I guess I lost motivation to update our blog halfway through telling about our Alaska trip. Now it has been 5 months, so the memories are not as fresh in my mind, but I will do my best to report on the rest of the cruise.
Our second port day was in Skagway. We happened to be in Skagway, the furthest north our cruise would go on the same day as summer solstice. The sun rose around 3:30 am that day and set around 11pm. However, the night sky really did not get very dark. It was the weirdest thing to look out over the ocean around midnight and still be able to see pretty clearly, the outline of the shoreline in the distance.
Anyways, back to Skagway. We decided to leave the most popular excursion is Skagway, the ride on the train up into Canada, for later on in life when we won't be able to do super active excursions. We opted for a zipline tour near Grizzly Falls through an Alaskan rainforest. The dock was closed because of rockslide, so they had to shuttle us from the exit of our ship to land. Since this was going to take longer than normal, we exited the boat nice and early. We got to shore about an hour before our excursion, so we decided to walk around town a bit. The town was similar to other Alaska towns we stopped in: about a thousand jewelry shops as well as souvenir stores and seafood restaurants. We did find this unique building, and later learned that it is one of the most photographed buildings in Alaska.
Here is the main drag of town. We did have a bit of excitement when the little theater in town decided to advertise as we walked past and actors started singing at all of the tourists from the second story window.
We didn't last long in town before getting bored, so we headed back to the location where all of the excursions meet up. We were a little early and did not see our excursion. As the time got closer, we started to worry that we had missed our tour guide. We tried to spot the other adventurous tourists around us and spotted a couple that could be in our group. Finally we asked another tour guide that was from the same company and she told us our guide was running late but would be there soon When she arrived and after initial introductions, we learned that she grew up in Lehi and was in Alaska for the summer to work having been recruited at BYU. After the 30 minute bus ride, we learned that not only did she grow up in Lehi, but lived less than a mile from us and we knew a lot of the same people. She also served her mission in Brazil. It was fun to have so many connections. We got a picture with her to remember what she looks like in case we ever run into her around home.
Our tour started with a short ride up the mounting in a unimog (the green vehicle behind us). It was kind of like an oversized jeep. We were on a single lane, steep road up to the top and it was kind of crazy that this unimog could make it up such a steep incline.
There were a lot of husky dogs in the decor because this was also a base camp for a sled dog tour.
The rainforest was beautiful and our tour guides were fun. The ziplining was fun and they had us do some fun games along the way. We were grouped together with a family of 5. It wasn't nearly as cool as our Puerto Vallarta zipline tour, but it was still fun.
On the bus ride back home, we came across a family of foxes. It was so cute. There was a mama and 4 little ones.
When we got back to the ship, we decided to get back on right away. We had early dining and we were trying to make it to dinner on time.
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