ALASKAN ADVENTURE: July 2009

Here are a few words and snapshots from our Alaskan cruise from June 20 through to June 27, 2009 on NCL (Noeweigian Cruise Lines).

This Alaskan cruise went up the "Inside passage" and made port of calls at Ketchican, Juneau, Scagway and Prince Rupert, Canada. The weather for the entire trip was brisk to chilly, hey it Alaska!!

All -in- all the cruise was great, relaxing and uneventful except for one minor incident when our ship hit an iceberg, oh yea, for real! (shades of Titanic). This happened on the part of the trip where we were scheduled to get up close and comfy to an active glacier but the captain announced that it was too dangerous because of the amount of ice in the water so he opted for a safer heaven to see a differnt glacier. So there we were, all 2500 passengers gathered on different decks at the front of the ship to see the highlite of the trip, an "active glacier". Well everybody had there eyes peeled and cameras at the ready as we made our way slowly up the fjord dodging the icebergs in the water (for those of you that don't kn

ow, as I didn't, a fjord is more commonly known to us as a box canyon, much like we all seen in the cowboy movies) granted the icebergs were not "Titanic" size but nevertheless they were "hazards to navigation" they were about the size of 8 to 10 cars stacked 2 high. The picture above to the left shows a smaller tour boat in the fjord...I'm showing it here so you can compare the size of an iceberg to the boat. Hey! they get bigger everytime I tell the story (remember you can click on the pictures to enlarge ). ALL OF A SUDDEN! kaboom -loud contact... "Houston we have a problem". The impact was felt by all, as the iceberg "shaked, rattle and rumbled down the side of the ship, now you could hear a pin drop, and nobody said a word , but you got to know everybody was conjuring up visions of the movie. Finally one guy said "It'll take three hours for this ship to go down" then we all listened intently for the alarm....... that never came ... So we ordered another drink and talked about where we were going for dinner ( there were 13 restaurants) . Soon thereafter the ship made a 180 degree turn and got out of harm's way, but in order to turn around they had to disp

atch a small boat in the water to push some of those ice formation out of the way. Sorry, but I do not have any good pictures of the glacier because everytime I went to take a picture, a huge section of the glacier would fall away ruining the opportunity for a good picture. (just kidding, it's an old joke)

The picture on the left is the closest we got to the glacer. The ice in the water seem small but they were quite large, as the picture above to the right shows. (Click on the photo to enlarge).

Our first stop was at Ketchikan and for our land excursion we opted for the Floatplane flight over the glaciers with a landing on a remote lake where the pilot let us get out and stand on the floats for a photo shoot. The plane was an old time De Havilland "Beaver" a classic "Bush country" airplane. It was a beautiful trip and to add to the pleasure we only had three passengers. Of course I flew in the co-pilot position. Here are several photos we took from the air. In one you can see our cruise ship as we flew along side.

Our next stop was at Juneau where we went whale watching on a small boat. It was a complete BUST. No sightings to speak of....only, barely enough (a mile away) to qualify to nullify the $100 guarantee ...If you don't see a whale!!..well it was raining, foggy, and cold...(we saw more whales from the mothership then we did on this tour)....in fact it was so bad I had to intervene and hold up their little whale model and announce a whale sighting. Everybody laughed even the tour guide.. a couple of days later on a bus going I don't know where, some little boy said to me..."Hey mister..your the one that held up the whale...you were funny".

Next stop was Skagway, a town of 800 with about a million visitors a year, it's claim to fame is that it was the jumping off point for the 1896 gold rush to the Klondike which was over 500 miles away, hard to imagine miners traveling that distance by mules and river barges, a six month trip. Of course many died in transit. In 1898 the trip was made a little easier for at least part of the way with the establishment of the White Pass, narrow gauge railroad. So of course no trip to Skagway is complete without an excursion on the historic, vintage narrow gauge RR. The train itself is something out of the past with it's vintage parlor cars and diesel engines and they still operate a couple of old steam engines. The trip we took was 40 miles round trip and climed 3,000 feet in 20 miles going over numerous bridges and trestles and tunnels. Going through the mountains we saw several glaciers and mountain goats albeit with binoculars. These are some of the pictures we took from the train.