Wednesday, July 2, 2008

During the night we slept thru stops at Petersburg and Wrangell.  I hope we don’t do the same thing when we dock at Bellingham on Friday!  Fog surrounded us when we awoke, but it soon burned off and the day was beautiful; in the 70’s and a light breeze.

 

We docked at Ketchikan, and spent 5 hours there.  Even though our vehicle is on board, we can’t use it so we got off the boat and looked for a city bus to take us the 2 miles to the city center.  The line for the bus was long, and we decided to hike it.  We went through primarily dock areas and businesses that were fishing related, and the smells were at times quite interesting.

 

We passed a Safeway and a Godfather’s Pizza on the way, so we felt at home.  As we were walking into town and looking over the dock, we saw hundreds of jellyfish and starfish.  But much to our dismay, Spongebob Squarepants was nowhere to be seen.  Even more disappointing was an absence of salmon.  It has been a cool spring and summer, so they are a month behind in their spawning run.

 

Ketchikan is a town of 7,500 and is heavily influenced by both native and Russian cultures.  We saw numerous totem poles, and they each tell a story.  We took a walking tour of the city and saw an Episcopalian Church that was the oldest building in the city, an old “red light” district, had some delicious caramel corn, then decided it was time for lunch.  We found a Subway then did some more looking around.  Deaune and Sarah found some ripe blueberries while we were walking, as well as some of the biggest raspberries we had ever seen – as big as your thumb!  They were delicious.

 

There were 4 large cruise ships in dock, and they were HUGE!  I can’t even begin to guess how many people they can hold, but they are at least 3 to 4 football fields long and who knows how many stories high.  Amazing! 

 

The city is built on pilings, or stilts, because the terrain is so steep, and some of their streets are made of wooden planks on pilings because of the tide.

 

We hoofed it back to our ship, which seemed quite small now.  We figured that we walked at least 6 miles on this little outing, and our feet were sore!

 

We have internet on board, even when we are not in port, so our kids got online to check their facebook and catch up on the latest with life back home.

 

Supper was microwaved again, and we played cards and ate popcorn until the kids went to watch a movie (such a rough life at sea; this sure beats driving!  Any way we can do this all the way back to Kansas?  I haven’t seen many boats this size in our rivers, but let’s try it!)

 

It was another unbelievable sunset this evening.  At one point, the sun was setting over a lighthouse…very nice!

 

We were going to stay up this evening and look for whales and porpoise, but a fog rolled in so we just caught up on blogging and hanging out.