Cruise Day 6 – Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada
September 26th, 2007I have captioned quite a few of the photos, and now I only have a few albums left. I should be able to get them up and running in a few days. I think. I mean we have tons of television to watch. We do have priorities, you know! In the meantime, I’ll try to get these last two trip reports posted.
Our last port stop was in Prince Rupert. I don’t know the exact reason, but all the cruiselines stop somewhere in Canada. Of course, most of them choose better stops than Prince Rupert, but that’s another story. This was our shortest stop, which is a good thing because there’s really not much to do in Prince Rupert. Gabe likes to call it “Prince Poopert.” I think that this is the last time that Royal Caribbean will be stopping at this particular port – everyone had similar complaints.
We took our time getting off the boat this morning. We had breakfast in the Windjammer again so we could sleep in a bit (the breakfast in the dining room ends at 9:30am). We went to the morning trivia (our team won, of course). Our shore excursion wasn’t until the afternoon, so we took things easy this morning. We ended up getting off the ship around 11am so that we could explore Prince Rupert for an hour or so. Unfortunately, we weren’t quite hungry enough yet to have some tasty seafood, so we just walked around a bit. We decided that we would try to go where we thought there would be a railroad museum. We walked a pretty good ways along a fairly sketchy path that took us to an old, small (and presumably no longer used) train depot. We ran into some sketchy locals along the way and were a bit nervous since we had around $4500 in cash in our pockets/purse – yikes!
Sketchy path (on our way back to the ship):
We did manage to get a nice photo of the ship on our way back to the ship (the shore excursions departed near the pier):
We went to the meeting spot for our shore excursion and waited a bit to be called to board our ferry boat. As we were waiting, it started to rain. We were not happy! We started to think we should have just stayed on the ship all day and skipped the shore excursions for this stop completely. It was not looking good for our Rainforest and Petroglyph tour. Funny how a bit of rain was going to ruin our rainforest experience, isn’t it? It was still raining pretty hard when we started on our 20 minute ferry ride (it was a very small ferry boat…more of a water taxi). By the time that we got to the island where our tour would take place, the weather had cleared up nicely. We were so lucky throughout the trip with the weather!
The rainforest was very pretty and a change in scenery from our other excursions. We were glad that we did the excursion afterall! We also enjoyed seeing the many petroglyphs in the rocks on the beach. Pretty neat stuff. When we arrived at the island, the tour guide indicated that this would be the last opportunity for a restroom for a while. I wondered what kind of facilities that they would have considering that this island isn’t developed (and is fairly small). Turns out that they have a very nice outhouse with a fancy composting toilet and an array of hand sanitizers. It was the nicest outhouse I have ever seen (and not the least bit smelly).
Gabe next to the outhouse:
The rainforest:
One of the petroglyphs (it’s a fish that our guide outlined with water):
After our walk through the rainforest, we ended up walking across another beach to the longhouse where we would have our barbecue salmon meal. Right after we walked out onto the beach, this bald eagle flew past us as if on cue:
Of course, we were all excited about the eagle! We would see him again in a few minutes. Once we got to the longhouse, we relaxed while our sockeye salmon was finishing on the grill. Our tour guide went out to the rocks on the beach where we could watch from the longhouse. She put out some fishbones for the bald eagle to have some dinner, too. In a few minutes, a raven swooped down to check out the scene and then appeared to call the eagle as if to give the “it’s safe” sign. The eagle appeared a few moments later and chased the raven away from his food. It was neat to see the birds.
Our barbecue meal was awesome! I think that it was even better than the salmon bake that we had in Juneau. We also had a unique experience of garnishing our baked potatoes with butter and seaweed sprinkles. It was all quite tasty. I felt bad for the people on our tour who had early dinner since tonight was lobster night! We knew that we wouldn’t have dinner for another four hours, so we weren’t too stuffed when it was dinnertime for us.
On the way back to the pier, we saw some dolphins from our ferry. We got back to the pier and back on the boat. We also had our passports stamped while we were in Prince Rupert:
Tonight was the last formal night, so we relaxed a bit when we got back on the ship and then got all dressed up for dinner. We tried to pack as light as possible, so we wore the same wedding attire that we wore for the other formal night. We had enough time to go to the pre-dinner show which had a 70s theme with lots of music and dancing. It was entertaining.
Tonight we made sure to get some photos of our new friends at our dinner table, and the photographer took a group photo as well. Everyone was excited about tonight since it was lobster night. Gabe really enjoyed his lobster. I enjoyed it well enough, but I’m just not as crazy about lobster as it seems most people are…
After dinner, we went to The Some Enchanted Evening Lounge with our tablemates Chuck and Karen. We met up with Bekka, too. We came into the lounge midway into the Battle of the Sexes gameshow. We didn’t get to see too much of it since we were late from dinner. What we did see was fairly amusing, though the females who were participating really performed very poorly!
Next in the lounge was the semi-finals for the Karaoke Superstar competition. Some of the performers were pretty good, though most were subpar at best (and some were just awful!). They all had more courage to get up there than I did, so I have to at least give them that. I left in the middle of the karaoke so that I could take photos of the Gala Midnight Buffet. They had a special time set up so that you could take photos of the buffet before the masses came to eat it all. We had considered getting a few bites to eat after the festivities in the lounge, but we were still stuffed from dinner and the line was just too long.
I made it back to karaoke to see a few more performances, and then we stayed for the midnight comedy show with a stand-up comedian. We enjoyed the show, but we were pretty tired afterwards! As I mentioned, we were going to get a few bites from the buffet, but we just went to bed instead.
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