The Big Adventure: Part 3

On the 21^st, we continued our exploration of Seattle with the CityPass. We went downtown and toured the aquarium which is out on the pier. It was the sort of place that would have been really fun to take young kids and for adults it was still a good time. My favorite part was a giant walk-through spinning circular tank of rotating jellyfish that were artificially lighted with different colors so that it looked like bio-luminescence. Some other highlights include learning about the harbor seals  with their caretakers/trainers and touching some crazy tidepool critters (only Alisha was brave enough). The day continued with a boat tour of the bay and through the locks and into the lake on the backside of Seattle. It was a great tour that we had great seats for right in the front of the boat and it was cool going through the locks as the water rises around you. Next, we walked up from the pier into town where we wandered the always-busy Pike Place Market and got a few treats to eat from the vendors. We saw the vendors throwing around huge headless fish and putting on a show for the tourists along the way. Alisha got some fish and chips for dinner and we headed back to the room to get ready for our cruise the next day.

The 22^nd was the start of our Alaska cruise but since the ship didn’t board until the early afternoon, we decided to use our last CityPass adventure to check out the Museum of Flight. It was like a fancier version of Tucson’s Pima Air Museum and there was a lot of fun stuff to see including WWII planes, fancy jets, and even some lunar/space station stuff. I decided to try the flight simulator at the museum and found that when I yanked on the controls to go after an enemy plane, the cockpit spun and I was completely inverted and held in place by a harness. I spun round and round going after enemy planes but didn’t shoot any down. About 20 minutes later, I felt airsick from all my spinning and realized that it was probably good that I didn’t become a pilot. Next, we headed down for our cruise but rather than paying for an expensive shuttle or cruise parking, we took the light rail into downtown and hiked from downtown to the pier. Fortunately we packed pretty light but I was still carrying a giant duffle bag sideways in my arms, wearing a big backpack, and looking like a pretty stupid tourist. We boarded the Norwegian Jewel (2,500 passengers, 1,000 crew members), dropped our bags at the room, and started looking for the food. It was a nice sunny day and as we sat on the top deck on the 14^th story, it was even a bit warm as we pulled out of the harbor. In the evening, there was fancy dining and a show previewing some of the entertainment throughout the week.

We spent the 23^rd at sea and used the day to be somewhat lazy and also to plan out our shore excursions for our Alaska ports. We explored the ship and found some of our favorite spots to sit and look at the ocean and coast. We did a little bit of eating and a lot of reading. In the evening, we went to a musical show in the theater.

On the 24^th, we arrived at our first port in Ketchikan, Alaska. We signed up for a jeeping/canoeing/walking tour that started with driving a jeep into the wilderness outside of Ketchikan. Next, everyone hopped out of their jeeps and into a 20 person canoe to row to the far side of a mountain lake. On the far side of the lake, we took a walk on a boardwalk showing off some of the Alaska vegetation. Finally, we canoed and jeeped our way back into town. We walked around town including the historic red light district along Creek Street. Finally, we attended a lumberjack show where we watched all manner of timber sports including log splitting, log rolling, log climbing, log sawing, and lots of other log-related activities. The log climbing was the most impressive as we watched lumberjacks scale huge telephone-style poles in second using only a looped rope and then freefall back down into a giant bean bag. During the show and at other times in Alaska, we would frequently see wild bald eagles soaring through the air.

We stopped at Juneau on the 25^th and took a shuttle out to see the Mendenhall Glacier on the north side of town. The glacier was impressive but it was also impressive to look at photographs and see how much it has retreated up the valley in the last fifty years. We did a hike out to view the glacier and a big waterfall nearby and looped through the woods on the way back. In Juneau, we walked through the town and took a look at Alaska’s very historic capitol building. We walked uphill and inland through town and did a loop up and over a part of Mt. Roberts just outside of Juneau. We had to be back on the ship by the early afternoon because we left port to cruise the amazing Tracy Arm Fjord to Sawyer Glacier. This was very impressive as it involved navigating a very large ship up a very small glacier-carved channel with icebergs and high granite cliffs on both sides. Alisha and I sat up on the highest deck at the front of the ship for five hours to ensure that we had a fantastic view of the entire cruise through this area. The fjord ended at Sawyer Glacier which is literally a river of towering ice that breaks off right into the fjord. All around us there were huge icebergs floating that had recently broken off the glacier and the cliffs ran with many small waterfalls from snow melt. In many ways, the experience would be much like driving a cruise ship up a water-filled Yosemite Valley in late winter when there is still quite a bit of snow.

Our final Alaska port was Skagway on the 26^th. We bought tickets on the White Pass and Yukon Railway which is an old narrow gauge railroad that traverses the cliffs up into the mountains and Canada. Skagway is a gold rush town with a lot of history as lots of miners poured into the area in 1947 and endured incredible hardships in pursuit of gold [greed] farther north in the inhospitable Yukon Territory. Ironically, when the railroad was built in 1949, the gold rush was already largely over in this particular area as private claims had left little land available for additional miners. One particularly impressive part of the railway was a huge trestle bridge that we passed over that was carved into the side of the mountain. Back in town, we toured the historic town sites, watched a video about the gold rush at the vistor’s center, ignored an outrageous number of trinket shops, and went hiking in the mountains outside of town. We climbed up to a really cool lake with a loop trail around it. On one side the trail was smooth and easy and on the other side it was a scramble of rocks and roots.

The 27^th was a day at sea as we traveled back towards the south. Alisha let me sleep in late and then we did a bunch of activities on the ship. We learned more about the ship from the captain and officers. We went to a presentation from one of the comedians on using humor to confront difficult moments in life. The crew (which is all international) put on a talent show in the afternoon. We also learned how to fold some of the towel animals that our room attendant Manuel had been leaving for us every evening. During the cruise, we started having some fun with Manuel. He folded us a swan and we left him a note from the swan saying that it had been having fun flying with the bald eagles in Skagway. Next, he made us a rabbit. We used our newfound towel folding skills to make a snake and left the head of the rabbit with the snake and a note saying “Thanks for the delicious room service food” from the snake. In response, Manuel made a towel scorpion that was attacking our snake with its pincers. The next day, we folded a towel penguin that was wearing Alisha’s sunglasses. We put it on the bed facing the scorpion. We took the nearby hairdryer out of it’s stand and had the penguin hold it and point it at the scorpion. We replaced the scorpion’s eyes with black X’s and left a note “Scorpion – you killed snake, prepare to die” from the penguin. Finally, on the last night Manuel made us a towel Eskimo. On the morning, we made a fishing pole for the eskimo out of a long piece of rolled paper and dental floss and had the eskimo catching a paper fish that said “Thanks Manuel.” Ya, I probably got too excited about the whole towel animal thing but it was fun. On the sea day, we also saw the most impressive show of the week which was the Cirq Bijou. There was some very impressive aerial acrobatics and I told Alisha that this was a legit show and not merely standard cruise-fair. Later, we found out one of the performers was a US gold medalist and another had been on the real Cirq and we were not surprised. Cruise entertainment was impressive during the show as was the food and the experience in general. We are now big fans of Norwegian and their Freestyle Cruising philosophy.

On our final day of the cruise, we arrived at Victoria, Canada in the early afternoon. Victoria is a very elegant city and I was quite impressed (maybe it is also snooty but we didn’t hang out long enough to find out). I’m not even a city person and I was impressed by the immaculately kept vegetation, the many parks, the old-styled architecture, and the cleanliness of the city. We walked into town along the harbor and took a shuttle out to the Bouchart Gardens which are probably the most elegant gardens we have ever seen. Our favorite was the sunken gardens which were carved out of what was once an old limestone quarry. Back in town, we did a loop walk back to the cruise ship through the Beacon Hill Park. At the evening show, Alisha was selected to come on stage to help out comedian/magician Jean Pierre. JP liked to make fun of his participants but Alisha got the upper hand on him. He is a short young guy and when he went back to back with her, he said “gosh, you’re tall.” She then got up on her tiptoes so she could tower over him even more. It was a funny end to a great week of sailing.