| Peter and Meredith drove us off island in their rental car to Seatac, where we took a plane for Juneau on Friday, August 25. It was raining when we got here, the cruise guide told us it always rains in Juneau, 96" per year. A sunny day is when it's cloudy but not raining. Peter's Ph.D. advisor from Yale picked us up at the hotel and showed us around Juneau. He was born there. We had a great salmon and halibut dinner at Thane's Ore House, and we loved hearing about Juneau from Jay's perspective. He is really interesting and fun. We went to sleep, but our ship came into port at about midnight, so we got to see her from the great view out our hotel window. |  |
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The next morning, we walked out to check out the shopping, not so great. Pretty touristy. But we found the goods for our liquor cabinet! Then Meredith and I and Murray and Marge all got on a tour bus to go see the Mendenhall Glacier, near the Juneau airport. It had these very cool turquoise blue stripes, and there were a bunch of icebergs in Mendenhall lake. Meanwhile, Peter and I were just out of sight up on the plateau of the glacier walking around. I'm going to let Hawk add some comments to this site, his are red. |
| When we got back, we got on the ship and went to our cabin, here are some shots. This is my twin berth, you can just see the silk pillow cover on my pillow that Hawk bought me. |  |
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Here's the liquor cabinet. We calculated gin/scotch/cognac for before dinner drinks and scotch/meredith mix and cigars for after dinner. Hawk got me the second jar of olives, and I grabbed the jar of cashew butter (I've managed to get Meredith addicted to it too). |
| Here's our desk. |  |
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And we have two windows, they don't open but the ac kept us really cold last night, so good. It was quiet, the boat left around midnight. Flat seas, hardly any motion. |
| Our first morning out on our way to Elfin Cove we stopped to see the humpback whales eating. That's a fin sticking out there -- it's about 16 feet long, 1/3 the length of the whole whale. |  |
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And you can see the humped back on that first one. The tails are so beautiful, just gigantic. These guys are much bigger than orcas, up to 50 feet long. |
| Cool shot of the tail. We followed them for about two hours. |  |
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Hawk looks great in his new jacket. |
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The next day we went into Elfin Cove, a bush fishing village that has about 20 year around residents. Hawk and Peter went ashore, but Meredith and I watched from the lounge and drank tea. It was pouring. And it just seemed kind of weird to me, 134 of us on this little cruise ship going ashore to a village of 20. Hawk and Peter were back pretty early, it wasn't too exciting. |
| We woke up early to get off in Glacier Bay the next day. It is a beautiful inlet created by a huge glacier that receded 300 years ago. We look cold, but it's really in the 50s and 60s, not so bad. Our clothes are doing the job. |   |
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We went up to about 1/4 mile from this huge glacier. You can get a sense of the scale of this glacier from how small it makes that humongous Princess cruise ship look. |
| Just as we left, the glacier calved, everyone was excited. Hawk got a picture. |  |
 | I escaped our dinner table when I just couldn't listen to the boring guy on my left any longer, and went up on deck to our cabin. But I had to go back outside to see this incredible sunset. That led to a glass of Meredith mix and a cigar... |
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The next day we went into Haines, which is a sweet authentic Alaskan village that also houses an historic Fort. While everyone else went on bald eagle cruises, we walked around town. |
| We found an espresso bar so we could have our capuccinos (the Yorktown Clipper has terrible coffee). |  |
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Here's our little boat, it's small enough to go into cool little channels and get right up to shore. |
| Hawk did laundry, then we went into the art galleries, most of which have authentic native art. The mayor of Haines is standing beside the eskimo sculpture we bought for our upstairs hallway, on that big blue wall we have there. |  |
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It's so cool. It's about three feet tall, made out of a humpback whale bone, and that harpoon is aimed right at you. We're going to set it into a driftwood post to make it tall enough for our 8 foot space under the cupola. |
| We left Haines around noon. The sun came out that morning early in Haines and followed us all the way to Skagway. Steve and Janine and Peter enjoy the sundeck. I put some spf 15 on Hawk's bald spot. |  |
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We got to Skagway around 3:45 that same day, it's only 20 miles from Haines. It's very different, though. The Park Service bought up all the buildings downtown and restored them to look like they did in 1898 during the Klondike gold rush. Skagway was the main port for the miners to enter the Yukon. They built this narrow gauge railway over the pass into the Yukon in 1898. Before that, the miners walked with pack animals, it was a horrendous journey. You can still see the paths they wore in the rocks. |
| This is a view from the train looking back at Skagway. Of course, we took the train up to the pass! But it took about three hours and we were starved when we got back. |  |
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The next morning, we woke up to three huge cruise ships beside us, each one with over 2,000 passengers. We walked into town to have Starbucks (YAY!) and look at art. We found some gouache paintings that really attracted us, especially these three. Especially the Merganser, to the immediate left here. They are at Lynch & Kennedy (lynch-kennedy.com). But we resisted. However, I do have a way to reach them... |
We're about halfway through this cruise, now. The company is wonderful, we are having the best time with Peter and Meredith, Marge and Murray and Steve and Janine. Everyone likes to hang out together or separately, it's all good. No whiners. | However, I have to admit that the food isn't up to snuff in quality or service, and we are all a little annoyed that they won't allow the 8 of us to sit together. They have tables for 4 and tables for 6. That's it. |
| So we left Skagway on Wednesday afternoon, about an hour late. One of the passengers strolled back aboard an hour and 15 minutes after All Aboard time, just seconds before her husband was about to be put off the boat. Her story is that her watch stopped. Anyway, that made us leave later than planned, but we saw no real consequences. It started raining shortly after we started heading south, toward Juneau. Where it always rains. We didn't see much on the way, it was extra dreary because it had been so so beautiful the last two days in Haines and Skagway. |  |
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Hawk shows me where we are on the inside passage. |
| We got to Sitka this morning around 8:30, raining and overcast. We can't see the volcano that marks the city. City center is only about a quarter mile from the boat, and so we cruised the art galleries. We saw one good piece, but the shop owner wouldn't let me take a picture so she lost a sale. Anyway, we like the merganser piece from Skagway better. We went to a few museums after the galleries, this is the old block house that separated the Russians from the Tlingit Indians. |  |
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Hawk reads the story. There's a Russian princess buried here (he told me). |
| Marge is reading Riddle of the Sands in the lounge. We spent a little time there today, it was raining so hard we didn't really want to do anything else. Then we left at 4:30 to go to the Tlingit dance show. The cruise ships get these performances from the Tlingits in exchange for a fee, which the Tlingits use to teach their kids about their history and traditions. It's a good exchange. |  |
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Meredith made me go, I was sure I'd get the fidgets. But no, it was completely wonderful. Really stirring, beautiful and fun. |
| We left at dinner time last night to go to Tracy Arm. Wait, I need to tell you about dinner. We sat with Steve and Janine at a 4-top and had fresh steamed dungeness crab with drawn butter. Cooked perfectly, perfectly fresh. I was so happy, and Steve was really impressed, too. He told me that before this experience, he hadn't liked dungeness crab. Probably because it wasn't that fresh -- we're pretty sure they got it at the pier next to us in Sitka that afternoon. Anyway, best dinner BY FAR of the cruise. Then we all got free after dinner drinks from the bar (part of the bananas foster special dessert) and went to smoke cigars and sing (!) on the aft deck of our level. We have appropriated that spot, no one ever comes there but us. Anyway, we were in heavy rain all day on our way to Tracy Arm, which is this very narrow fjord with two glaciers. Here a crew member pokes the canvas in the sunroof to get rid of the accumulated rainwater. |
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Right outside the entrance to Tracy Arm we started seeing very blue icebergs. They are blue because the ice is so compressed. |
| Here's a view down the channel, looking the way we have come. |  |
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There are tons of harbor seals up here, not exactly sunning themselves on the ice but they are resting. |
| South Sawyer glacier is very blue. It's the same color as my sapphire in its clear lights, you can't really see it here, but I tried. |  |
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Here's the glacier. It's much bigger than the one we saw in Glacier Bay, maybe twice the size tall. We are looking at it from a mile away. |
| So the crew went out and netted an iceberg and brought it aboard so people could touch it. Hawk thought that was pretty interesting, I guess.
Oh, c'mon, get into it! Actually, I thought they were going to let us use it for ice cubes in tonight's drinks, but they think it's not sanitary enough. The helicopter company that took us to the glacier encouraged us to bottle the water from streams on top, and even gave us labels for our bottles. |
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Here are Marge, Murray and Steve. It looks cold, but it really was only wet. |
| And here's a picture of Sawyer glacier. Not as blue, but close. Equally stunning. |  |
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We got to Juneau at 11 pm and got off the boat the next morning. Here's a raven-killer whale dance stick that we think would go great hanging from one of the beams in the livingroom. |