Alaskan Cruise: Ketchikan

The first port we came to on our Cruise was Ketchikan, Alaska. Months before the cruise, we booked an excursion in Ketchikan with a local excursion company. It was a jeep and canoe tour of the National forest there. Well, the day before we pulled into port, Danny received this random text at sea from the Ketchikan company telling us that due to some mechanical issues with their jeeps, our excursion is cancelled. Danny exchanged a few texts back in forth, trying to find out if it was legit. We also checked with the ships excursion group to see if the same excursion had been cancelled with them and they told us that it was still on. So we found out the hard way why it is beneficial to book excursions with the ship. Apparently if they are short on equipment, they cancel the non-ship excursions first. So we woke up in Ketchikan the next day, not really sure what we were going to do. We were able to walk off the ship early and got added last minute to a kayak excursion, one of the ones I had picked out before the cruise as an option that day. 

The excursion started with a short bus ride. Then we got on a motorized raft for a 20 minute ride out to a beach area with the kayaks. This was the coldest part of the day. I was glad I brought my beanie and mittens along. On the beach we had a short training on kayaking and then we were off in 2 man kayaks.

While kayaking, we stuck close to the shoreline and saw hundreds of orange and purple starfish, sea anenomes, and sea cucumbers. We also saw a lot of Bald Eagles in the trees and the sky.

It was so beautiful on the water.

We saw a deer on the shoreline. That was kind of cool. 

We kayaked along the shoreline and ended up in this lagoon. There was an eagle nest up in one of the trees that we were all looking at. Then Danny and I spotted a school of tiny fish and seal.

After hanging out in the lagoon for 5-10 minutes, we headed back to the beach where we had some delicious chocolate chip cookies and hot cocoa. then we got back on the catamaran and then back on to the bus. We still had to pay for our excursion, so we stopped in the gift shop to take care of that. We even got charged the excursion companies fee instead of the ships fee, so that was nice to save a little. By the time we came out of the shop, our Royal Carribean group had left already. So we loaded in the bus with the Carnival group.

We walked around town when we got back to the port. There was a nice souvenir shop on our way from the Carnival ship (where we got dropped off) and our ship, so we did some shopping for our kids. We also got me a sweatshirt. Danny didn't want anything. We got each of the kids a shirt or sweatshirt and a toy or trinket. Ketchikan had a lot of totem poles and the buildings were really colorful. It was different than I imagined it from the pictures I had seen, but it was probably my favorite town that we walked through on this trip. 

We sat outside the ship for a bit after walking around town and looked at the map. There was this area on the map that we had missed, so we decided to go check it out. We are so glad we did.  It had more restaurants and shops, but they were all over water and the walkways were made of wood. It was a cute little area.

We did not get fish and chips or fresh crab legs since the food on the ship was already paid for. Plus, the crab legs were almost $100. It turned out to be a nice day, even though we did not know what the day would look like when we woke up that morning.