Our Alaska Cruise on Ovation of the Seas — With Two Kids
Some trips you plan for years. This one started with a single lucky spin. A $1,065 jackpot hit at just the right moment, and instead of cashing it into everyday life, we pointed it north. That’s how our family ended up sailing the Inside Passage on Ovation of the Seas — a full-on Alaska cruise with kids, two of them, wide-eyed at the rail.
If you’re weighing an Alaska cruise for your own family, here’s what the experience was actually like, and why we’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Why a cruise is the easy way to do Alaska with kids
Alaska is enormous, and doing it by land with children means a lot of driving, a lot of logistics, and a lot of “are we there yet.” A cruise flips that. Your hotel moves with you overnight, so you wake up somewhere new without anyone having to pack a bag. On a ship the size of Ovation, the kids had room to roam — and we had a balcony, which in Alaska is not a luxury, it’s the main event. We watched mountains and glaciers slide past from our own railing with coffee in hand.
The moments that stuck
Standing on deck as the ship eased past a glacier, close enough to hear it, is the kind of thing that makes a eight-year-old go quiet. We saw fjords open up around us, spotted wildlife, wandered among totem poles in port, and layered up for the cold-weather couple selfies that this family apparently cannot stop taking. The scenery does something to you up there. Even the kids, who have seen the Colosseum and the Eiffel Tower, still talk about the day everything around us was ice and water and green.
Roadschooling on the water
We homeschool, so we don’t pause learning when we travel — we relocate it. Alaska turned into a floating curriculum: glaciers and how they form, the Indigenous history behind the totem poles, tides and marine life, the gold-rush stories behind the port towns. None of it came from a textbook. All of it stuck, because they were standing in it. That’s the whole reason we roadschool the way we do.
How the perks made it reachable
We’ll always be upfront about the money, because that’s the point of this whole project. The jackpot was the spark, but the reason cruising works for us again and again is the casino comps — waived fares, onboard credit, and free play that stretch a sailing much further than its sticker price. We play for those perks, within a set budget, and treat the winning as a bonus rather than a plan. If you want the receipts-and-numbers version of how a casino offer turns into a cruise, we lay it all out on The Travel Log.
Gambling should always stay in the “entertainment” column of the budget, never the “income” one. If it ever stops being fun, help is free at 1-800-GAMBLER.
Would we recommend it?
Without hesitation — especially for families. An Alaska cruise gives kids something dramatic and real without asking them to endure endless travel days to get it. Ours came from a lucky night and a good offer. Yours might too. See where we’re headed next on our home page.
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