My wife has requested, for Christmas no less, that I finish writing about our honeymoon trip this past summer. She's told me that my lack of telling this tale has prevented her from posting other happenings from the year. I told her... well, I told her a lot of things, some of it was funny but all of it off point. The point is, I'm going to finish writing about our honeymoon so she can post other stuff to this page. Merry Christmas baby!
So there we were on a floating pleasure palace with one full week to burn and ship staff at our beck and call 24 hours a day. And on the first day, we were at sea and had nothing to do but run around taking pictures while communing with the care-free spirit that possessed the ship. The view leaving the harbor was already beautiful, but grew gorgeous as we sailed north. The Inside Passage is pretty calm compared to the open seas and the mountains in that area have a different kind of majesty than their land-locked cousins. It was hard for me to get used to seeing green mountains jutting out of the sea, at least at first. They're simply breathtaking!
By the next morning we were nearing Juneau, capital of America's last frontier. For breakfast, we dined in the Windjammer Cafe on the ninth deck and watched other ocean liners following in our wake as we sailed down the fjord toward the city. The Cafe is actually pretty nice with a 270 degree surrounding view of the ship. You can get just about anything you want to eat, depending on the time of day of course. Interesting side note, Indian food looks and smells the same at breakfast-time as it does at dinner time. Oh, and we had our first whale sighting right off the port stern! (For landlubbers, that's the back left side of the ship... I think.) They bobbed through the water like over-sized dolphins and wouldn't be bullied from their path by us or anyone else. Orca whales right in front of our eyes! I was able to capture some of this on the cam-corder, really cool!
We docked on the outskirts of town, maybe a fifteen minute walk from downtown. You should know, that as the third largest city in Alaska, Juneau is not big. There are about 30,000 people living there and as our tour guide to the Mendenhall Glacier would eventually tell us, the only way into the city is either by boat, plane or birth canal- there are no roads leading to the city! The geography of the state dominates everything in Alaska, permeates the character of the people living there. You have to be rugged like the land, or move back down to the lower forty-eight states... or die, which isn't really much of character trait. And get this, while on our way to the aforementioned glacier, a huge black bear ran across the road about 200 yards in front of our bus. I've been to Yellowstone twice and lived in Colorado for five years, never once seeing any kind of bear except those in the zoo. We're on Alaskan soil for shortly more than an hour and BAM! Bear sighting at 12 o'clock! We couldn't get our cameras out in time to take pictures though. Bevin did take some fantastic shots at the glacier.
We spent the rest of the day shopping around Juneau. I bought James, Bevin's dad, a whale-bone sculpture. I told him that it was from a whale's penis bone, no one at the store could tell me otherwise! ;) There's also a bar, the Red Dog saloon (http://www.reddogsaloon.com/), that has a gun hanging above the bar that used to belong to Wyatt Earp. Bevin and I walked the streets bouncing in and out shops and art galleries, having a great time!
We also took the sky tram to the top of Mt. Roberts, which overlooks the whole city and waterway. The altitude is about 1800 ft. above sea level, and actually has a sub-tropical rain forest located there. It's amazing! You can see all of the kinds of plants that you'd expect to see on a mountain- pines, shrubs, bushes- but also, there were feathery ferns and wild, red flowers! There was also a bald eagle living in captivity at the top of the mountain. The poor bird had been shot with a .22 through the beak, damaging its left eye. The people taking care of it promised that the in the off season, the eagle lived in a much larger enclosure. That makes sense though, you can't have an eagle sized rookery at the top of a mountain which also happens to be in an avalanche zone. We ate appetizers at one of the local restaurants before returning to the ship. It was a good day all around!
To be continued...
