A week cruising Alaska aboard an UnCruise ship is seven days of wilderness exploring, good food and interesting companions. Here are five things I loved about my late-April trip out of Juneau on the SS Legacy.

Wildlife, large and small

As expedition leader Megan Moran put it, we were frequently on the lookout for “charismatic megafauna.” This meant big stuff, like whales, bears and moose. While we indeed saw megafauna, I loved everything from seeing a swimming bear to watching otters and seals all the way down to finding forest fungi like witch’s butter and fairy goblets.

Guide Sarah Sinn-White eats witch’s butter off a stick.

Kayaking

I love kayaking, but I don’t have my own kayak. They’re so big, and it seems like a pain to have to heave it up and secure it on my station wagon, and find a place to store it. But the Legacy tows a smaller boat called the Sea Dragon to store its kayak fleet. On the Legacy, it’s no big deal to wander down to the Sea Dragon and launch right into icy, thousand-foot water. In Alaska, I went kayaking almost every day. Bliss.

Kayaking among icebergs!

Yoga while cruising Alaska

Okay, I already mentioned I’m too lazy to load a kayak on my car. Do you think that at home I really get up and drive to a yoga class that starts at 6:45 a.m.? Before caffeine? If you guessed no, you get a gold star. But on the Legacy, it took about 50 seconds to walk from my cabin on the third deck to the yoga area on the fourth. Add in a few minutes to put on enough layers of clothing to do yoga at 6:45 am on the deck of a ship in Alaska in springtime. I had perfect attendance.

Bundle up, it’s time for yoga!

Inventive vegan food

Do I really need lunch dessert AND dinner dessert? No, I don’t. But it’s hard to turn it down when pastry chef Amanda Randall is constantly turning out special coconut creams and carrot cakes for the one vegan on board. Plus breakfast pastries. And Chef Ian Charles knows his way around vegetables and quinoa. You would have to have an extremely weird diet to go hungry on this ship.

It’s vegan!

New friends

My cousin and I spent an unforgettable week cruising Alaska together. We got to be better friends than ever, sharing a cabin the size of a dorm room. But we also met lots of interesting people who shared our love of nature and were always ready to share a table at meals. I hope to see some of them again. Maybe on another UnCruise adventure.

Hanging out in the forest with new friends.