ALASKA, Part II

The next morning we woke up to beautiful Skagway!  As we were leaving our rooms, our steward pointed out that we had notes on our door informing us that the whale watch we'd scheduled for the next day in Juneau had been canceled!  I was SO disappointed.  This was the thing I'd been looking forward to the most about this trip!!!  Jason and Craig were just plain furious.  We'd booked it a year ago, and now we would be stuck trying to reschedule 16 people???  That wouldn't even be possible!!!  The three of us marched down to guest services and Jason gave them a piece of his mind.  We also scheduled me for a different whale watch that still had one space available.  So I would be okay.  But it wasn't what I was hoping for, obviously.  I wanted to do the whale watch with everyone!  (And I kind of felt like a jerk taking the one space left, but Craig was pretty sure no one else could possibly care about seeing whales as much as I did...)

There wasn't anything else we could do until the Shore Excursion desk opened that evening, so we headed out for the day and tried not to worry about it too much.  (I'm very bad at not worrying about things until later.  But I tried.)  Once we were off the ship we did a little more shopping-- I let Colton and Camille buy stuffed animals for themselves.  And then we took a bus to a place where they train sled dogs for the Iditarod!  (And yes, I spelled that right on the first try!)

Snow!  You can see it!

Alaska is SO pretty!

It's always good to know that people consider your name to be a good dog name.  But my Dad is named Rex, so this is nothing new to our family...

That green vehicle was called a "mog" and we got to ride in it to where the dogs live.

This building was weird, but in an entertaining way!

Ryder and Camille were very excited to ride up front with the driver!

And the rest of us were all in the back!

This thing apparently had 8 gears for going forward and another 8 gears for going in reverse.  I can't for the life of me understand why that would be necessary...?  Also, it could haul quite a few people!

Who doesn't love adorable puppies???

Here are some of the dogs all ready to race!  It was fun to watch them, because they were SO EXCITED to get running!  As we all got seated in our "sleds" they started barking and jumping for joy!

These were basically like golf carts without the motor, but they held 6 people, plus the musher, who could brake and steer from the back

Happy doggies!

I think each cart had about 15 dogs pulling it.  And we went pretty fast, all things considered!

After a few laps, they let us pet all the doggies and tell them what a good job they'd done

We'd decided we should all wear our Cruisin' Together sweatshirts that Tom and Donna had bought for everyone, but then no one thought to tell Tom!

And, of course, everyone was very excited to get to hold the puppies at the end!

Especially Grandpa!

My sister Leah loves salmon, so I had to show these stuffed animal fish to her!

Alaska is so pretty!!!

We had enough time to get pizza and ice cream before our next excursion (the joke in this part of Alaska was that ice cream was MUCH CHEAPER than a gallon of milk, so they recommended just letting your ice cream melt and then pouring that on your cereal; yum!).  

And then we were boarding an old-fashioned train that took us through White Pass, where all the prospectors had to go for the gold rush!  The train ride was around three hours long, and I was a little worried as we began that we would get bored, but I ended up really enjoying it.  The history was fascinating (I grew up learning about the gold rush since Seattle was considered the gateway to the Yukon, and I love this kind of stuff).  The views were spectacular, and even thrilling at times!  And we got to see mountain goats, which I also love.  I definitely recommend this excursion!

Ruh roh. 
Seriously, though, we went on a trellis that was fully functional, but it was still terrifying!!!  What kind of chutzpah does it take to build something so rickety and then run a train across it???

Lots of snow at the top!

Going into a tunnel

Super cool.  But man, that gold rush was rough.  Good for Seattle, bad for all the people who tried to get rich quick!  Anyway, I learned a lot and the train ride was great!

By the time we got back to the ship, we'd missed dinner in the dining room, so we were about to head to the buffet, but I stopped by our rooms first to get cleaned up.  Our steward was there, again, but this time with happy news-- they'd reinstated our whale watch for the next day!  I have no idea why it got changed back (was it because of us yelling?  was it never actually canceled in the first place?  NO CLUE!), but I knew I needed to get this information to Jason--who had headed straight for the excursion desk-- before he could give someone else a piece of his mind!  So I raced downstairs and caught him just in time, and we got me put back in the whale watch with everyone else.  And then we got to join everyone else at dinner, much happier than we'd all been that morning!  I was so glad that I'd been too distracted by the cute puppies and amazing views to waste this awesome day worrying about tomorrow!

I was proud of this panorama shot I got that evening

The next morning we got up super early so we could see a glacier!  It was pretty startling to see chunks of ice floating by!  As we were staring at the glacier, we also saw a few seals swimming around, which was fun.  And the water the ship was in was all green and cool from the glaciers, so that was pretty awesome.  Definitely worth losing a few hours of sleep!

There's the glacier with all the in the water near it!

This was so crazy looking, where the glacier water meets the regular water!

I said, "Kids, let's get a family picture!" and Kendra stayed in bed!

Another shot of the two waters refusing to mix!

After that, the ship headed out of the fjord and chugged down to Juneau.  I used those couple hours of travel time to get a nap and then it was back off the ship!

Today we wore our new Bay Hay & Feed sweatshirts, except Kendra and I traded.  We agreed we would share our sweatshirts, since neither of us could decide which one we wanted more!

Like in Sitka, we took a bus to a different boat in a different harbor.  On the way, we saw a mama bear with two cubs, and a ton of bald eagles.  The boat headed out and the captain explained that we were going to head south because his whale senses were tingling.  As we approached a bunch of other boats sitting around not moving, he told us this was a great sign, and sure enough, within a few minutes of our arrival, we saw killer whales!!!  According to everyone, these are super rare to find (they said they hadn't seen any in two months), so everyone was pretty excited about this.  We also saw a sea lion and a humpback whale (briefly), but at this point, the stars of the show were those orcas.  They were transient orcas, which feed on large mammals (as opposed to resident orcas, which mostly eat salmon), so I was a little worried for the sea lion and humpback whale!  (But honestly, it would have been pretty awesome to watch them hunting!)  I didn't even try to get pictures, although I was nice and let the guy next to me with a crazy huge lens lean way out in front of me so he could get pictures.  Craig and Jason got these shots, though, which are pretty good for an iPhone!

After we'd had several good looks at the killer whales, the captain decided it was time to head north where he thought we'd see more humpback whales.  And we did!  There were at least two (plus a couple fins that I suspect were porpoises?) and a couple times we got to see their tail (flukes) after they'd come up for air, so that was awesome.

Keeping balanced as our boat went over a ferry's large wake

Thar she blows!

Be still my heart

So I was SO happy.  I've finally gotten to see humpback whales!  I just wished we could have stayed longer in case one of them decided to breach.  A dream for another time, I suppose.

We had one more stop, which was visiting Mendenhall Glacier.  This one was so blue and pretty!

Yeah, that's super cool

Things got messed up with the busses so we ran out of time-- it would have been cool to have hiked over to this waterfall!  But the glacier alone was still worth it!

It doesn't look all that impressive until you realize that all those specks along the bottom are people!

When we got back to our port, Craig wanted to explore Juneau a bit more, so he took Kendra and Colton with him, and I took Ryder and Camille back onto the ship.  (I wouldn't have minded seeing more of Juneau, too-- it looked like a cute town!  But I didn't want to just release Ryder and Camille without any adult supervision, and while we'd been trying to decide what to do, everyone else had already boarded the ship.)  I had a bit of trouble then because I hadn't bothered to bring my driver's license.  So I had to be escorted onto the ship by a 19-year-old TSA agent, while he explained to me that it was against the law for adults to not carry ID around and I technically could have been put in jail for up to 3 days.  Um, okay?  

Once aboard, we did the responsible thing and got ice cream before the soft serve place closed for the night!  

And while we sat on the 14th floor deck, I looked down and who should I see walking the streets of Juneau?  But Craig, Colton, and Kendra!  So that made me laugh.

We finished our ice cream and joined everyone else for dinner.  Cruising is so fun!  Next on the docket was roller skating.  I put on the roller skates and went about three feet towards where all the helmets and stuff were and decided that breaking my ankle would be a terrible way to finish up our vacation.  I took them right back off and just enjoyed watching everyone have a fun time!

I was sad to be leaving Juneau (and Alaska), but I got this lovely sunset as a parting gift!  

Meanwhile Craig and Camille played pingpong against Ryder

As it was the 4th of July, they had a "party" with a balloon drop at 11:30pm.  It was pretty lame, even by my standards.  I think they needed the lights to be lower and everyone to be a lot drunker for that to have been fun.  And fireworks.  They needed fireworks!

This was flag was covering the doorway to a pub, so people kept popping out from under it and then trying to squeeze past us.  Who puts a flag in front of a door???

But I was impressed with our cruise director singing The Star-Spangled Banner.  He didn't quite nail the hardest note, but he did pretty well, considering how difficult that song is!  And I'm a fan of any celebration of our great country, so at least they tried!

And once again, I think this post is long enough.  More soon!