Cruises

NOODLES, WATER SAFETY BELTS and music are all provided by the FUN & FITNESS Travel Club when guests cruise together. Fitness Host Joyce Doucette of Points, W. VA enjoys applying yoga techniques to water exercises. "Water is always excellent for exercise," she says. "It allows you to exercise without hurting. And the less it hurts the more exercise you will do." Yoga classes are also held in addition to walking and dancing sessions.

FUN & FITNESS Travel Club members like to learn. For example, Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith was a big-time con man who moved to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush to take advantage of naive prospectors. His most notorious con job was opening up a bogus telegraph office with poles and wires stretched out back into the forest. Lonely, homesick miners would come into his telegraph office and pay their last $5 to send a telegram home. Smith would alert them the next day their telegram had been answered by family members who needed money immediately. When the poor miners gave up their absolute last dollars to send home Smith would keep the funds for himself. This story and more, like the one about who really built the world famous White Pass Railway through Alaska, make this cruise vacation an unforgettable travel adventure.

FUN & FITNESS Travel Club members can spend a day in Skagway when they cruise to Alaska. A favorite spot to visit is the Red Onion Saloon where guests can enjoy drinks, have lunch and learn how during the Klondike Gold Rush Days there was more than one way to "get rich." The ladies most highly sought after in Skagway had rooms in the Red Onion where they could entertain their favorite guests in private for as long as they wanted. Ladies newly arrived to Skagway had to carry their own half-bed suitcases. This made it easier for the more ambitious working girls because immediately upon agreeing on a price they and their clients could literally "get down to business" wherever they happened to be. Alaska in the late 1800s had many "new entrepreneurs" starting out. Some goods and services were worth their weight in gold, as many enterprising ladies found out.