Can you see the humpback whale in this video? Here, let me zoom in 24 times. Do you see it now? A little grainy, but you see it, right? How about in this video? Do you see the whale? Much better, right? Well, the first video is what we saw from the deck of our Alaskan cruise ship and the second video is what you're very likely to see on an Alaskan cruise whale watching excursion. When we planned our Alaskan cruise, seeing whales in the wild was high on our bucket list, but we decided against booking an actual whale watching excursion. Our mistake was assuming that on an eight-day cruise, there would be a ton of opportunities for these amazing creatures to get up close and personal with our cruise ship. And that was just not the reality. I mean, we did see whales in the wild, but at a very, very far distance away. We basically saw splashes of water and moving blobs of black and gray. And while I guess we can technically check see a whale in the wild off our bucket list, we will always regret not booking a whale watching excursion on our Alaskan cruise.