Alaska 2006 – Day 4

Alaskan Cruise

Day 4 – July 20 2006

(Daily Princess Patter Pg 1Pg 2Pg 3) – Red dots indicate events we attended

 

Good morning Juneau! We arrived this morning and it was raining. However, our excursion isn’t until noon so perhaps the weather will get better. We are scheduled to go on a small boat that will take us near Mendenhall glacier and then take us down the river and through some white water rapids. It’s going to be great!

We got savagely attacked by this wild moose and bear when we got off the boat. Fortunately, there was someone there to snap a photo for us. Click on the photo for a larger version.

We had some extra time to kill after breakfast and before our excursions so we walked around on the streets and visited some of the shops. There were lots of places to poke around in. We decided that after our excursion we’d come back and get some t-shirts and stuff since we would be having some extra time in port today.

It was time for our excursion! We took a 15-20 minute bus ride over to Mendenhall glacier.

 

This is a huge glacier and unfortunately we didn’t really get a chance to get all that close to it as the river we were to following led away from it. However we did get some good photos.

 

They made it very clear to us that we would probably get wet and that we needed the proper protection in order to ensure that if we did fall in or we did get drenched that we wouldn’t have a problem. You can die really quickly in this cold water and with our doing some rapids and all they really made sure we had some good gear.

 

There’s our transportation. An inflatable boat! The guy on the photo on the right was our tour guide who did a great job pointing out stuff and paddling his heart out to get us where we needed to go.

This was a beautiful trip down the river. There were some pretty wild rapids and we had to put our cameras in a “safe dry bag” during the rough parts so we couldn’t get any photos. Most of the photos of the ride all would look much like this one. However we did see some some deer and some bald eagles. It was a very enjoyable trip. Adam even managed to get sunburned (no surprise).

Back to the ship for some lunch, and then back down for shopping in Juneau. In Juneau they have a really cool cable-car that takes you to the top of a huge mountain.

Unfortunately it was about $35 a person just to ride the thing so we elected to pass. We bought some shirts and some jewelry and stuff and went back to the ship for dinner. Then we went and saw another dance show put on by the Coral Princess dancers which was a tribute to Broadway shows. We enjoyed it very much.

Sunset in Alaska. As we were pulling out of the dock I snapped this photo. It was a beautiful end to a great day.

Tomorrow should have lots of fun as we are supposed to ride on a train and see some great scenery of the Yukon. We are looking forward to it!

On to Day 5!