Tag Archives: Alaska

Juneau what we did next?

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Saturday 13 August 2022 – We could afford a relatively relaxed start to the day, because Silver Muse wasn’t due to dock in Juneau until 0930. This gave us plenty of time to (a) have a leisurely breakfast and (b) fret about exactly what clothes would be the best choice for our first Adventure of the day, which was to scale the local monster, Mount Roberts. Well, as far as what they call the Tramway Station, but what we’d call the cable car station (just before the number 1 if you click that last link, i.e. about a third of the way to the top; what do you think we are, mad?).

A major consideration would be the weather – would it be cold? would it be wet? The forecast was for showers, and a temperature of about 15°C.  We both had fairly heavy duty jackets available, but we could see from the view from the boat

that it wasn’t actually raining so I decided instead to risk just a rain jacket over an extra fleece layer, with a waterproof camera bag tucked into the backpack that Jane personfully volunteered to take with her, along with a couple of small water bottles, a spare camera battery and my wallet, because she’s a sucker trouper. (Hah – Ed)

The official trail starts outside Juneau, so, to get there, we thought it would be good to walk through the town.  The ship was docked about a mile outside town, and we spurned the free shuttle bus in favour of walking into Juneau. I’m glad we did, as although the first part of the walk was along the road, it gave us a view of the ship

and we arrived in the town via a boardwalk, which was quite attractive.

(There’s little doubt about what Juneau’s main industry is…)

You can see the “tramway” departing in the photo above. We stopped by the bottom station to ask about ticket prices.  An all-day pass to go up and down the mountain in the cable car would have cost us $45 each, but the lass at the counter told us that as long as we spent $15 apiece in the restaurant at the top we could ride down for free.

We carried on through Juneau which is an attractive place, provided you don’t mind a profusion of jewellery shops.

Many of the cross streets are actually staircases

because the town is built on the side of Mount Roberts (not, counterintuitively, Mount Juneau), giving it the nickname of Alaska’s answer to San Francisco. There are quirky buildings and street art

and we particularly thought it would be worth seeing the State Capitol

which has a statue outside it of William Seward himself.

Just by the Capitol we met a Canadian couple, Cynthia and Steve, whom we’d chatted to whilst awaiting the Seward train, and we fooled around with a statue just in front of the Capitol.

This is Jane, bearback riding,

Just along from the Capitol, there’s a small but perfectly formed Russian Orthodox Church, which is really cute.

(In the competitive nature of these things, there’s a cathedral next door.)

The stream of attractive houses continued

with some lovely colours of paintwork.  We call these houses the Basin Street Blues

despite the fact that they’re actually in Basin Road, because we don’t want the truth getting in the way of a good joke.  Or even that one.

Passing a couple of other interesting sights,

we eventually reached the start of the Mount Roberts trail. It became apparent that an event was under way which involved people Running Up That Hill. We had a brief chat with a friendly-seeming marshal who told us that his brother lived in Wolverhampton and, presumably to get some sort of revenge on us for this horrible family destiny, told us that the trail was “vigorous” and the cable car station was “about 45 minutes” up it.

Bastard.

The trail was steep

and muddy in places

 

(there were marks along the way to guide us – the above is a root map)

and with some sections so steep they put in steps.

It runs through forest, which is great if you like forest, but this did mean that the trees rather relentlessly got in the way of anything like a decent view to give us an excuse to stop and photograph it in order to have a bit of a rest. It really was quite hard work for us, and presumably more so for the runners who occasionally overtook us as they headed up the mountain. And then passed us again as they came down again whilst we were still panting up.

I was very glad that I didn’t bother with the heavy jacket.  Even with fleece and rain jacket I felt distinctly overdressed, and before too long both Jane and I were in shirtsleeves – once again, very lucky with the weather.  We met a chap coming down who told us that he’d seen a bear and her cub just off the trail which made us at once excited and terrified.  We never saw the bear, which is at once a shame and a relief. We also passed a couple of girls who told us that the “sidewinder fries” at the top were excellent.

45 minutes? Hah! It was a good 90 minutes of toiling up the hill (and a climb, I might add, of 627 metres which is 2,000 feet) before we finally saw the top station before us.

There was finally a view worth looking at

and we could see our ship, too

but the main priority was to get to the bar and spend that $30,

I can report that the sidewinder fries are indeed excellent and the beer – Alaskan Koelsch – was, too.  The walk up represented the most exercise that either of us had done for some weeks, so we felt pretty pleased with ourselves, particularly since we met Cynthia and Steve again; they had ridden the cable car up so I felt we’d chalked one up for the UK. Not that we were smug about it, or anything.

I had our beer-and-fries receipt ready to show for the ride down, but no official showed the slightest interest in checking our bona fides, presumably because there were very few customers riding the cable car, so we could have saved ourselves the $30.  On the other hand, that would have meant I didn’t get the beer, and that would have been a shame.

We took the shuttle bus back to the boat, and just about made it to La Terrazza for a swift lunch.  This ended Phase I of the day, but we had still more excitement to come in the form of a whale-watching excursion. Since we had a little time to spare, I had a strategic kip by way of prep for this, and Francis brought us hot water and milk (and canapes) so we could make some decent Twinings Earl Grey tea before we headed out to the quayside again.

The excursion was billed as a “Whale Watching and Culinary Experience” with a subtext of a great photo opportunity, which is obvs why I wanted us to opt for it.  A coach ride took us to Auke Bay and we boarded a double-decker catamaran which took us out into Stephen’s Passage.  I didn’t feel a thing, your honour.

Commentary was provided by a young lass who was a marine biology student and who was clearly on top of and enthusiastic about her subject.  The skipper clearly knew roughly where to go and before too long we spotted a whale so everyone rushed to the outside deck to take photos.

This whale was called Sasha, who is sufficiently well-known to be referred to as “The Alaskan Whale”. Apparently you can see the letters A and K in her tail flukes, but I wasn’t able to verify that.  I got a couple of snaps of her, above,

and this one, showing the scar across her back from an unfortunate encounter with a ship’s propeller. We saw a couple of others as well, and if/when I get time I’ll update this post with some video.

Overall the trip, although the culinary experience was nearer being just a snack bar, was good; these were the first whales we’ve ever seen, despite having gone on whale watching trips elsewhere.

The journey back to the dock in Auke Bay took us past a decent view of the Meldenhall Glacier

and then we were back at the ship a short while before it left Juneau at 10pm.

And so ended another fairly intense day.  We have a couple of tours in the plan for tomorrow – a train ride and a bus tour of Skagway.  Since we’re likely to get rained on, being inside looks to be the best option, but you’ll have to come back tomorrow to find out how the weather treated us.

All at sea

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Friday 12 August 2022 – Our first day at sea has largely been an opportunity to draw breath after four days of scampering about, but we have managed to pack in a bit of Playing Tourist as well. The Tourist Thing is to view the Hubbard Glacier, one of the few glaciers in the world that are actually advancing – most are receding in the face of climate change. As I said in my earlier post, the outlook for a decent outlook wasn’t bright and the ship’s foghorn was sounding regularly.

However, there wasn’t a great deal we could do about the weather, so we turned our attention to Catching Up With Stuff in the hope that it would clear before we got to the glacier. The blog, for example, needed attention; yesterday was as yet undocumented and That Would Never Do.  Another task was a bit of laundry, because these things are important, you know. So the morning passed in contented admin, until the captain announced that we were nearing the glacier, at least as far as his navigational instruments could tell – I’m sure he couldn’t actually see the thing.  Francis (our butler) had recommended that we go to the observation deck café, so we hied ourselves thither in haste, with me clutching the recently-purchased extra-long telephoto lens as well as the camera to plug it into.

After a while, the fog began to lift.

and you could begin to make out the glacier from the clouds.

 

The clouds lifted further

and the glacier became clearer.

Eventually, glory be!, the sun came out and we had a clear view of the glacier.

The cruise has a couple of onboard experts on various things, including, fortunately, glaciers, and so we had a lecture over the PA system.  I expect it was highly informative, but frankly I was too busy taking photos to ay much attention. Also, since it was clear that the boat was inching closer to the glacier, we thought it might be a good idea to get some lunch. So we headed to La Terrazza, where a buffet lunch was on offer and seating on the deck seemed a good idea.

After a swift lunch, I headed back to the top deck, where it was clear that we’d got a lot closer to the glacier

(to give you some idea of the size of the glacier, we were some seven miles distant!)
and the deck was a popular place to be, now that the sun was out

not that everyone was dedicated to marvelling at the wonders of nature, mind.

The surrounding scenery also had a lot to recommend it.

After a while, the ship started very slowly to turn, and we realised that the view from our cabin was going to be pretty nice.  So we went down and I started processing photos whilst Jane took one last look at the glacier from our veranda.

Before long, the ship was under way to distance itself from Disenchantment Bay, and the weather closed in once again, underlining how lucky we’d been to have such a clear view of the glacier.

Mind you, it cleared again later, as we got further away from Disenchantment Bay.

Despite the excitement around seeing the Hubbard Glacier, today has been a fairly quiet affair, getting used to the idea of cruising; an opportunity to gather strength and gird our loins for the morrow. Maybe.

We arrive in Juneau, actually the capital of Alaska, at 0930ish tomorrow. In theory we’re going to walk up a mountain and then go whale watching.  However, it wouldn’t at all surprise me if the weather had some influence over what we actually do. The forecast is for a reasonably cool day with some showers, but who knows?  If you’d like to see how we got on, then please check in on the next entry here.

All a-bored!

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Friday 12 August 2022 – We’re now aboard Silver Muse and underway. This is the view from our cabin’s balcony right now (it has been like that ever since we left Seward); appropriately we are in Disenchantment Bay.  (It improves – keep reading.)

We’re not missing anything right now, therefore this  is a fantastic opportunity to bring you up to date with how everything went yesterday.

This being a holiday, we were up earlier than would normally be the case at home. OK, the jetlag helped. Thing is, we needed to hand our luggage over to the nice Silversea people, conveniently located at a desk in the hotel lobby, between 8am and 9am, which means 8am ‘coz we always want to give ourselves maximum contingency for cock-ups. As well as handing over the suitcases, we had to prove that we were free of the Dreaded Lurgy and that we had ‘fessed up to the Canadian authorities about our imminent arrival in a week’s time. Jane, as always, had done a mistressful job of marshalling the necessary paperwork, which left the Silversea folks almost as impressed as I was.

It was our lot to travel by rail down to Seward, where the boat would leave. We actually had no particular idea about whether this was better or worse as an option than traveling by coach, but, whatever, we had to be ready to be picked up at 1215.  This gave me the opportunity to finish writing about our day in Anchorage on Wednesday, which had been sufficiently eventful that it took two days to write it up.

The rail trip to Seward starts, somewhat counterintuitively, from the airport. There are no scheduled trains from Anchorage to Seward, so this was a Silversea Special and it departed from the rail depot at the airport (presumably needed because of the massive logistical significance of Anchorage as a hub). A coach took us to the airport, where we joined a queue to prove, once again, that we had the paperwork, then another queue to get a boarding pass for the train and our cabin keys. There was a holding pen whilst we waited to board the train

and then we were called by carriage number.  They called carriage 555 first, and we were carriage 554, so held ourselves in readiness to sprint forward. Then they called….carriage 553. No matter, they hadn’t forgotten us and we were next to take the walk down the platform.

The carriage had big observation windows

and for the journey we had the pleasure of the company of the two ladies bottom right, Rebecca and her mother Margaret. Notice that there’s nowhere to put bags, so my super-heavyweight backpack had to be stashed somewhere else.

The carriage was run by a chap called Christian, who did the best he could to gee everyone up with tales of possible sightings of moose and eagles and bears and that, but his news that the train trip was going to take four and a half “ish” hours came as a bit of a surprise. The weather conditions also quite literally dampened expectations of fabulous and interesting views.

Christian started serving people from the far end of the carriage and it became clear that it would take him some time to work his way up to our end.  Happily, we discovered that we were next to the buffet car, which was rather like any British Rail buffet car except the lady serving behind the counter knew how to mix cocktails.  We satisfied ourselves with a hat trick of G&Ts before we were able to get a salad via Christian’s service, and that nicely lubricated the conversation with Rebecca and Margaret as we ground our way slowly along.

The most interesting challenge, photographically, was seeking a gap among the trees in order to get a photo.  The train might have been moving slowly, but the gaps between the trees seemed to flash right by.  I managed one glacier

and one lake

and that was about it (no moose or eagles or bears), which meant that by the time we got to Seward we were beginning to feel rather bored with the whole process. I don’t know whether the coach option might have been swifter, but we were all glad to get to Seward, where the weather conditions (as forecast)

weren’t all that conducive to any further beautiful photography.  Scurrying from the train to the boat was actually a higher priority

and, naïve soul that I am, I was surprised at the size of the ship.

The boarding process was very smooth and it was soon clear that we were going to be very well looked after during our cruise.  Every cabin has a butler; ours is called Francis and he came and introduced himself and talked us through some of the information we’d need throughout our cruise.  We also found the launderette, which is a nice thing to have the use of. These things are important, you know.

The rest of the day was taken up with the inevitable and important safety briefing and dinner, which we took in a restaurant called Atlantide.

Great food, nice surroundings and efficient and courteous service. After dinner, we thought it would be good to stretch our legs, so we walked around the ship to orientate ourselves.  It’s a big ship in our experience, but quite small in the general cruising context – a maximum of 596 guests if full. Relatively small as it is, it’s still an 11-story building  so there was a lot to take in.

We learned from one steward (Simon, German) that there are 437 guests on this cruise and somewhere around 360 crew, so the service level is near one-to-one; also that even if the numbers had been higher post-pandemic, the ship would not have been full, as they have to reserve some cabins for quarantine purposes. The pandemic’s consequences continue to affect the hospitality industry, even after all this time.

The strains of the day began to tell, and even the prospect of further free booze wasn’t enough to keep us going, so we called it a day at this point and got our heads down in order to prepare for a day at sea containing the prospect of seeing the Hubbard Glacier at reasonably close range from the ship. We therefore hoped for decent weather, not something that we’d seen thus far.  However…..

….the skies have cleared, making today’s activity a bit more promising.  I’ll write about that in the next post, so do come back and find out more, won’t you?