can get your picture on a green screen being attacked by your choice of Alaskan wildlife… even an owl for some reason. There’s also a hiking trail, which we venture out on for a while, but let’s face it, we’re in a rain forest, so nothing stays comfortable for long.

After about an hour, we opt to return to the ship for lunch (and me, so I can check our stateroom phone for the highly anticipated voice-mail from the shore excursion desk). We just miss a cable car headed down, but “Don’t worry,” says the school teacher we rode up with, who’s emerging from the terminal booth. We can ride down with him, and his frame drum, on the next car, in about 10 minutes.

185 drum beats later, we exit the cable car and head back to the Millennium. We mainline directly to the pool grill, since we’ve found it’s about the only venue onboard to get a decent meal, as unhealthy an option as it is. But more on that during a later tale.

“That’s probably them,” Mrs. Winks says, peering up a tight formation of 5 seaplanes flying just under the cloud cover. It’s after lunch, and we’ve gathered at the floatplane vendor’s marina, just down the pier from our ship, waiting for our aircraft to arrive. Dashing all my hopes, the flightseeing excursion is going on as scheduled. Yes, an earlier excursion had suffered a weather cancellation, we were told, but the pilots held a team meeting and decided while conditions were less than prime, all could be conquered with a wing and a prayer, “‘cause the tourist season isn’t getting any longer, you know.”

As if they squadron has somehow heard Mrs. Winks’ proclamation, each plane in the formation dips its wing in greeting, and then the last plane breaks free from the rest and does a full vertical roll at heart-stopping velocity.

“It’s them,” I confirm. It’s Mama Bear and her cubs. On their way to Denali. Each flying their own individual two-engine aircraft.

“How do you know for sure,” asks Mrs. Winks.

“Don’t you listen?” I respond. “Last summer, Conrad Bear took a gap year from university, so he could master the art of barnstorming. Mama Bear must have told us this three times.” “Oh…” “Because every family should have at least one member who can perform at that skill level, and don’t we?”

Minutes later, someone cues Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries and five of our vendor’s floatplanes dive bomb Juneau harbor, one after another. I take some solace in seeing the aircraft are larger than I expected, but they’re still only driven by a single prop, and it’s unnerving knowing a lot of our success rides on someone in the back-office performing accurate weight calculations with the less than verifiable numbers we supplied them during check-in. “Is that before or after the buffet, yuk, yuk, yuk,” at least one member from each party chortles, all while our lives hang in that very balance.

Our massive assemblage is broken into weight-balanced groups (no surprise an inordinate amount of wafer-thin teenage girls were assigned to ours) and moments later we’re climbing into our aircraft. On this itinerary, we’re going to get an aerial tour of five glaciers, and then land at the isolated Taku Glacier Lodge for a salmon bake. We are warned there are bears and mosquitos there - and only one bathroom, which is when the reality finally hits home for us; Alaska is not for the faint-hearted.

We buckle up and are given some ridiculously rudimentary safety rules - like don’t open the doors or windows during flight. Then the Indian Jones-like pilot revs the engine, dons his fedora and we rip across the busy Juneau Harbor waterway, a scant 50-yards from our cruise ship, before becoming airborne after a bouncy water take-off.

The flight is relatively smooth, but when you hit a rough patch of air, you definitely feel it, magnified x10. Along the way, we listen to a pre-recorded narration through our headphones. It explains a bit about the glaciers and landmarks we see below. While it’s still pretty cloudy out, the pilot maintains a low altitude to keep the ground visible to us at all times. I can only imagine how incredible this scenery must be on a sunny day.

It’s stunning, and you definitely gain a new perspective on the how the glaciers encroach upon and ultimately carve-out the landscape. Hitherto, we had only seen these massive ice formations from sea level - off the decks of the Millennium. From the air, you get to see their alien-planet like topography of deep crevasses and their mystical blue coloring, especially pronounced on overcast days, like this one, our headphone-narrator explains.

After a 25-minute flight, we land on a calm lake before the massive Taku Glacier, the Juneau-area’s largest. The floatplane taxis to a shore-side dock where we deplane and are welcomed by Taku Lodge staff. We’re invited to explore the surroundings, warned what to do if we encounter a bear (a black bear is actually resting in a tree, in sight, within 50 yards of the encampment), and listen for the dinner bell.

Adjacent to the lodge is an alderwood fire pit, where a chef is busy grilling our salmon entrées. We take a short hike into the forest, but other than mosquitos and unidentified scat, we see no wildlife. All the bear action seems to be back at the lodge, where the salmon bake proves a very tempting lure – going against every “don’t associate food with man” bear-rule we’ve been endlessly brow-beaten with since entering the state.

While the accommodations at the lodge dining room are cramped, the meal is excellent, especially when compared to the slop we’ve been being served on the Millennium. The salmon is smoky, fresh and savory. It’s served with baked beans, a sour dough biscuit and homemade coleslaw. Iced tea, water and lemonade are free, with beer and wine available at a $6.

Another black bear runs by the dining room window, headed for the now unmanned fire-pit, sending most of the diners in pursuit with their phone cameras. Mrs. Winks manages to grab the snapshot below. While they’re not technically feeding these bears, Taku Glacier Lodge still makes it very attractive for these creatures to visit, hoping to find some scrap that eluded cleanup.

Up Next: Some additional pictures from this cautionary tale.

Here are additional shots from our first tale:

The Mount Roberts Tramway

Glacier creep as seen from the air

Calving in blue

Touching down at Taku Glacier Lake

Food Porn! (That's Mrs. Winks' chicken entree)

Lodge life...

Up Next: Another cautionary tale

Another way to read a review, thanks for sharing, waiting for more

Geez ... thanks for ruining my day! Hubby had been all excited to bust out for a road trip, but that's not going to happen. I shall remain firmly glued to my computer screen, until the next installment, and the next, and the next!

Absolutely brilliant!

Loving this!

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The engineer in me has not allowed the booking of any flight seeing excursions (and probably never will), but I’m having fun reading about your adventures!

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Thanks for sharing, We've been to Alaska 2x and loved every minute. I was too chicken to join husband in the flightseeing of Mt. McKinley but he said he had a ball and the photos he took were amazing. Too bad that you didn't find the food as good as you would like on the ship. I'll be looking for the next installment.

Nope, not canceling my millennium trip yet! Keep trying… This is got to be one of the best reads I’ve had in a long time on this website

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Your pictures are stunning and your writing style is a joy! Thank you for sharing.

Another Winks review? I heard he was banned from Celebrity for trying to bring aboard fireworks. Guess the ban was lifted.

"I’m bitter and generally drunk when I write these" - Oh I cannot wait for this one; it is like Ron White visiting Alaska. Preach on....

Sounds like fun....along for the ride. :)

Yeah, I agree with those of you who want to keep your feet on the ground! Not a week after our cruise, an Alaskan float plane went down in Ketchikan. Everyone lived, but jeesh!

Months ago, while initially nailing down the logistics of this travel fiasco, Mrs. Winks decided we should take the land tour first, and save the actual “cruising” for the latter portion of the trip. Her logic, and I agree with it, is that the land tour is fraught with stressful situations, like having to pack bags and move to different accommodations every morning, having to stick to the motor coach’s inflexible departure schedule, and the truly frightening prospect (for cruisers anyway) of not knowing when your next meal is coming and how much it will cost. At $7 a pop, reindeer-meat hotdogs aren’t exactly budget friendly!

You see, what’s not clear when you’re sitting at home booking your land tour, all flush with giddiness and naivete, is for how much of the land tour you’ll actually be on your own. There’s no staff of a thousand crewmembers catering to your every precocious whim. No premium beverage package to drown your sorrows in. And meals are almost entirely your responsibility, which means paying for them! This is why saving the relaxation, pampering and hungover mornings for the latter portion of the trip might be your best option when planning an Alaskan cruise. To end on a high note, as it were. After the stresses associated with rail and motor coach travel (mostly dealing with your fellow land-tour passengers and the threats from competing bus lines), are all safely behind you.

This strategy was a good one for us, except that it necessitated joining the Celebrity Millennium in the tiny, remote, port town of Seward. Seward is so small, the ship actually carries more passengers and crew than this city has residents currently populating it! It’s out of the way, the locals are ornery and it’s lost its only genuine claim to fame of once being the official start point of the infamous Iditarod dog sled race.

For you history buffs, Seward was named after President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, who originally championed the purchase of the Alaskan territory from the Russians for 2 cents an acre. A fire sale by today’s costs, at the time, it was considered a frivolous expenditure for a country just emerging from Civil War. This is why Alaska landed “Seward’s Folly” for its first official, if downmarket, nickname. When gold was discovered thirty years later, William Seward was vindicated, though he was no longer alive to enjoy the long overdue round of “I told you so’s.”

In 2018, our land-tour guide Julie takes great pride in assuring us, that while Seward has lost it Iditarod status, it now boasts a new claim to fame. Seward, it turns out, features an award-winning cruise ship terminal, recognized industry-wide specifically for its speedy embarkation process. (Who knew there were awards for such things?) Of course, winning that accolade isn’t all that challenging when the game is pretty much rigged in your favor. Let me explain.

Because Seward is in a relatively remote location (Is there really any part of Alaska that isn’t?), getting there is dictated primarily by common-carrier transportation schedules. The two most employed options (we won’t call them popular) are the Alaska Railroad, which will bring you in from Anchorage, and land-tour motor coaches, whose arrival times are tactfully controlled by the cruise line itself. Few people actually come by car. And unless you’re Mama Bear and can afford to leave your land tour early by helicopter, which she did, thus ensuring her cubs got an 11 am boarding, you’re embarkation time is left to the sick whims of some rube back at Celebrity’s home office. So that, folks, is the reason why Port Seward continually wins the highly coveted America’s Fastest Embarkation Cruise Terminal Award ten years in a row now – it’s easy when you can strategically stagger the arrival times for 95 per cent of your guests.

This was the painful lesson we learned the final morning of our land tour, as our motor coach makes several stops along the two-lane road to Seward. To make matters worse, it’s rainy and overcast, so the bus’s initially fun “punch-buggy” travel game of moose and bear spotting has lost most of its novelty now that we’ve spent four long-days of exhausting and contentious play.

We stop at a wildlife sanctuary, where we have the opportunity to explore the grounds of caged, rehabilitating, injured animals, including bear, moose, bald eagles and even a porcupine. It would be a suitable distraction from the fact that we’re not gaining early access to the Millennium, only the rain is nasty and wind driven and the paths at the sanctuary getting muddy. It’s the coolest temperatures we’ve experienced while in Alaska. Is this really how our dream cruise is going to begin? The gift shop and food trucks become both our shelter and our prison, as I make note that reindeer-dog prices are at tourist-gouging $8.

An hour later, we are back on the bus and get excited when we cross into the city limits of Seward. Our tour guide Julie points her out to us, and the whole bus leaps from their seats to get our first glimpse of the Millennium. Only our motor coach then turns away from the pier and, surprise, it turns out we have yet one more “exciting” stop… the Alaska SeaLife Center, located hardly a mile from our ship. So close but so far…

Mercifully, Julie isn’t always just strictly business. Reading the crowd and hungry for a tip, she announces where the closest liquor store is (a block from the SeaLife Center) for those of us who want to stock-up on liquid contraband before embarkation. Mrs. Winks shuffles me away from the rest of our group heading into the SeaLife Center and says we should go find the liquor store now before it gets too crowded. (This is all kind of absurd, given the fact we both have premium beverage packages waiting for us onboard). But given the choice between finding alcohol or parading past more caged, maimed mammals in rehab, I choose the former and we are off to explore the streets of Seward.

“You can’t get in that way. It’s locked,” the crotchety woman barks at us, coming out an adjacent door.

“But the sign says liquor store?” I query, puzzled. Granted, the sign is written in black marker, on a Johnny Walker box top, that’s been duct-taped, woefully off-center, to the glass.

“You get to the liquor store through the bar,” she mutters. “Is it that hard to figure out?”

The old timer is right. The liquor store is in the bar. That’s apparently how things work in Seward. The hag leaves us with some of her homespun Alaskan pearls of wisdom: “You fools from “the outside” are better-off ditching your backward, below-the-49th-parallel, way of thinking if you want to get by up here.” I don’t bother to let her know, like all tourists she’s going to berate, we’re only just passing through.

It’s a local’s bar, dark when we enter it, and no one, not even the servers, look up at us when we walk in. They’re all glued to some dog-sledding competition being played on all the television screens. On our own, we locate another locked door, with another handwritten sign on it, inside the bar, which says we need to wait for the bartender to come unlock the store if we want liquor. So we proceed to stare down the busy barmaid - who seems to have an inordinate amount of customers for 11:30 am in the morning.

She eventually comes over to us, fumbles for a key from the array hanging from her keychain pocket hook and unlocks the door. “Try to make it snappy as you can see I’m kinda busy…” she greet us.

Not that there’s exactly aisles of fine vintages to choose from. I half-wish Mrs. Winks, in deference to our waiting beverage packages, will retort, “Nothing today, thank you” and simply walk away, but instead, to save face, she buys some bottle of swill that claims to be Alaskan-fermented champagne and we are ushered out the locked door to the street, because we can’t go back out through the bar. “Damn cruisers,” we hear her utter under her breath as she padlocks the door again. Things are kinds complicated in Seward. Except for the lines at the cruise port. Apparently they have that process down.

After our harrowing experience securing our totally unnecessary bottle of pre-embarkation hooch, we explore the commercial street further and window-shop an array of souvenir and other stores. It’s nice to be on our own, away from the tour group, and realize life will be less structured and stressful once we board ole Millie.

Because it’s part of the tour package, we do end up going into the SeaLife Center and have to admit it’s not bad. We get to see horned puffins close up, watch harbor seals frolic, and witness the enormous, but graceful, stellar sea lions swim around their pen, courtesy of a glass-enclosed underwater viewing area.

We get back on the motor coach just in time to note we have now officially missed the special Concierge Level boarding-day lunch and will have to settle for the carnage of the buffet. There really aren’t that many perks to booking a Concierge stateroom, but embarkation lunch is probably one of the biggest. IT seem planning your cruise post-land tour does have some drawbacks, after all.

The motor coach lumbers its way through the streets of Seward and our tour comes to an end on the docks before the Millennium… where it is dank and raining. Caribbean cruisers by trade, it’s odd to be boarding a ship in this type of weather. But true to their reputation, boarding at Seward, accompanied only by the other 40 passengers on our motor coach, goes very quickly and smoothly.

Up Next: How To Cheat & Win at the Not So Newlywed Game

Love your review. Thanks for posting, I can't wait for more.

Thanks for the review.

Looking forward to another Winks Cruise adventure and the many misadventures of Mr. Winks. :)

Love reading your review, keep them coming. Makes our forthcoming holiday to Alaska seem even more tangible.

LOL....my kind of review.

Thanks for your kind words of support and continued readership.

For those of you planing an Alaskan Cruise, I would say think strategically before pre-booking too many shore excursions. Weather is a genuine factor in Alaska, and if we had to do it all again, both Mrs. Winks and I would probably have saved a number of excursion choices 'til the day of... finding vendors on the dock if necessary, since the majority of these excursions go on even in inclement conditions.

At times, we felt a bit pinned down by our pre-booked list of excursions, and while they were all mostly fun and worthwhile, we think it would have been a better experience if we'd had some more flexibility available.

That said, obviously book your must-do excursions ahead of time, especially if you fear they might sell out. But you might want to play it more free-wheeling with your secondary list.

Okay, foregoing a computer crash or other natural disaster, there should be a new tale available here in just a few hours. (yn)

Always enjoy your reviews. Thanks for the efforts!

Can't wait to read the rest of the review. Always entertaining.

Missed meeting you on the Equinox last fall but did meet Mrs. Winks one night when you had gone to bed early. We kept her company at the bar. Sorry you didn't do a review of that cruise (or maybe you did and I missed it).

Missed meeting you on the Equinox last fall but did meet Mrs. Winks one night when you had gone to bed early. We kept her company at the bar. Sorry you didn't do a review of that cruise (or maybe you did and I missed it).

Yeah, we dropped the ball on doing an Equinox review. I came back from it sick as a dog, and by the time I recovered, just wasn't into doing a review. Big mistake.

At this point, I should probably come clean and let you in on a little secret. Mrs. Winks and I were not alone on this voyage. We were part of a larger entourage. You see, we booked this Alaskan cruise to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary (…and they said it wouldn’t last). But as it turned out, Mrs. Winks’ dear sister and brother-in-law were also celebrating a milestone wedding anniversary this year… their 35th! So we decided, as a group, for some bizarre reason, that cruising the Inner Passage was somehow an appropriate homage to the act of marriage longevity.

A few months later, too old to be risking life and limb in a remote state not exactly known for its EMT response times and accident survival rates, and in complete indifference to our children’s wishes, we all boarded the Celebrity Millennium in Seward.

You can call them Mr. and Mrs. Brad. And here they are:

The reason I bring them up now is because the Brads play a pivotal role in this upcoming tale. The whole evening started off whimsically enough. We were in the Martini Bar, planning our evening’s activities, when a couple next to us suggested we attend the Not So Newlywed Game – the cruise industry’s copyright-sanctioned rip-off of the once popular, Chuck Barris production, US TV gameshow.

Yada, yada, yada, we dared the Brads (who had never participated in this cruising classic) to get to the event early and sign-up to play. With 35 years under their belt, they’d be a strong contender for the “married the longest” slot the hosts are always looking to fill.

As for Mrs. Winks and I, who have played this game on previous trips (and won); we officially retired from the sport several voyages ago. Some claim it’s because the International Cruise Director Alliance had successfully levied maritime game-show fraud charges against us, but I can assure you those charges were finally dropped, and there was no collusion whatsoever. And everybody knows that. (Thanks going once again to our pal Jim Walker at CruiseLaw). So nowadays, when people ask us about participating in the Not So Newlywed Game, we simply say “We choose not to play!”

After enjoying another round of martinis, we headed up to the former Sky Lounge, now called the Cosmos Lounge, fifteen minutes early so we’d get a good seat, find out what the sign-up procedure was, and bolster the Brads game-playing fortitude with some additional liquid courage.

Fortunately, sign-up was literally that, putting your name in a hat. On other cruise lines, to secure a spot on stage, potential contestants must whoop, holler and feign fornication, in front of a salivating audience, who then vote, with their applause, for their favorite duo. On the Millennium, thanks to modern luxury no doubt, participation is determined by the admittedly less-flamboyant, but much more civil, luck of the hat draw.

Of course, none of us had a pen handy. And the cruise director’s staff were busy running around the floor trying to configure the stage for the gameshow. Fortunately, Mrs. Brad was able to stop a passing waiter, quickly borrow their pen, and scribble down their names which she then deposited into the black top-hat sitting on the lectern stand.

The lounge was quickly filling up with guests, but only a handful of them showed any interest in signing-up. So odds of getting chosen to play looked pretty favorable for the Brads. Mrs. Winks and I sat back and prepared for the hilarity to come by ordering another round of cocktails. Nights like this were made for beverage packages.

So let me tell you why you should never travel with family and friends. You think they’re always on your side, watching your back no matter who or what you encounter during the cruise, but in the end, like most privateers at sea, they simply can’t be trusted.

So by now, you've probably guessed it. Mrs. Brad, unaware of the charges against us (dropped, there was no collusion), had of course written OUR names down, not their own, and placed it into the black hat. Nice joke. And of course the first couple picked by Bethany, the event’s cruise director staff emcee, from the depths of the black hat, was Mr. and Mrs. Winks!

In our defense, Mrs. Winks and I haven’t “practiced” this game in years. But it’s amazing how getting back on stage, under the blinding glare of the spotlight and the energy of the Cosmos Lounge audience, and mostly a couple of very-dry vodka martinis, quickly reawakens your dusty old gameshow skills. Before long, we were slaying the crowd with our savage wit and killing-it on the scoreboard with our landslide of correct answers.

In the end, we locked down first place and were pleased to find the winning prize, which is usually a bottle of the house champagne and a keychain, was this time a gift certificate for a free Cariloha sheet set (the softest bedding in the world!) which we could pick-up at the next port.

So how exactly do you win the Not So Newlywed Game? (which, on the Millennium for some reason, is copyright circumvented using The Hunger Games motif instead).

Well, as I mentioned previously, in 20 years of sailing, we’ve had the opportunity to participate in this particular game more than a few times. Initially, we did so mostly as a goof – (the first time we were both woefully drunk!) - but as we played the game more often, we noticed a commonality in the types of questions asked of the couples.

Soon we came up with a formula for skewing the odds in our favor, which can pretty much be condensed down to this:

• Always use a pre-chosen relative (no matter what they ask you, if a relative’s involved use the one you agree on. We use Mrs. Wink’s sister Maureen and my brother Rocky for this).
  
• Always have a “making whoopee” place. (Again, doesn’t matter what the specific question is, if it pertains to any romantic act, always have this specific place and time agreed upon as your answer. I’ll spare you ours).
  
• Always have a bad item and a good item (there’s usually a best or worst gift questions. But if it involves any item, reference the appropriate pre-agreed upon item).
  
• Do this with colors, foods and old boy/girlfriend names.
  
• Always have an agreed upon bad habit (that can utilize for just about any personal question).
  
• And if they ask you the sexist “What Do You Wish Your Wife Had a Bit More of and a Little Bit Less of?” please resist using the hackney bigger-boobs and smaller-ass answer, and do as we do. “I wish Mrs. Winks had more patience and less ego.” We’ve actually won using that answer (possibly twice). And because so, Mrs. Winks used this lucky phrase as a vanity license-plate for a number years afterward.
  

The act of redeeming our ill-gained prize became a bit of a challenge itself. We needed to choose our bedding at the Cariloha store in Ketchikan, but we also had a very long shore-excursion booked that day.

When we returned from that excursion, there was already a long line of people waiting to re-board the ship and only about 90-minutes ‘til all-aboard. And of course, we’d left the prize certificate back in our stateroom safe (it being so priceless!) so we had to get back there to retrieve it.

I tried to persuade Mrs. Winks to abandon the mission. We could always give the certificate to our Captain’s Club host Graeme or our room steward as an additional tip. “What are they going to do with Queen-sized sheets?” she countered. “Listen, we won this sheet-set fair and square, and we’re going to get it.” There’s no arguing with a women hell bent on getting her free stuff.

After almost half-an-hour of waiting on the security line to get back on the ship, we dropped our bags in the cabin, grabbed the gift certificate and headed back to the gangway. Once there, it was a hassle to get off the ship - since all personnel had been assigned to the overflow crowd still trying to get back on it. Then, once on the streets of Ketchikan, we had to find the Cariloha store, which ended up being tucked away on a small side-street more than a few blocks from the pier.

Picking out the sheets was no hassle and the clerk was very helpful, even venturing back into the stockroom to retrieve a color selection we liked which wasn’t out on the floor. As advertised, the set of sheets was completely free (a $135 value), but Mrs. Winks couldn’t resist the temptation to purchase some fitness apparel… made from bamboo fiber… to add even more weight to our already over-the-airline-limit luggage!

We rushed back to the ship with our sheets in tow with about 5 minutes to spare before the all aboard time. Fortunately, by then, the long line had dissipated and our mission was completed.

Next time: The Real Alaska

Yes, she remembers that night fondly, so happy that someone recognized her from the posts here (and didn't hold it against her!!)

 

Yeah, we dropped the ball on doing an Equinox review. I came back from it sick as a dog, and by the time I recovered, just wasn't into doing a review. Big mistake.

Something was going around. Last 2 days I started to come down w/ something & it lasted for weeks once I got home