The Smith family took an end of summer cruise to Alaska from Vancouver BC. Convinced it was going to be cold, Sherri and Mallory went shopping for cold weather gear. Turned out we had 7 days of sun and warm temperatures – highly unusual for the Pacific Northwest. We got there by a 1000 mile trip on Amtrak which is a wonderfully relaxing way to travel and a whole other story. On the first day to the Inside Passage, it was all sailing, and besides the usual plethora of shipboard activities, it was an ideal time to look for whales and other wildlife. We docked in Juneau, the capitol, Skagway and Ketchikan (loosely translates as Tourist Trap). In fact, each town we visited had a host of T-shirt shops, trinket emporiums, and more jewelry stores than residents. Curiously the main feature in the jewelry stores was Tanzanite – a pretty periwinkle colored stone from Africa. Every store was fond of noting that there is only one Tanzanite mine and once it runs out in 2016, there will be no more. Considering the amount of stones held in these hundreds of stores in 3 small towns in Alaska alone, I very much doubt a worldwide shortage will occur in in the next one thousand years, much less by 2016. We also made a stop at every towns public library so Eric and Sherri could gorge on free public wi–fi and Mallory could add to her library card collection. I dont know how we did it, but we found time to visit the Mendenhall glacier outside of Juneau (picture), the totem pole Museum and Park in Ketchikan, and we rode the narrow gauge White Pass & Yukon Railroad in Skagway. The latter is a three-hour ride up along the trail the miners took to access the Yukon during the famous Alaskan Gold Rush of 1898. With the sun shining bright the views were spectacular. The other stop we made was a cruise up the Tracy Arm to the foot of the Sawyer Glacier where we saw huge chunks of ice “calving” into the bay. The whole experience was fantastic. Notably, Alaska marks the 50th State that Sherri has visited and the 49th for Eric and Mallory on our decades long see America first vacation itineraries. Next stop Hawaii.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 16:20:43 +0000
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