Alaska - second part

So we sailed out of Vancouver at about 5 PM and spent the first night and the following day at sea. It was foggy, the mountains were mostly obscured by clouds. We don't even have any pictures of that first day, it was just not photo weather. Our first port of call was Juneau. We had booked a shore excursion from home a while back - a trip by float plane over the mountains and glaciers to a lodge pretty much in the middle of nowhere, for a salmon bake. The first thing we saw upon arrival was a sign warning that there were bears. Some young men were walking around with long poles and I wondered what that was about. They turned out to be the bear chasers, had a mother bear and two cubs up in a tree very close to the BBQ pit and kept them in the tree with these poles. Meanwhile the guests were all over the place, taking pictures and being the usual nuisance. Once the salmon was cooked on a big outdoor BBQ and everyone went inside to eat, the bears came out of the tree and helped themselves to the left-overs on the grates. Some paws got singed in the process but that didn't keep them away. They also eat the sand that is under part of the grates, that soaks up the drippings from the salmon. The lodge had a big picture window looking out to the pit, it beeing only a few meters away, we got some really good pictures. The only other wild life we saw there were thousands of mosquitoes. Several cans of bug spray waiting for us as we arrived at the lodge should have been a first clue. Anyway the food was wonderful and the trip in and out over the mountains and glaciers was unbelieveably beautiful. You don't get to see things like that anywhere else.
The ship moved on through the night, arriving in Skagway the next morning. Michael might remember that place - it was were we boarded the ferry when we came out of Inuvik, and were the captain invited Michael to steer the boat. We went on an all day land trip in Skagway, mostly by bus into the Yukon territories through some awesome country, along the trail of the gold rush, then back to catch a narrow gauge railway back to Skagway. Michael, do you remember the train from Whitehorse, Yukon to Skagway, Alaska --it was the way we travelled when we left Inuvik. I know it was a long time ago (1978), but I wonder how much of that you remember. The country is rugged, high mountains, tight valleys, everything either green or bare rock. The train travelled very slowly (2 1/2 hours for a 27 km stretch) because of all the tight curves and high elevation with wooden tressles. Often you could see the front or back end of the short train around the curves. The ship again travelled over night and we arrived in Glacier Bay the next day. It is a bay full of broken off ice, that "calves" off the glaciers that end at the waters edge. When the ice breaks off, it makes loud noise like gunshots. We saw a black bear family along the shore - not on the ice. Again we sailed overnight and arrived in Ketchikan in the morning. It is a nice little town, almost all of it built on pilings over the water, because the whole island is bedrock with only a couple of inches of soil covering it. Here we had booked a half day boat tour to a crab research station, where we learned how the crabs live and are caught, measured and released. Then the boat took us to a lodge were we had a crab feast, the freshest crab possible, and as much as we could eat. Andy managed 2 whole crabs, I am a lot slower at picking them apart and only managed one. For dessert it was cheesecake with freshly picked wild blueberries. We skipped supper on the ship that night. That was the last stop on the cruise, the next night, day and last night were at sea. The first part of that was only water with nothing to see, except we did see some whales, then when we got closer to Vancouver Island we sailed close enough to shore that we could see the bays and mountains. It was again quite cloudy and partially foggy. We arrived in Vancouver at 5 AM, were off the ship by 9 AM then spent the rest of the day with all the different stages to get home: customs, bus to airport, 4 hour wait for the first plane (Vancouver to Edmonton) another wait for the connection to Winnipeg, where we arrived around 9 PM. Alaska is really worth while to see, we are really glad we went. The ship wasn't as nice as the one to the Panama Canal, although it was still great. The food wasn't as good and neither was the service - but that is another story. We would go with them again - but only if they offered a destination we wanted and no other line was offering it. Well, that's it for this trip. Time to plan the next one.