Juneau, Alaska

Due to our late arrival our planned trip was cancelled, however the ship was to stay till 9pm so we still had time to do something. We decided to walk the relatively short distance through the city to the tramway (cable car) and take a ride through the rain forest to the top of Mt Roberts which, at 1,800 feet high sits impressively behind the city.

Once at the top the views are one of the most expansive views in Southeast Alaska: Chilkat Mountains to the north, Gastineau Channel to the south, west to Douglas Island, and east into Silver Bow Basin, where gold was discovered in 1880.

Juneau is set on Gastineau Channel and although it is Alaska’s third largest city, it has a real “small town” atmosphere. I have no idea what the locals look like because we were the fourth cruise ship in port, all at the same time – I don’t know what the collective noun for tourists is, however “swarm” sort of describes it! Perhaps you can suggest a better collective noun?

I was looking forward to the gondola ride up the mountain, but perhaps Grace wasn’t. I had visions of Grace very closely examining the gondola floor (not see through) as she did in a recent trip in the glass sided cable ride up the Blue Mountains near Katoomba. That (to the rest of the family and the other sightseers in the cable-car) was an amusing sight – I noticed someone taking a photo of Grace on the floor in between photos of the view outside.

However, I shouldn’t have worried as Grace was in a particularly bad mood from an incident that happened as we were leaving the ship.

As a result of the earlier incident,
a photo needed to be taken of
every animal we passed!

 I didn’t mention previously, there are ship’s photographers and they try to get as many USD photos of you and the family as possible. The evening prior, we purchased $100 worth of pictures and really didn’t want any more.



As passengers disembark, in each port except Prince Rupert you had to run a gauntlet past the photographer and man inside various animal costumes. They encourage everyone, particularly children to stand with them and our girls did – Grace also tried to photograph the girls with the “seagull” (it was supposed to be an eagle!) and the photographer rudely stuck his hand in front of Grace’s camera spoiling her shot. He was a Filipino and blunt words were exchanged.

That set the scene for our trip up Mt Roberts. Grace stared out the glass window seemingly oblivious to the heights we were reaching, intent on doing something about the photographer!! The view from the top was fantastic, but other than walking along a number of tracks, one back to the bottom, there wasn’t a lot to do.

There was a small theatre in which we watched a very talented family singing and chatting about the local area with a little history, combined with a Powerpoint slide show.

As it was late in the afternoon when we were returning, the family were getting tired but we were still searching the shops for something warmer to wear for our trip to Davidson Glacier tomorrow.

Fortunately we found very nice, warm jackets and clothing all at discounted prices. We are at the end of their tourist season with less than three weeks to go, so the vast majority of shops have substantial discounts – yay, shopping... I’m so glad we were tired, we had to cut the shopping short…