If you’re certain to have little interest in seeing Alaska but enjoy glutinous multitudes fighting for somewhere to sit with a pile on their plates, an Alaskan cruise is for you.
My favorite stop was Hoonah, with a population of 931 or about one third the number that disembarked our ship that day, to see some bear, moose, or maybe a reindeer or whale.
There was no such things, so everyone did what the ship planned for – shopped. The options were mammoth: bear, moose salmon and whale shirts, caps, pants, pajamas with that cute little buttoned back flap, belts, eye wear, undies, and slippers, and, AND if you looked closely made in China.
Most went for some representation of salmon, not in your fresh, local Cosco sense, but dried salmon, flavored salmon, jerked salmon, puréed salmon, salmon spice, even not yet salmon – the eggs, all jarred, canned or sealed. Given the selection I went for a dozen cans of salmon spread: the pepper garlic, Chipotle and cruise dung flavored, as gifts for friends back home. Those cans seemed the most popular amongst the other cruise ships in port that day and the over 500,000 tourists dropping in to give a financial “high-five” to the 931 inhabitants of Hoonah each year.
One stop was in Juneau, the Alaskan capital. There we were greeted by three blocks of jewelry stores, filled with diamonds and watches, shipped in from Switzerland and Africa, followed by the same mammoth monotony from Chinese fabricators depicting bear, moose, salmon, whales and such!
My life having been spent in various conferences in every state’s capital, each built with pride as monuments to democracy, I decided to visit the only one on the continent that I had not visited.
Finding the address, I looked around, to the right, to the left, down in front, off behind, no, that lump of bricks was actually it, the same old lump you have in your town, in every town.
There was one remote stop, where we sat in the water a few hundred yards from a glacier: It was a jaw dropper. We hung on the rails as we approached and then glued there for the two-hours our ship stayed, watching a 300+ ft. high glacier calve blocks of ice weighing tons into the ocean.
Me, brother and our loves!
If it were not for that glacier and the chance to spend quality time with my wife, brother and his love, the trip would have been a bust. They made the trip right up until we tried to leave.
All was well as we left the ship for our 2 pm American Airlines flight home. The plane broke before take-off, and a new one was ordered, arriving 6 hours later, that would miss our connection home to Tucson. The airlines said we had two choices, one, we can get you to Los Angles where you will need to stay two days untill our next Tucson flight or we can get you to Phoenix sometime tomorrow where you will need to use your own resources to find home.
What fun, what experience, what adventure, what learning to just watch Animal Kingdom and be happy.
Richard Kimball
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