Having to wake up to catch an early morning ferry is starting to get old, real quick. We had the alarm set for 3:45 am, but neither one of us slept that well, in anticipation of the early rise. We skipped the coffee and tea and ate bananas for breakfast as we waited in line for our 5:15 am ferry departure. We are on our way to Ketchikan, which will take 24 hours by ferry. Good news is that we booked a stateroom and as soon as we are onboard, we intend to go right back to bed. Our second rising, [View Full Entry]

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It rained during the night, as we found out in the morning, as water poured off the tent when Dave opened the hatch. However, we never heard the rain during the night. We also noticed we were sitting on the floor of the van, with almost all the air gone out of the mattress, as we got out of the van. Not a good sign. By the time we had breakfast and were ready to go the skies were just cloudy and remained that way throughout the day. First order of business for the day is laundry. How fortunate we were, [View Full Entry]

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Five am came early this morning, as I suppose it does every morning. We grabbed coffee at the campground office and headed to the Ferry Terminal about 5 miles away. Two hours before the ferry leaves, you need to check in and get a lane assignment. There we sat, in our lane number 5, until about 7:30 am. We are on the Fairweather today, which is a high-speed catamaran ferry. It is quite nice and comfortable, but unlike the Malaspina, it has only one passenger level and no wireless internet. We sat at a table where Dave read his book and [View Full Entry]

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Our journey today is bringing us to the city of Juneau. Juneau, nestled into the foot of it’s namesake mountain, is the capital of Alaska and it is landlocked. You have to fly or take a boat into this city, but you would never know that by the number of cars and the 4 lane highways that it has, especially during rush hour. Juneau is a cruise ship port and there are four huge ships in the city docks today. The population of Juneau is around 32,000 people and it swells, like Skagway does, when they add 8-10,000 more people per [View Full Entry]

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After 12 glorious hours of sleep, we are both feeling wonderful and rearing to go. The mosquitoes here at the campsite are ferocious and the size of moose. We dodge them in the morning while fixing breakfast and again when we get back at night to fix supper. Since it is not raining, the first thing on the agenda this morning is a hike at the Mendenhall Glacier. The glacier is about a half mile wide at the base and 12 miles long and it is very impressive to look at. Huge chunks of blue glacial ice lie in the lake [View Full Entry]

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After virtually no sleep for either one of us, we got up at 5 am, grabbed a cup of tea and a couple of breakfast bars and headed for the ferry. We are taking the Alaska Marine Highway Ferry to Juneau, with a stop in Haines along the way. We did not have any problems driving down the ramp and into the ship with the box on the back of the van. The ferry ride was smooth and nobody got sick (meaning me). There were glaciers and waterfalls interspersed in the mountainous landscape along this 5 ½ hour trek on the [View Full Entry]

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Our last full day in Skagway started with getting the van loaded up, laundry and some last minute shopping. We bought a few more souvenirs and then had lunch at the Red Onion Saloon. The “girls” were leading tours upstairs into the brothel. They charged $5.00, which is what it cost the men in the late 1800’s to visit with them upstairs. The money was sent from the “crib” in a tube to the bartender who kept track of the girls. He had a doll for each of the girls and would lay the doll on it’s back when the girl [View Full Entry]

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Skagway is an enigma. There are so many wealthy people here, yet to look around, most of what you see looks like poverty. There is abandoned and unlived in property everywhere and about half the houses that are lived in are shacks or extremely rundown. A great number of the employees here for the summer are foreign students. Most employers provide “housing” for these employees, which is often a run-down trailer in a campground, and in some cases tents. Dave and I walked through several campgrounds in the city and we saw lots of permanent type tents (white canvas on a [View Full Entry]

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Needless to say, we slept-in this morning after a late night last night. Dave was “under the weather” and did not want to do much of anything, but it was such a beautiful day, sunny with no clouds in the sky, and I wanted to be outside. We had planned on doing the hike up to Lower Dewey Lake, which is a short but steep hike. Instead after lunch we drove downtown and treated ourselves to ice cream cones and drove to the harbor to eat them. Then we headed up the Dyea Road to the scenic overlook of Skagway and [View Full Entry]

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A cloudy day, but no rain. Not bad for a day with a 70% chance of showers. A hike this morning up to the Gold Rush Cemetery and Reid Falls, yielded a surprise. As we were approaching the cemetery on the gravel road, a black bear suddenly appeared and stood looking at us. We were a good distance away and so I told Dave that we needed to turn around and go the other way. He had not seen the bear yet, but knew that something must be wrong. That’s when he looked straight ahead of us and the two of [View Full Entry]

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