Cruise Day 4 – Skagway, Alaska
September 23rd, 2007We’re making progress on the photos (and on the detailed blog entries about the trip, as you can see). Some of the captions won’t be too hard…there are only so many things you can say about beautiful scenery! So…now onto Day 4, when we stopped in Skagway. We were excited about our shore excursion today which would be taking us to the Yukon. Woohoo! This was one of our favorite parts of the trip.
Our shore excursion meeting time was at 8:15am, so we didn’t have very much time to have breakfast before meeting our tour on the pier. We decided to eat in the Windjammer. We discovered that we definitely prefer the regular breakfast to the buffet. The breakfast was ok, just not as tasty as the “real” breakfast. At least it was quick, which is what we needed this morning.
We met our tour guide and boarded our bus. The excursion started with a brief tour of Skagway (it has to be brief — Skagway occupies an area of approximately 20 by 5 blocks and has a population of only 800 people). Our tour guide once again stressed how lucky we were to have such perfect weather and how it was NOT typical of Alaskan weather this time of year. The tour guide pointed out things of interest along the way – the White Pass Railroad (that we would be taking later in the day), Bridal Veil Falls, the William Moore Creek bridge, and general information about the area. Very pretty scenery! The bridge was scary, and only one bus was allowed to cross it at a time. Our guide told us the story of the bridge. Before the current cantilever bridge, several failed attempts were made to build a bridge across the river. Due to a large amount of daily earthquake activity, the bridges kept falling down after only about a month of use.
Gabe and the bridge:
Part of Bridal Veil Falls (not an original name for a waterfall, there are many throughout the world):
We made several scenic stops along the way, including the “Welcome to the Yukon” sign:
(Gabe and I crossed the street to get a photo of the less exciting “Welcome to British Columbia” sign)
We made our way to Carcross and had a barbecue lunch. We were confused as we both were convinced that our lunch included salmon, but we had mixed up the excursions as our first in Juneau and the Prince Rupert excursions were the ones that involved salmon. Our lunch was fine, and then we had enough time to play with the puppies at the musher camp and take a sled dog ride! The puppies were adorable:
The dogs were SO excited to pull our “sled” (it was more of a cart). This is how they keep the dogs in shape during the summer. Look how excited the dogs are…they can’t wait to get started!
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Here’s some bumpy video from part of our ride:
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We took a quick tour of their museum, and then went to downtown Carcross. There wasn’t much to downtown Carcross! The town is even smaller than Skagway with a population of around 400. Our tour guide explained that the high school aged kids from here are bussed to a town about 90 miles away where they stay for the week. In Skagway, they had one school for K-12 with a graduating class of only 4 students last year.
We were excited to get our passports stamped:
After leaving Carcross, we headed back to Fraser to catch the train back to Skagway. The train ride was quite scenic, as you would expect. We stood on the platform for most of the ride so that we could take photos. Many of our photos didn’t turn out so well since we were shooting into the sun. We had lots of sunspots that ruined some of our photos, despite using the lens hood. Oh well.
When we got back to Skagway, we walked around downtown and then walked all the way back to the ship. We could see the ship pretty much from Skagway, but it seemed muuuuuuuch closer. The walk was definitely longer than we had anticipated.
We thought about going to the pre-dinner show, but we were too tired and decided to take a nap instead. After dinner, we thought about going to the Love and Marriage game show (to watch, not participate), but we were too tired and just went to bed. We did catch some bits of the Love and Marriage show on TV the next day. It was like the Newlywed show and amusing. One couple was a young couple married for less than a year who were on the cruise with her parents. When asked who from his wife’s family would he not want to be stuck on a deserted island with, he chose his wife’s mom…who was not in the audience, but who would see this replayed later in the trip. He went on further to say that she was “high maintenance” and a bit of a “drama queen.” We heard later in the trip that things were *not* going well with the couple and that the parents had seen the footage and were not thrilled!
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