Alaskan Cruise
Day 3 – July 19 2006
(Daily Princess Patter Pg 1, Pg 2, Pg 3) – Red dots indicate events we attended
Up at 5am! Rise and shine! We’ve got a shore excursion bright and early!
Pulling into Ketchikan looking forward to a fun day!
Kevin is ready to go!
We went and grabbed breakfast and then went into town. We had a short time before our shore excursion so we snapped some photos.
Kevin liked this sign. It says “Safety ladder. Use at your own risk”. Guess it isn’t a very safe safety ladder.
Here’s our balcony! We decided to take some photos of it while we were on shore and had the chance. It’s really a great room and a great balcony location. If we had to complain about something, however, it would be about this terrible garbage smell that for some reason seemed to always find it’s way to our balcony. We’d go out to enjoy the day and we’d get this terrible smell and run back inside.
Time for our shore excursion! We are going on a rain forest and wildlife safari! Hopefully we’ll see lots of bald eagles, bears, elephants and that sort of thing. Well maybe no elephants…
We got to the safari and met our tour guide.
Here he is talking about a spiny plant.
The walk through the forest was beautiful. The trees were so full of color and there was lots and lots of ground cover. We were told to watch out for bears, but unfortunately we never saw one.
There were lots and lots of old trees with weird root systems. Here’s Kevin standing inside of one. We are in Alaska so let’s talk about Bald Eagles…
These guys are all over the place. In almost every tree we could see in the forest had an eagle in it. They are thriving extremely well. It was awesome to see them flying around and free.
Here’s a grey heron we spotted.
We then stopped at a petting zoo and fed some reindeer. They loved to eat the leaves off of the branches that were provided.
We were then taken to a totem pole carving demonstration. We got to watch this guy and his son chip away at a totem pole and tell the story behind it. We then went into the gift shop they had right there and got some salmonberry jelly and jam (yum!) and then we went back to the ship to eat some lunch, go back into town to get some goodies (and freebies), and then back onboard pretty quickly so we could set sail again.
Bye Bye Ketchikan! We had a great time.
As we were pulling away I shot this picture of this guy and his dogs. We missed our critters at home so I decided to snap this one. These dogs were really really happy with this man and they were playing and leaping up at him. It was a nice sight as we were leaving..
Mom and Dad could live here. Look what I saw as we were sailing away.
Once we were back onboard we got followed by our sister ship from princess (Regal Princess). This ship was behind us for quite a while but eventually we let it go by as it has a more aggressive schedule than we did.
Back on board we relaxed a bit and Susan took an art class.
A beautiful pastel drawing of a sunset! This drawing will probably go straight to the Smithsonian for historical purposes.
After that we got ready to go to a trivia game but all of a sudden…
WHALE! They came on the speaker and told everyone there were some Whales in the area. This is the best photo I could get unfortunately. Hopefully we will see many more of these and we’ll get a better opportunity. There were lots and lots of whales but getting a good photo isn’t easy.
We topped the night off by going to a “Liars Club” type of game show which was really fun. Then Kevin went out exploring the ship and going to the “fun zone” (a kids club) and Adam and Susan relaxed on the balcony.
Looking forward to tomorrow! We get to see Mendenhall glacier and the port of Juneau!