There's a stretch of October where you can step off a ship in Skagway, Alaska, and step off the same ship in Mazatlán, Mexico, about three weeks later. Same stateroom the whole way, if you want it. Norwegian Encore® finishes her Alaska season and then works her way south, and if you follow her down, you get a run of weather and scenery that doesn't usually belong to one trip.

Here's how it lays out.

She sails a 7-day Alaska round-trip from Seattle on Oct 4, 2026: Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan, and Victoria. That's the tail of the season, cold mornings and low light, and the glaciers don't care that it's late. Then she repositions, six days from Vancouver down to Los Angeles by way of Victoria and San Francisco. Then she turns around in Los Angeles on Oct 18 and heads for the Mexican Riviera: Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlán, and Puerto Vallarta.

Twenty days. One ship. You start in fleece and you end up looking for shade.

I like this for a specific kind of traveler. Not the person who wants an Alaska cruise, and not the person who wants a Mexico cruise. The person who likes the idea of watching the map change underneath them without repacking, without a second embarkation day, without learning where the coffee is on a different ship. You settle in once. By week three the crew knows you.

For those of us flying out of Kansas City, the shape works out better than it looks. You fly one way into Seattle and home out of Los Angeles, and you're not paying for a round-trip that strands you on the wrong coast.

Now, the interesting part.

There's a night in there where Encore moves from Seattle up to Vancouver, and that hop isn't sold as a sailing. It's a positioning move. The ship goes, and as far as the booking engine is concerned, nobody goes with her.

So there's a question, and I don't have the answer yet. Maybe Norwegian Cruise Line will let you stay aboard that night. Maybe they won't, and it's the train up to Vancouver and a hotel night before you board again. Amtrak runs that route and it's a pleasant ride along the water, so it's not exactly a hardship either way.

If you want to go, let me know, I'll call and find out. That's a phone call, and I don't mind making it.

That's really the whole thing I wanted to say here. These four sailings are sitting on the schedule right now, available to anybody. Nothing's hidden. But nobody at Norwegian is going to put them on a page together and call it a trip, because it isn't a product they sell. It's four separate bookings that happen to line up, and you only see it if you're reading the deployment schedule with your head tilted.

If that's the kind of thing that gets you interested, we should talk. Not because you need help booking a cruise. Because the trip you'd actually love might be four bookings that nobody has named yet.

More on <a href="/ncl-cruise-to/transatlantic-reposition">Repositioning Cruises</a>