Cruise Day 3 – Juneau, Alaska
September 23rd, 2007Today was our first port day of the cruise, and the only day that we were tendered instead of docked. This meant that we had to take a little boat from the ship to the dock. The tender process went fairly smoothly as they organized everyone with shore excursions according to shore excursion times. We were signed up for a shore excursion that involved a tour of the Mendenhall Glacier and an Alaskan Salmon Bake.
When we checked the weather report before leaving for the trip, we were concerned that it was going to be raining the whole time we were in Alaska. When we woke up this morning, it was quite foggy and overcast, so we were still worried that it wouldn’t be a good day for seeing the sights. As we got closer to the port, the skies started to clear. We ended up with perfect weather (and all of our tour guides and such telling us how lucky we are to have such beautiful weather and how it was pouring rain the previous day).
The Mendenhall Glacier was huge with pretty scenery all around, including a nice waterfall nearby. We really were lucky with this beautiful weather!
After visiting the glacier and visitor center, we went to the salmon bake. YUM!! The salmon was quite tasty…and the cornbread was fabulous! Gabe went back for seconds for salmon and we both got cornbread seconds. During our meal, a musician entertained us with some cover songs and then some traditional Alaskan songs and some songs of her own. We learned that you “Gotta Get Up Early to Catch a Moose,” which was entertaining with everyone acting like moose (I really want to say “meese”):
I roasted marshmellows at the firepit after our lunch, and then we took a walk to a pretty waterfall before concluding our tour and heading back to downtown Juneau. We walked around Juneau a bit, and then we decided to do the Mount Roberts Tramway. I’ve been on plenty of things like this and ski lifts and such, but they always scare me quite a bit. I especially didn’t like it when the tram stopped in midair near the top. Yikes!
We had some very nice views from the top and did a little bit of light hiking. We also watched a movie about the native people around this area. We saw a bald eagle that was in captivity because someone had injured him. Sadly, he can no longer fly because someone presumably shot him on purpose.
We returned to our ship and relaxed a little before dinnertime. The dinner tonight was a little later than usual, and we were really tired from our full day and the time change. The night before we had to change our clocks, so we had a four hour time difference from the East Coast. Our waitstaff told us about the Sweet Indulgence Buffet. We were really tired, but we decided that we couldn’t miss the one and only night that we could see the dessert buffet! We were glad that we stayed!! The buffet was incredible. We were all standing around in awe of the trays and trays of cakes, pies, pastries, fruits, tarts, chocolates, etc, that they were bringing into the Centrum atrium – 3 floors of desserts! We were stuffed from dinner, but we managed to find some room for a few bites!
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