What do you do when your time zones are so off (FOUR hours at this point!) that you wake up starving an hour before breakfast begins?
You send your husband to the coffee bar to bring back coffee, pastries, and jam, and you finish watching Captain America in bed while you enjoy them!
We didn't have any organized excursions booked at this port, so here's what we chose to do!
We hiked Mt. Dewey, whose claim to fame is that John Muir once hiked here and built an interesting campfire at the top. Side note: when the kids got home and we were telling each other about our vacations, I told them about this and they both immediately shouted, "MUIR WOODS!", and then told me all about John Muir and their very interesting trip to Muir Woods! Yay for context! Mental note: show kids the Ken Burns National Parks series.
The hike is pretty steep and also, don't fall off of the boardwalk!
Matt wasn't always so sure about the height, but he was a trooper about it.
The views, of course, were worth it. You can see our cruise ship from here, as well.
After we hiked down from Mt. Dewey, we hiked to Petroglyph Beach.
The petroglyphs here aren't nearly as well-maintained as they were in Hawaii, but that made hunting for them more of an adventure.
Even though we did sometimes find them cracked.
Or buried in sand!
This is almost my favorite photo from the entire trip. It also seems to be kind of a thing in Alaska to leave your boat to rot wherever you're done with it.
This one is so much more elaborate than the others that I'm not sure that it's from the same time period.
Many petroglyph designs are unique to this area.
But many, bafflingly, are not. Do you recognize these circles?!? In Hawaii, the prevailing theory that we were told is that they marked births, with the indentation in the middle meant to hold a segment of umbilical cord, and the additional rings meant to represent additional births. In Alaska, however, we were told that historians don't know what these represent. Weird, right?
After we'd hiked what seemed like all damn day, we got back to the ship and it turns out that not only was the day still going strong, after all, but that it was plenty warm enough to hop into our swimsuits and spend the rest of the afternoon at the pool.
And the lounge chairs. And the milkshake bar...
Not pictured: the kid whom I bought a garnet from and whose friend gave us free lemonade; the shoes that I also bought, after finally admitting that the boots that I've owned for nigh upon a decade have grown maybe half a size too small; the friends that we've made (including one at the top of Mt. Dewey!), because it's easy to make friends on a cruise; or any part of the evening, probably because it began with another reception for our group that included free wine.
This was our first port day and one of our longest port days, with both our first excursion and a ton of free time in one of the loveliest towns in Alaska, so excuse the shocking number of photos and videos that I am about to subject you to:
Can you have a better breakfast than one eaten on the back-end of a cruise ship at sea? Don't be fooled by the fact that half my plate is fresh produce--I gained something like five pounds on this vacation! But as hard as I've been working out since I've gotten home, I would not trade in a single chocolate croissant or heaping serving of bacon. That food was amazing!
It tasted even better with this view.
We passed through this fog on the way to Ketchikan, but most of our port days were sunny and clear and warm.
Our first excursion was canoeing around a lake in Tongass National Forest. Although I can swim, I am not confident in or on the water, so I love myself some life jackets!
Matt is confident in and on the water, and when he canoes, his forearms look hot.
See the dead tree at the bottom of the frame, with the little seedlings growing in the lichen on top of it? That's how these trees grow
The dead tree then rots out from underneath them, so the mature trees have these roots that look like spiderlegs.
This fungus is called bear bread. Bears eat it just prior to hibernation to constipate them.
Early in the spring, then, they eat this skunk cabbage, to get their bowels moving again. If you eat it, it will give you, too, diarrhea, but if you simply wrap your salmon in it to bake, it will give the salmon a nice mustardy flavor.
I am pretty proud of myself that I'm canoeing and not dying. This vacation and all its water activities was a huge confidence booster for me!
It was a big canoe, with several people per side, except that I kept looking behind me and noticing that I was the only one paddling on my side--humph!
Since this is a National Forest, not a National Park, some parts of it are logged, but not this area. It's original, pristine forest here.
I survived the canoe trip!
Now on to explore Ketchikan!
Whales are so common that they're used in advertising!
Also salmon.
Yes, I did take pictures of all of the totem poles.
This totem pole makes me sad to look at now, though, because it was underneath this totem pole that we phoned Will to wish her a Happy Birthday. We were only able to leave her a voicemail, and I cried. Oh, my gosh, I missed the kids SO MUCH on this vacation!
Super tall totem pole!
Creek Street is now a boardwalk of indie shops over a salmon creek, but it used to be a red light district. This shirt is also an example of the work of the artist Ray Troll, whom we fell in love with on this vacation. He lives in Ketchikan (although his work is apparently seen all over the world), and we bought several prints of his while we were here. Now that we're home, I'm going to go online and buy another T-shirt of his that I wanted but didn't get at the time.
Here's the creek.
And here's how the gentlemen could get there!
As Matt and I were walking along this creek, he suddenly exclaimed, "Ooh, I see a salmon!"
"Nuh-uh," I said, because I have that kind of positive attitude.
Nevertheless, I looked, and didn't see any salmon, and looked, and didn't see any salmon, and looked, and didn't see any salmon, and looked, and then--I saw a salmon! And then another! And another!
It turns out that the creek was absolutely teeming with salmon!
Can you see them?
They're actually easier to see on video:
But these guys, resting a bit before the tide rises enough for them to be able to make it up these rapids, are a little easier to spot:
Yeah, we possibly hung out watching salmon for hours before remembering the time and hiking back to the ship.
Found another totem pole on the way there, because of course.
And our cruise ship!
Not pictured: Soho Coho, our favorite shop in all of Alaska, the random tourist with whom I fangirled over salmon at the Salmon Ladder, any of the beautiful stained glass pieces that decorated the light posts along the dock, or the very instructive lecture on cetaceans that we attended and that taught me exactly how to positively identify the humpback whales that we're going to see in a couple of days!
We went to the Captain's Reception, where the ship's officers all introduced themselves and there was free champagne and nibblies.
This day had the second most beautiful scenery of our cruise (you'll see the MOST beautiful scenery when I show you the Hubbard Glacier!), but you'll notice that I only took one photo of it. Real photographers see more deeply when they look through the camera lens, I think, but as for me, I think that I have to choose whether to look deeply at something or take pictures of it--a memory doesn't feel as real to me if I've only seen it through the camera. So for much of the trip, I chose whether I wanted to look at it or photograph it, and on this day, I clearly wanted to look!
White-sided dolphins from our cruise ship! After breakfast, I bundled up and sat out on deck most of the day, alternating binoculars and Hamilton.
This isn't the last time that we saw white-sided dolphins, but I believe that it's the only time that I photographed them.
I was pretty excited about the lecturers on the ship--we had a naturalist and an oceanographer. I brought my travel journal along to each lecture and took notes.
See? Notes! People commented on my note-taking, and once, as I was casing one of the fifth-floor lounges for the best spot to watch the string quartet, an older gentleman in a track suit waved me over to him solely because he'd seen me taking notes at that day's lecture and wanted to discuss it with me. One of my favorite things about this cruise was adult conversation--very little talk about kids, but lots of talk about books, movies, travel, and history!
Even though the scenery was majestic--we were cruising the most narrow part of the Inside Passage, including the Seymour Narrows, a part so treacherous that it requires its own pilot--this is the only photo that I took of it on this day, and even this is at the very end of the day, when the fog is coming in and I'm on my way down to our room to dress up for a reception.
Okay, I sat in our window and read for a little while longer before I got dressed.
And then we hit the martini bar, because the entire ship had an open bar in honor of the Captain's Reception! It turns out that I love myself a dirty martini. I'd meant to try as many different cocktails as possible while everything was free, but instead I had two dirty martinis.
So obviously we then hit up the super fancy restaurant while we were nice and drunk. Thank goodness for the bread basket!
Our cruise included all the food, even the fancy food at the fancy restaurants, and my philosophy was that if there was something on the menu that I'd never eaten before, then by god, I was going to eat that thing! Here I'm eating my first caviar.
Not pictured: the whales that we also saw (my first whales!!!), the blanket burrito that I spent most of the day happily in after an attendant thought that I looked cold and brought me THREE fleece blankets, the captain, whose biography informed us that his career at sea began when he ran away from home as a teenager(!!!), or the cruise director, who gazed at the captain with stars in her eyes during his welcome speech.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
