Cape Horn lived up to its reputation yesterday morning. We arrived in the area around 8:00AM. It was breezy and cloudy with a few breaks in the sky. Cape Horn is on Cape Horn Island (what a coincidence) and belongs to Chile. When the weather permits, cruise ships sail completely around it. As we approached and could see the naval station on the Cape. The captain decided the weather was good enough to do the sail around. Initially it was quite pleasant; the sun ev...

Somehow this morning we woke up in Alaska. We spent the morning cruising down the Beagle Channel. Along the way we went by a series of five glaciers that reminded us so much of College Fiord in Alaska. The most spectacular was the Italian Glacier which dropped down a sheer cliff into the ocean. At the base were a large number of small icebergs, fortunately not too big to cause any problem. We arrived in Ushuaia, Argentina around noon. It is a city of about 80,...

Somehow it seems wrong to set the alarm when on vacation, but yesterday it was worth it. We got up at 6:30 to see a gorgeous sail in towards the Amalia Glacier. It was cloudy and quite chilly (cold) but just as we arrived at the glacier the sun came out to shine on it. The ship stayed there doing 360's for about an hour. The rest of the day was a relaxing sea day. It has been too cold for us to do much outside. Hopefully it will warm up after we get around Cape H...

Our start to the day in Puerto Montt was again interesting. I had organized a tour for ourselves and 20 other Cruise Critic members to go to the ski area on Orsono Volcano, see Petrohue Falls, and visit the city of Puerto Veras which is on the 2nd largest lake in South America. Puerto Montt is a tender port so getting us all off early on the same tender was a bit of a challenge. It was a good group and we pulled it off. Then it got very interesting and we were lu...

After 6 flights, 6 hotels, 10 days and 1 great time we are on board the Crown Princess. Now we can unpack and get some laundry done. Boarding was interesting. We had a nice breakfast on the terrace of our Valparaiso hotel. The climate there is a lot like San Francisco – usually foggy and cool in the morning but it was sunny this day. We caught a cab to the cruise terminal and got there about 10:30 where we were informed that there was a work stoppage at the...