I am so tired, in a good way. We spent yesterday combing the side streets and back alleys of Skagway. What a pretty little place it is. We just strolled along all over the wee town looking for interesting ideas for our new house and things to take pics of. The weather was amazing. I am turning brown again! Quirky and quaint...that describes it perfectly. And, thankfully, the great masses of people that swarm off the ships don’t venture past the busy main street. We could hear the birds singing, and children playing and lawn mowers humming. It was perfect.
Last night we went upstairs and had pea soup and mac and cheese for dinner. It was delicious!
Today we hit Juneau fairly early. We leave here at 3:30, fairly early. We were going to try to do the same thing today but its a whole different type of place here. Not so pretty, but certainly interesting.
There were only two ships in port when we arrived at six this morning. We got off our ship early and walked down to a coffee shop that we like. We can sit on the sidewalk, have a blueberry something or other and mozie on in good time. As we sat there three more ships, with approximately 2500 people per ship (or more) arrived.
Its really something to watch. This little town simply swings into tourist action. Up pull fleets of buses and hundreds upon hundreds of people of all sizes, shapes, colour and ability, squeeze onto them and off they go to be carefully placed in tippy canoes, or get stuffed in kayaks, or be pulled by sled dogs over iffy tracks, or strapped into zip lines, or helicoptered onto glaciers, hike up into forests and have salmon bakes, or visit native villages, that are carefully planned out so you won’t miss a thing, or get onto boats and go off in search of the whales, or get taken into the ‘ancient rainforest’ to go walking on a tippy rope path high up in the branches, or get stuffed onto trams that whisk you up to the top of the mountain, or transport you to rickety old steam trains that take you impossibly high up a canyon.....and all of them have irresistible gift shops you must pass through to get out to go back to your ship.
All along the main street a full fleet of good looking young men from the middle east, dressed in beautiful dark suits with impeccably crisp dress shirts, dark hair slicked back, shiny black dress shoes, stand at the ready in the doorways of many jewelry stores, all claiming to have the best ammolite, or diamond or opal or whatever piece of jewelry you really really want.
All the food trucks fire up and pretty soon you can smell salmon grilling, halibut deep frying, seafood chowder heating up, sourdough bread being baked, fish tacos being hand made and that one falafel truck, which always ends up with the longest line up of all.
Later on, as we were sitting on a bench we watched all those hundreds of people, a good deal of them truly old and a lot of them truly overweight, dragging their butts back to their respective ships, carrying giant shopping bags full of t-shirts, alaskan blankets, everything moose, kids’ stuffed whales, smoked salmon in pretty wooden boxes, fudge from the Alaskan Fudge Co., ulu knives by the dozen, train whistles, pj’s with bears all over them, smoked salmon flavoured vodka (really) and a thousand other useless but fun crap.
And now, a lot of us are sitting in tired stunned silence as we watch gorgeous Alaska slip by our windows, where ever we happen to be on the ship. Whales are spouting out there but everyone is too tired to care too much anymore. I think even the crew were tired because dinner was really crappy tonight. Oh well, like we need more food!
Tomorrow Ketchikan. The Captain came on the blower at dinner and told us that it actually wasn’t going to rain there tomorrow. I will believe it when I see it. TTYL I see the font is tiny again, Dammit!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment