The Alaskan Cruise!


		This is where our adventure began: The Royal Caribbean Vision of the Seas . The boat is huge - no, really, it's just big! I mean I knew that these boats were big and all, but you don't get it until you are standing next to one! By the time we took this picture in Vancouver, we had gone through a lot to get there! First, we had gotten married in October! Then we have spent the last eight months getting excited about taking our honeymoon on a cruise ship. We both went through some tough times at work right before we left. Then the ride up! We took a Greyhound, spent an hour and a half in Canadian customs because some woman didn't understand the term "Photo ID" and they refused to let her cross the border. Then, we get to the pier ...
Just us and 2000 of our best friends!

The picture above is the group of people we found when we got to the pier - and this was just the group boarding at 1pm! The boat was scheduled to keep boarding until 4:30! All told there would be over 2000 people on the ship and that includes 20 to 40 honeymooning couples, depending on who's numbers you believed. (We met about ten of those couples at a mixer!) The huge group of people here is more a result of U.S. Customs than anything else - apparently they were late in arriving and held up the whole process. Yes, it's true, I had to go through Customs twice in one day just to voyage to the same country I left - only in America! And what a nightmare! This was easily the worst part of the trip - after being on a bus for nearly 5 hours, we spent another 3 hours in a whole series of lines just to get on the damn boat! Apparently, U.S. Customs was afraid that one of use was trained by Al Queda and that we were planning to run the ship into the Pentagon or something! As it turned out, it took so long for all of us to get through the lines that the boat didn't cast off until nearly 7pm and they were boarding right until the end! But, as you can see from the pic to the right, we were ready to go and happy to be there. We were willing to put up with just about anything to get on that damned boat - paradise awaited!
		The boat passed through a glacier! Yup, this is Hubbard Glacier. The water is strewn with big chunks of ice that has been under so much pressure it's bright blue. The water is so cold it looked like we were going trough a blueberry Slurpee! It was pretty cold here, we walked out on deck and immediately wondered if our decision to only bring light jackets was the smartest move we had made. Turned out later that the weather was great and our jackets were fine - but glaciers are cold things, they can fool you!
These pictures don't do the real thing justice. This was one of the most errie and beautiful things I had ever seen. This was as unearthly as Earth gets. One of the most remarkable things about this trip was the natural beauty, seemingly untouched by man. A living museum and we were just cruising through, enjoying our breakfasts and seeing this glory right outside our windows like this kind of thing happened everyday. I guess in a way it does happen everyday - just not to me. Even the crew of the boat, most of whom had never worked on an Alaskan trip, commented on the stark, savage, untamable beauty we saw, all from the comfort of our deck chairs while we sipped tea.
		Our first chance to stretch our legs off the ship was in a little town called Skagway. This was right in time, both Steph and I were ready to walk around on something that didn't pitch and sway. Steph had actually been a little seasick, but the right meds and the incredible food on the ship had made everything right! I seem to have been born with sea legs - I was actually enjoying the novelty of the swaying. But I wouldn't give up the chance to walk on terra firma - it's not like I was born with gills or something! Don't we look happy here? We really were. The ship was great! We had a ton of great food, we had seen incredible scenery, we had gotten great on-board entertainment, and it was only Tuesday! We still had until Sunday - and this was only our first stop of three!
Beautiful! But enough about Steph - look at those mountains! One of the best things about this trip was it was the first time in a long while that Steph and I got to do something that was just the two of us. We didn't have to be anywhere. We didn't have a schedule or any deadlines. We were just tramping around, eating great food, napping like cats and enjoying the heck out of ourselves. Our jobs and our zoom-zoom lives just suck you dry. We're always on the go - always coming or going. Who needs sleep? We have to get to work for a special project! But, not on this trip - we even began referring to "the 'W' word" - saying the word "work" was taboo! Only a few days in and I'm already more relaxed than I've been in many years. It's a little scary when you think of it that way.
		Well! We see what our plans for Skagway were! Actually, it's only root beer - just foolin'! :) Skagway is a tiny little town, there is no industry there besides tourism. No joke! For three or so months the cruise ships come and the money flows. When the boats stop, most of the town moves somewhere else! Skagway was a little boomtown that popped up where the gold rush boats in the 1880's dropped people and their equipment off. It was the gateway to the gold fields further inland, and the place where most of those would-be miners got fleeced or just turned around and went home. These days aren't much different, the town exists mostly to shake money out of the pockets of cruise ship passengers. But, I really liked the little town. The historic district is only eight blocks long, filled with authentic buildings, each with an authentic souvenir shop. The town isn't much more than that, but uncontrolled capitalism has always appealed to me.
I love this shot! Yes, it's the boat again, and yes we're still in Skagway. But, I just wanted to show the freaking hugeness of this boat! The funny thing is that this boat was dwarfed by the other two who were docked there as well from other cruise lines. Plus, the latest ships in the Royal Caribbean line are bigger still and have features like an on-board ice skating rink! This picture was taken from nearby one of the other ships. We got a little lost and ended up at the other dock. In this shot it looks like it would be easy to get back to our ship, and it would have been, if we had wanted to swim! The docks had no clear way back to the ship for someone who wasn't a local and we didn't want to miss the tour we booked. Finally we hired a pedicab. Steph and I are not tiny people, but this guy pedaled his heart out and got us to our boat with just enough time to make our tour. Needless to say, he got a big tip!
		This whore was the guide on our tour! Okay, she wasn't a whore, she was the madam! The other guide was just a whore, though! The tour we took was called The Ghosts and Good Time Girls of Skagway . It was mostly about prostitution in victorian Skagway. What the girls did, how they got away with it and what it did to them. It was funny, enlightening and even a bit grizzly. And, no joke, the two tour guides called themselves Madam Sally and Lady Ambrosia - I can't make this stuff up! We got to see "Cribs" - the little houses that the working girls lived and worked in that weren't much bigger than tool sheds. Many of these are still standing, all of them are food stands or souvenir shops - still doing the good work! The girls would have been proud. Then they took us to "The Red Onion" a local restaurant that was at one time a brothel. It was also once an army barracks in the 40's - appropriate somehow. This tour was a lot of fun. It was one of only two "activities" that we went on. The main reason is the expense! It was $60 for the two of us to go on this walking tour! This was one of the cheapest tours available!! While fun - I'm still not sure it was worth the cash. Again, the ghosts of the working girls would have been proud!
Alright, just in case I haven't said it yet - the boat was hee-uge! Not to mention really pretty and had a ton of neat features and rituals. One of the interesting things were the rugs in the elevators. They changed those rugs everyday. What would that matter? Well the rugs had the day of the week printed on them! So, get up in (the morning? the afternoon? our stateroom had no windows or clock, we never knew!) and head off to find food. When the elevator arrived, you looked down and saw the day of the week - this saved our butts a few times! I'm considering recommending this idea to my office building - there are days it would be good to know what day it was! The picture on the right here is The Centrum - you guessed it, the center of the boat! This atrium passes through most of the upper decks. It has a ton of light passing into it. There are chairs and tables all over for talking or playing cards or what have you. The room had two water fountains and a huge sculpture hanging from the ceiling - gorgeous! And it wasn't overly gaudy, either. Just neat-o!
		This is Juneau. This is pretty much the view we had as we stepped off the boat. Gorgeous! Juneau was okay, we walked around it more than any other city on the trip. But, mostly the mile leading up to the boats is just for tourists. The real town is a ways away from the docks and not easy to get to. I wanted to see the real town, no matter how "untouristy" - instead I was offered 20 blocks of shopping and a McDonalds!
Stephy and the Bear - there's a sitcom in there somewhere! As I said Juneau was all about shopping. At times I wondered if we were touring Alaska or just a bunch of malls? I guess "The Real Alaska" can't be seen from a cruise ship. On the ship they kept having these lectures on where to go to buy diamonds and why buying tanzanite now is smarter than waiting. We caught the end of one of these lectures while waiting for something else and these things were well attended! It just seemed odd to me that people would wait until they were on a cruise to buy jewelry when they could do that anytime!
		Quick family reunion! They had these stuffed animals all over Juneau. Some were even bigger and scarier! That got me to thinking - you clear out a territory, scare off or kill the animals. Then open stores and place fake animals in front of the shops - only in America! It sounds like I'm bitching, and I am - but at the time this picture was taken, the smile was genuine! This could have been a stuffed Republican and I would have given it's fuzzy butt a hug! We were both having a great time - and we were spending money, what could be better!
Ketchican was the last city we visited. Steph and I agree it was our favorite. Less commercial and more historic - they saved the best for last.
		One of the reasons we were looking forward to Ketchikan was it was the location of our second "activity" - a lumber jack show! Have any of you watched lumber jack sports on ESPN or anything like that? Well, if you haven't, check out this link here - but come back! Basically, it's a bunch of people out doing all the things that lumber jacks used to do for a living, but they are doing it for speed and points. Steph and I watch a ton of it on t.v. and we thought it would be fun to see something like this in person.
I'll admit it, I was a little disappointed at first. I went in expecting to see something like they show on ESPN; big guys in tee-shirts, chain saws roaring, wood chips flying! There was some of that, but this show was aimed at the family. It was actually a lot of fun - I was hooting and hollering louder than anyone else! I mean, how often do you see average people tossing axes at targets? They pulled two people from the audience, gave them each three tosses of the ax - something the guys had illustrated earlier. Between the two from the audience, they got three bullseyes - one better than the two "pros" had gotten earlier! All in all, very cool!
		They have these horse drawn tour carts all over Ketchikan. Some had four horses, other just two. I'm not really sure why I'm putting them out here other than the fact we thought they were cool. Funny, they had pedicabs in Skagway, horse drawn carts in Ketchikan - well, I thought it was funny! Good horsy - whoa, boys!
It's a picture of Steph. I know you knew that. Haven't I written enough about this little town yet? I just wanted to put up a pic of my wife - is that a crime??? Ain't she purty? :)
		Last thing about Ketchikan, they apparently get a lot of rain. All the locals pointed out that we were there on a good day - it wasn't raining. The streets were still wet. We get a lot of rain in Seattle, too, but I don't think we get Ketchikan levels. They had this meter near the docks, they called it their "Liquid Sunshine Meter". Steph here is standing next to it - the salmon above Steph's head is at about 48 inches for the year. The funny thing is that this meter wasn't to scale. As you can see, 36 inches is at Steph's head - she isn't three feet tall! They make an awful big deal out of their rain!
This is just a sample from the cruise - it's tough to put a whole week's worth of activities on a web page without it becoming it's own blog. I barely scratched the surface on all that was available on the (did I mention it was HUGE?) boat. I hardly mentioned the shows, the food (!), the service we got from the crew, etc. This is only the beginning of the pics we got, too - Steph was a little shutter bug and we had something like 350 pics on the digital camera plus about an hour of footage from the video camera. We highly recommend this type of travel. It was so nice, we didn't have to think about anything. Everything was done for us, by really nice people. Sure, we didn't see "the real" Alaska, but then again there was very little that was "real" on this trip. That was the great thing about it. It was an escape from reality. Imagine eating in a restaurant and leaving without paying. Imagine someone came in a tidied up your living space a few times a day. Imagine every time you turned around someone was asking you what you would like to drink and they would hustle off and bring it to you - with a smile. An utter lack of reality. It was like being ultra rich for a week - I could learn to love that! On top of all of it, I spent a week with someone I love and that I never get to spend enough time with. I don't know about her, but this has had an effect on how I see the world. I want whatever that was back and I'll do anything to get it - I'm addicted!
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Just us and 2000 of our best friends!