Alaska -- Ketchikan

I didn't get many pictures of the wildlife, but that was more a matter of being too slow on the shutter button or not having a long enough zoom lens--not a shortage of wildlife. (I have this 28-200mm zoom lens which worked well, but there were others on the ship with zoom lenses so big that my son-in-law wisecracked that some of these people looked like they were overcompensating for other deficiencies.)

I lost count of the number of whales that we saw spouting or breaking through the surface, all during the voyage.

Bald eagles? I've seen them near our house here, but they were everywhere in Alaska on this journey. This one was a bit too backlit, but you can still tell what it is:


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This is Ketchikan, Alaska, our first stop:


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Like the rest of the Alaska coast, the vast quantity of rain and snow means that everything is very lush, like these rhododendrons:


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Here we are on the stream that runs through the historic section of Ketchikan:


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Is there anything that better typifies the wild allure of Alaska than floatplanes?


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One aspect of Ketchikan and Skagway that was not appealing was that both cities were essentially cruise ship tourist traps. Ketchikan has some commerce other than tourists, but Skagway seems to have none. In both places, jewelry stores, largely stocking the same low quality Chinese made jewelery, were dominant:


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We knew that the cruise ships steer customers towards those stores that have paid a promotional fee. One taxicab driver in Juneau told us that the stores are actually owned by the cruise ship lines. I don't know if that is true or not, but it might explain how they manage to make money charging so little for seven nights on board. It was apparent that many of our fellow passengers (like many Americans in general) have far more money than sense, and were spending it pretty wildly in these jewelery stores.

In Ketchikan, the cruise ships were stacked up in the harbor.


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As a result, there wasn't enough room at the dock (or perhaps our ship drew too much water to get there), and we ended up getting ashore in tenders that actually turned out to be the lifeboats from the ship.


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My image of a lifeboat is the open rowboats from every movie ever made about the Titanic, but these were double screw closed boats, with seating for 150.


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