We woke up this morning crazy early and headed up to the top floor. The ship was sailing into the Tracy Arm Fjord… Great plan I tell you, I’m sure nothing ever repeats the whole Titanic thing, but it seems kind of stupid. Here you have a giant ship and you take it a couple hours inland to end up at a dead end facing a Glacier. Now once you see the pictures you’ll notice that the water has tons of stuff floating in it. We even got a picture of an iceberg with a seal on it. If the seal is 5 feet long, then the iceberg has to be 50 long… I also caught a series of about 70 photos of an iceberg breaking up, rolling over, breaking up some more and rolling back with fountains of water erupting all over. Yep, just drive your boat right by these, it’s as safe as can be… really. I have to admit that the glacier was awesome, and it was a really cool thing to see one from the water, but someday one of these ships is gonna hit something and then it’ll be a headline. “Cruise ship sink in Alaskan fjord. 300 people stuck on iceberg!” And they’ll only be stuck on the iceberg until that sucker breaks to pieces explosively with lots of churning and rolling.
On a lighter note, I doubt many people on this boat have actually seen winter. We were up on deck and sure it was windy, but it wasn’t cold, maybe 10 degrees Celsius. The wind made it a little colder, but these people looked like they were about to die of the cold. People were wearing all sorts of stuff on the deck. If you were to decide what kind of weather to expect based on what people were wearing your expectations would range from blizzard to heavy rain to a windy summer day. But then if you looked at the people wearing the stuff, those wearing gear meant for a windy summer day ranged from freezing their asses off to freezing even more of their asses off. Even the people dressed for a blizzard seemed to be cold out there, grabbing some extra blankets to cover themselves. I don’t think there are many Canadians on the boat. I saw very few people who looked comfortable in the cold. And many people gave me a funny look as I walked by wearing shorts and a windbreaker. The only thing I was missing was a hair elastic, the wind was whipping my hair in my face. I would have probably been better off wearing pants but the cruise has been too warm so far, a some cool air was a welcome change.
Anyways, enough about the weather. We’ve got a bazillion pictures from this place, so you guys will have a chance to see this stuff too. Heh, again with the MS Word, apparently bazillion is a real word… It can’t spell flavour correctly but it’ll let you put in bazillion. Microsoft needs to fix up its English. Well, next stop Juneau, we should be there in a couple hours.
Random thought before I leave… Do ships like this produce “road kill”? The answer is yes! And apparently, if you hit a whale you get fined something like $275K!!!! With a quarter million dollar fine, how do you enforce it? The honor system is right out, nobody is going to go out of their way to declare they it a whale if they then have to pay you a huge chunk of cash. Do they have specially trained coast guards? “Hey there captain, looks like you go whale blubber all up in your grill, we’re gonna have to fine you…” Do they have some sort of test to see what kind of whale guts are stuck to your boat? What if the whale was already dead? Do they have to catch you in the act? So there you have it folks, there’s a fine if you hit a whale, but there’s no way to enforce it… so really it’s just there to scare people into behaving. Isn’t the government so smart?
Now that I’m back from Juneau, time to continue the story… We went to the buffet for lunch and I asked the pizza guy to make me a cheeseless pizza. You’ve probably all seen me eat the stuff, it’s pretty good, the only problem is keeping the toppings on. Anyways, the guy making the pizza was clearly Indian or something, and I really doubt that pizza was a mainstay where he’s from. In any case, you’d think that he would at least learn the names of the part of the pizza. Because apparently a pizza with no cheese is “just the base, sauce and toppings?” Base, dough, what’s the difference. In his defense though, he made me a seafood pizza that was really good, thin crust, lots of toppings. But the way he gave it to me was hilarious. He clearly wasn’t gonna try to serve this cheeseless pizza to anyone else, so when it was cooked, he looked around for a plate it would fit in, and when he finally gave up he tossed it onto one of the cloth covered trays. They’re like McDonalds trays, but instead of the paper liner, these guys use cloth. So pizza on tray, done. I split the pizza with trish since it was a 12 or 14 inch pizza, but with the super thin crust and no cheese it wasn’t very filling. We ate our pizza with salad and off we went…
We got to the disembarkation place and there was a huge lineup, so we decided to go somewhere else instead of spend our time waiting in yet another line. As we were walking to our room we were talking and I said “We can just find something to do for 30 minutes” and some old guy in the hallway said “I wonder what that could be?” heh, dirty old man.
We were roaming around Juneau trying to figure out what to do. Trish had read that there was a bus that went to the glacier in Juneau. So I headed towards one of the tour booths at random, they pretty much all advertised the same stuff. Honestly, why would anyone have 12 different booths all set up by different people but all selling the same shit. That doesn’t make sense. If the ads they had one the front of their booths were different in content that might mean something, but the ads were only different in look. Some were blue, some were green, some said “$7 bus tour” others said “Glacier Bus $7”, but really it all added up to the same thing. Lame. Anyways, I picked one at random and started talking to the guy. Trish spotted some smoked salmon on the guy’s counter, and asked if it was his snack. He said yes, and offered her the salmon. Trish ate it all without even sharing… Then she said she was thirsty so Mike (the booth guy) gave her his bottle of water. In the mean time he had talked me into taking a more expensive guided tour of Juneau. So I guess everyone was happy… Mike had his sale, Trish had her snack and I… well, I wasn’t super happy because I spent about $40 more than I was expecting to spend.
We had a bit of time to kill before our tour so we checked out the smoked salmon shop. I don’t know if they plate their smoked salmon with gold or if they encrust them with diamonds, but $50 a pound for smoked salmon is a bit much. We did find some weird birch syrup. So maybe that will be tasty, we got a tiny bottle for $9, it’s a rip off but I’ve never seen the stuff before. And it was way cheaper than the gold plated salmon.
We got in the van with Jerry the tour guide. He was a nice fellow who told us all sorts of stories about Alaska and Juneau. He droves us to a few places including the glacier and a small chapel. We saw some bald eagles, and some far away whales. One of the ladies on the tour with us was from Missouri and she hadn’t bothered to bring her jacket with her. Her amazing logic was that it had been warm in Ketchikan, so clearly, the following day in a town a few hundred miles north of Ketchikan, it should be just as warm. Best logic ever if you ask me. So the stupid lady was freezing her ass off at the glacier and then she retreated to the van, but she was still shaking from the cold. So when we got to the little chapel place, I felt sorry for her so I offered her my jacket. It was 15 Celsius out, and if you’re from Missouri, that might be crazy cold, but where I’m from that’s a warm spring day. So I was fine with just a T-shirt on. Anyways, she appreciated the jacket and returned it when we got in the van. She should have kept it until the end of the tour because she was still freezing in the van. Whatever, next time she goes to Alaska, she’ll probably have a bit more sense.
Word of advice, if you really hate line ups, don’t go on a cruise. When we got back from the tour, we had to line up to board the ship. This kinda sucked because the line was so long it was going from the docks to the shops. The shops of course were closing because Jerry the tour guide had told us that once the cruise ships left, so did the shops. And this was the last cruise day of the season. Strange, we go from town to town to see the same shops in each town, and the shops are only there for the cruise ships. This seems like an elaborate plan to steal people’s money…
Back on board we went to supper. Richard and Lawrence, our waiters, are normally very attentive but tonight something must have been on their minds. Maybe I blended in with the background, or I wasn’t as interesting as Trish or perhaps someone had slipped ruffies in their drinks. The end result was that they kept forgetting about me. After our appetizers they served Trish her salad and left me with my dirty appetizer plate. Trish was halfway done her salad and I still had nothing so she stopped eating to wait for me to get my salad. Instead they tried to clear her salad from her. The second time someone tried to take her salad away she mentioned that to Lawrence that I never got my salad. So he went to check and finally came back with a salad for me. Then they’d refill Trish’s water glass and leave mine almost empty… it was really really weird. But hey, you can’t win em all, so whatever. The food was good. My dairy free desert today was some fruit and some dark chocolate along with the sorbet… Not very great, but he promised me the chef was looking into it. Meh, that’s life, but this time Vladimir the maitre d’ came by to let me know that the chef was trying to figure something out for me. I guess people who are lactose intolerant just suck it up for desert? It seems to me like dairy free food should be available when you’re on a boat with over a thousand people on it.
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