It’s Wednesday, I am sitting in our stateroom taking in some quite choppy seas. As far as I can see, which isn’t far, there are 8-10 foot swells until the fog line. This is about what I expected from the ocean in this area, we left Tracy Arm Fjord this morning heading for Ketchikan tomorrow morning and at the moment it’s slow going and pretty rough.
We are totally enjoying our vacation however. Monday morning we arrived in Juneau Alaska and although it was quite wet, we found ourselves totally enjoying our day. We started with a trip to the Mendenhal Glacier. We took a not so scenic bus ride out there, it was raining and the windows were pretty foggy. Although we got a great verbal tour, we couldn’t see much of what was being pointed out.
When we arrived at the glacier things were quite different. The glacier was magnificent. We caught a bear fishing for Salmon at the creek, a Bald Eagle high in the trees and took in the beautiful Alaskan Scenery on our way back to the port.
When we returned to the port we waited a few minutes before we were off on our whale watching adventure. Our guide took us about 20 minutes out into the channels until we sighted these incredible creatures just off the boat. In all we saw about a half dozen Humpback Whales. The trademark spout of air and water, the big dives, the displays of Dorsal fins, it was amazing to see.
We sailed through the night after Juneau and when we woke up we were in Skagway Alaska. After rambling around town for a few minutes and even coming across a Starbucks (and a $6.75 White Chocolate Mocha, heh) we took off in a small bus for a ride up the White Pass. Our tour guide took us to the old cemetery, thrilled us with stories about Soapy Smith and other local color, and then we headed out the pass and eventually into Canada. The scenery was simply breathtaking. I can’t imagine how people managed to cross that territory in the gold rush.
After making it back to the boat, we woke up in Tracy Arm Fjord and the Sawyer Glaciers, these were pretty incredible as well. We sailed around and past our boat’s sister ship the "Star Princess" and seeing that ship against the glacier and mountain back drop really puts the size of the country into perspective.
That finds us back where we are now, in heart of the Inside Passage making our way to Ketchikan, then Victoria British Columbia and eventually back in Seattle Washington early Saturday morning. I am sure there will be more photos to come, but I have picked out a select few to show what we have seen and done on this vacation so far and uploaded them to Flickr. You can view these photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/philoking
I hope you enjoy them as much as I have. I going to check out the email I haven’t looked at in four days, see what’s going on and I’ll be back to the world on Saturday. Adios!
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