7 Night Cruise sailing from Seattle roundtrip aboard Eurodam.

Holland America Line’s first Signature-class ship, Eurodam has recently received many exciting updates. Guests on this graceful ship can enjoy the full Music Walk™ experience, including Lincoln Center Stage, B.B. King’s Blues Club and Billboard Onboard. Explore onboard at a cooking class or hands-on workshop with America’s Test Kitchen, BBC Earth Experiences and a Digital Workshop Powered by Windows®. Dine in your choice of specialty restaurants.

Highlights of this cruise:

Seattle
Harvester of trees. Provisioner to gold rushers. Gateway for sea commerce. Incubator of jazz and grunge, jets and literature, coffee and computer software. Seattle is as much about reinvention as it is a landscape. But what a landscape! There are lakes and mountains and forests everywhere you look. The rest is an archipelago of neighborhoods studded with boutiques and coffee shops. Catch a salmon at Pike Place Market, ride to the top of the Space Needle, sample a local microbrew in Fremont, or slurp a bowl of steaming pho down in the International District.

Puget Sound
Ice-crowned peaks cradle Seattle—the Pacific Northwest’s urban epicenter—a city full of evergreen-ringed coves and waterways (not to mention hipsters, tech geniuses and ill-advised man buns). The most glorious mountain remains the stratovolcano of Mount Rainier: This 4,392-meter (14,410-foot) snow cone has 27 glaciers, making it the most heavily frosted region of America’s lower 48. Besides featuring on Washington State’s license plates, on a clear day, Rainier hunkers over the Seattle skyline. Also visible are the mountains of the Cascade Range, along with the jagged outcrops of the rain forest­–fringed Olympic National Park.

The Puget Sound fills the notch of western Washington’s mitten shape, and goes more formally by the name Salish Sea, since the ecosystem stretches up into the San Juan Islands and British Columbia’s neighboring Gulf Islands. With luck, visitors will see pods of endangered orcas here—pods that have been enjoying a 2015–16 baby boom. Also keep an eye out for humpback whales bubble-net feeding: Teams of whales spiral upward around prey, blowing cyclones of air. When the panicked fish crowd into a column, the predators launch toward the surface en masse—pleated throats wide open—to suck in as many as possible.

Scenic cruising Stephens Passage
Stephens Passage is like the best shortcut in the world, a straight line through Southeast Alaska in a landscape that comes with very few straight lines. It’s not only people and ships that use the passage: Concentrated in and around its waters is a greatest hits of Alaskan wildlife, from humpback whales, the whoosh of their breath loud enough to be heard almost a kilometer away, to giant sea lions and their very distinctive smell—well, okay, call it a stink—that can carry just as far.

The southern reaches of Stephens Passage start at the edges of Frederick Sound, one of the best whale-watching areas in the state. The sound narrows and as you are funneled into the passage, the mountains come right down into the sea, high tide licking the roots of spruce and hemlock. In tiny bays, guillemots and gulls gather; when they take off at the ship’s wake, the noise is like applause.

The water of the passage is ridiculously deep, well over 300 meters (1,000 feet) in places. But in this landscape cut by the last ice age, you really have to measure to the mountain peaks for true scale: They climb to summits at 1,500 meters (5,000 feet), their slopes covered with forests, meadows that turn sunset into alpenglow, and best of all, by the purple tinge of glaciers that form the passage’s crown.

Juneau, Alaska
No roads lead to Juneau, which gives the Alaskan capital a misty inscrutability. You need to come by air or water, but when you arrive, the place will delight you with its bounty of water, forests, and mountains. Squeezed between the Gastineau Channel and Coast Mountains, Juneau offers a lot of variety in close proximity. The massive Mendenhall Glacier and the immense Juneau Icefields are at its back door. The vast Tongass National Forest stretches away to the northeast. You can shop downtown or get out and kayak, dogsled, raft, hike, whale watch, flightsee or fish. The adventures are as bountiful as the daylight.

Glacier Bay, Alaska
If you didn't know any better, you'd think Glacier Bay ostentatious for the way it flaunts its ice. The glaciers practically terminate in your lap. A cruise to Glacier Bay National Park with Holland America Line will show you a UNESCO World Heritage Site that protects a unique ecosystem of plants and animals living in concert with an ever-changing glacial landscape.
When a monumental chunk of ice splits off a glacier and thunders into the sea the impact shoots water hundreds of feet into the air. You hold your breath as you catch the moment on film. Then you wait for it all to happen again. And it does: Glacier Bay has more actively calving tidewater glaciers than anyplace else in the world.

Icy Strait Point, Alaska, US
Icy Strait Point is a popular cruise destination on Alaska cruises and is only open when a cruise ship is in port. This historical town is filled with history and culture. Back in the old days when a freezer was a piece of ice, fishermen in Alaska had two problems. The first one was finding the fish, although that wasn’t too complicated, the ocean was chock-full of fins; but the second problem was a little harder. The government regulated how long you could keep your catch on the boat, and it wasn’t very long.

Canneries were the answer. Owning a cannery was having a license to print money. Really. As operations spread up and down Southeast Alaska, each cannery had its own currency. True company towns, canneries had their own workforce, their own laws. A big cannery needed a couple hundred workers, for everything from keeping books to making the millions of cans needed to ship all that fish, as well as the actual cleaning and prepping of fish on the line, called "slime row."
Canneries were usually somewhere beautiful, someplace you could see from far off and aim your boat towards. But canneries didn’t survive the advent of refrigeration. Most were taken back by the forest or simply left to rot. With one exception: Icy Strait Point, beautifully restored. Just opposite Glacier Bay, Icy Strait Point stretches for a few hundred meters along the beach; the old wooden buildings, bright red in the endless green of the Tongass, now offer a museum and a cannery demo. But more interesting is simply the madness of scale. Icy Strait Point gives a chance to look into history to see where Alaska’s money came from, all in a ghost town of millions of fish.

Sitka, Alaska
The onion domes of St. Michael's Cathedral are your first clue that Sitka was once a key Russian settlement. Indeed, it was capital of Russian America, seat of the bishop of Kamchatka, and the most important port on the West Coast for the first half of the 19th century. Catch a performance by the New Archangel Dancers, be greeted by native Tlingit people, then stand on the spot where the United States took possession of Alaska in 1867. The dramatic setting in the shadow of Mt. Edgecumbe is one of the loveliest in the Great North.

Ketchikan, Alaska
Ketchikan clutches the shores of the Tongass Narrows, with many shops and houses built right out over the water. The stairways are weathered and the vibe is cheerful in the town that calls itself the Salmon Capital of the World. Besides the main attractions – Creek Street, the Tongass Historical Museum, Totem Bight State Park and Saxman Village – try a flightseeing trip to Misty Fjords National Monument. These deepwater fjords were gouged out by retreating glaciers, leaving granite cliffs towering thousands of feet above the sea and countless waterfalls plunging into placid waters.

Victoria, Canada
Hello, England. Fancy meeting you here! Victoria is a city that started as Salish Village, spent a roustabout adolescence as a main port for gold prospectors and opium traders, and then transformed itself into an icon of British gentility after the completion of the trans-Canada railroad put neighboring Vancouver in the ascendant. Two events were seminal: the opening of Butchart Gardens in 1904 and the completion of the Empress Hotel in 1908. Butchart is a collection of gardens more than a single garden -- highlights for cruise visitors include the Sunken Garden (built from a former limestone quarry), the Italian Garden, the Japanese Garden, and the Rose Garden (breathe deeply). The Empress Hotel is merely a national icon. Come in for high tea.