Sailing the Alaskan Coast - Day 3

Day 3 Memoirs

Welcome to our Alaska cruise. I'm starting blog entries on Day #3 (Juneau) because I didn't remember I had a blog until just a few hours ago! Many interesting things have happened but I'll have to write about them later. Here's starting from yesterday (Sunday, June 3rd).

After seeing so many eagles on the train trip up from Seattle to Vancouver I shouldn't be so surprised to see another one. But this morning one went past the window of our cabin, passing a scant 20 feet away!! Oh, if only I had my camera in hand at that moment.

The weather cooperated magnificently today -- we weren't sure if any days would have good weather so we'd thought the first chance at seeing glaciers on a day without rain would be one we try to book an air flight. These tend to be between expensive and downright highway robbery. But it's one of those things you have to say, "Well I'll only be this way once in my life and its the only chance I'll have."

Finding tour operators in Juneau was a frustrating mystery. Where were they? We wandered Juneau's nice, clean streets with elegant shops aimlessly and finally found the "discount" shops. Not many, but we managed to be persuaded into a flight tour over five glaciers, with a salmon bake dinner thrown in to boot -- at the low price of only $225 each. Well, low it isn't but it was a lot less than taking a $398 helicopter tour if we'd booked on the boat.

This tour was to the Taku Glacier Lodge (long and very interesting history about this place -- ask me about it later) by seaplane, dinner and a short hike, and then back by seaplane to Juneau. All in about 3 hours. This had better be one helluva good time at $75/hour.

The salmon bake was quite good, better actually than most of the food we get on the ship. Fresh salmon, caught 16 miles upstream, then roasted on an open alderwood fire (not baked) to just about mouth-watering perfection. Add to this tasty beans (homemade home cookin' style), slaw and some of the most flavourful biscuits I'd ever had and I was quite impressed with the meal even though it was pretty much standard homestyle fare. It just happened to be the best of its class.

One of the most impressive parts of the meal was to learn that the ice used in our drinks was actually from remnants of the Hole-in-the-Wall Glacier across the river! I was literally drinking melted ice formed from snow that fell 4,000 to 5,000 years ago! Talk about the novelties of life.

The flights to and from the Lodge were... well, spectacular. I'd never seen glaciers in person and didn't even know the term "glacier blue" until I was hit rather suddenly with it in tiny pools just below me. I used a lot of digital film on these blips trying to get the best representation of that blue that I could. I only had a little bit of time to review the photos but I have to say that even in film the colour of "glacier blue" comes out rather well.

After morning whale watching, snow-capped mountains' glory, harbor seals, Juneau and glaciers, downloading the camera cards took quite a while. All told almost 500 pictures were taken on two dSLR cameras. 3.5 gigabytes!!

Today was a four meal day, since we took the sushi bar option for late dinner, just before the evening entertainment. Imagine this... five hours of All-You-Can- Eat sushi every night of the cruise! My first two meals of the day were lighter than average, but add to that the salmon bake and sushi and I started to wonder for the first time this trip how much I was going to weigh by the end.

Tonight's entertainer was ventriloquist Don Bryan of Canada. His bio provided to us in our daily schedule was impressive so we decided to go. A lot of his schtick was a bit old, dated, stale and sometimes too racy. However two of his acts really shined: one was with nothing more than a tennis ball and two O-rings (another great short story behind this I'll tell you later). But it was his last section that had me laughing hysterically, my eyes tearing so much I couldn't see for ten minutes straight! He used a live member of the audience as his 2nd "dummy" -- for this he chose a man about 40 years old and fairly stocky. He used touch contact to emulate puppet control (by squeezing the man's shoulder the man was supposed to open his mouth but not say anything). With a series of three different voices, each more ludicrous than the last, the whole audience was lost to laughter. I hadn't laughed so hard in anytime I can remember of recent past.

Tonite while in Juneau we once again cheated the evil Cruise Line of their money grubbing capitalistic greed. I brought a really powerful Wi-Fi antenna (15 dbi for those who are curious) and started poking around the town across the water from the boat. Our room was not dock side this port so the nearest houses were 2 or more miles across the water on the opposite side of the fjord. It took three attempts but found an unsecured router I was able to establish free service. Voila! And for all of 45 glorious minutes we had access to our email. Thank you, to whomever you were, for your generosity of sharing your internet. If I can do this at our other two ports of call we would have saved at least $100 in access fees.