2009 Alaska Cruise

Today is Ketchikan.  Basically had nothing planned for the day.  Had kept looking at some bear watching trips, but had a tough time swallowing the prices that they asked for them.  Ended up just getting off the ship and wandering through some of the shopping in town.  Most of it looks just like the same shopping you get anywhere else in cruise ports quite frankly.  Also wandered our way up Creek Street, to a spot just under a road bridge, where you could see the salmon trying to work their way upstream.  Farther down in the calm and clear areas of the stream, you could just see hundreds of them slowly swimming up stream.

The port day in Ketchikan is relatively short, and so we sailed early.  Later in the day we went through I think Snow Passage, which is apparently a good spot to see some whales.  Sure enough, several humpback whales were hanging out in the area, so we got a chance to see some from the ship.

Even later that night I was watching the Golden Princess pass us heading south, and also saw yet another whale.  So up to this point, have done pretty well spotting whales.

Our day at sea.  Slept in some for a change today, and woke up to find that the weather is definitely different.  I’ve been wearing shorts so far today, but I’m probably one of the few.  I was sitting out on the promenade deck for a while in a somewhat sheltered location, and they were barely adequate.  However, by spending some time there, I was able to see a few whales and some dolphins.  Didn’t have the camera with me though.

Right now we’re sailing along and the fog has really moved in.  Can’t see real far off the ship, so trying to spot whales and dolphins is probably all but hopeless, and the ship’s horn is sounding every couple of minutes.

Finally it’s time to board the ship.  One of the nice things about staying at the Pan Pacific Vancouver, is it’s right at the cruise terminal (at least if your ship is leaving from Canada Place).  So in the morning, all you do is call the desk and have the hotel bellmen pick up your luggage, and they arrange to take it to the ship.  Talk about easy.  Then, after checking out, all you have to do is hop in the elevator down to the cruise port level.  We did that around 11:30, and basically walked through the entire process with no lines, and got right on the ship.

Later that evening, watched as we left the city of Vancouver.  Have found it kinda interesting, we’ve run into a couple of cruise staff that we had during out last cruise, which was on the sister to the Island, the Coral Princess.  Lauren’s one of the assistant cruise directors (don’t know if she was listed as assistant or junior last time aruond), and Bryan was the shore excursion manager, I’m guessing he’s doing the same thing here since his name is at least listed as part of the shore excursion staff.

Real early morning today to catch the train from Seattle to Vancouver.  Train leaves at 7:40 in the morning, they started doing seat assignments at about 7:20 (although people were lined up before that).  Ideally if you’re in the line early, you might be able to get a seat on the left side of the train for the better views.  Of course, you could also be told you’re getting a seat on the left, and when you get to your seat discover that it’s on the right.  We were able to get reseated after the train left though.  Nice easy ride, especially after a few days of a lot of driving.  After getting into Vancouver, took the Sky Train to the waterfront station right near our hotel (the Pan Pacific Vancouver).  This was pretty easy, even with a couple of rolling suitcases.  Was made a little tougher because of a parade in town that day, but without that it’d probably be even better.

After checking in, headed out down the waterfront area and ended up in Harbor Green Park, where there was a children’s water play fountain area.  This was about as far as we made it, because even though the extreme heat had broken, it was still awfully hot out.  Wandered back to the hotel to relax for a while before dinner.

For dinner we met up with another of Cathy’s cousins, Angie, and headed towards Gastown.  First place she tried to take us apparently had closed down, so we ended up finding somewhere else to eat.  Thankfully, in the evening the temperatures had really come down to a more reasonable level.

This morning we were picking one of Cathy’s cousins up and heading to the Boeing plant for their tour.  No cameras, no cell phone, no bags, basically nothing allowed on the tour.  (Yet back at the hotel there was a several page photo spread of the inside of the plant in the Seattle book.)  Still, not a bad tour, you end up in the world’s largest building by volume.  Saw the 747, the 777, and the 787 assembly lines.  On the 747 line the first of the 747-8 models was being built.  The 787 line I think had the 4th one, plus one of the earlier ones back in for some work.  Did find a couple of amusing things in the gift shop.  One was a model of the Airbus A380.  Only Airbus item I saw.  Second was a model of the 787 done up in Northwest colors.  That was almost tempting to buy, because it’s something of a novelty item.  There will never be a 787 done in NWA colors.

Headed down to Seattle again, and once again walked around the market, this time with stuff actually open.  Busy place, and quite frankly, most of the stuff seemed to be overpriced for the tourist market.  After that, we drove along the waterfront for a while.  This weekend was Seafair, and supposedly there were supposed to be a couple naval ships along the waterfront, including I had heard an aircraft carrier.  We did see Fat Albert and some of the jets from the Blue Angels flying overhead a couple times while they were doing their show over the lake.  But no luck after driving around the waterfront finding anything that looked like a Navy ship.  So we dropped Wes off, and then went and dropped our rental car off.  After that walked down to the waterfront area to catch the ferry to Bremerton and back.  Did see what looked like an aircraft carrier being decommissioned in Bremerton.  Relaxing ride, nice view of the city coming back, and off in the distance Mt Ranier was peeking through the haze.

Back across the state time, so yet another early morning.  And, of course, once again we’re not exactly taking the direct route.  We had two main stops planned for this trip across the state.  First, we headed up to the Grand Coulee Dam.  Apparently the biggest dam in the country, although even after looking at it, I’m not overly convinced of it.  Looked into their tours, but turns out their elevator was broken, so all people were getting was a brief trip basically out to a viewpoint it seemed.  Since we had just missed a tour by 5 minutes, and had to wait till the next hour to take one, didn’t particularly seem worth the effort.

From there, we headed down to the Dry Falls area (which apparently is in Sun Lakes State Park).  This is an area that was apparently carved out by a giant flood a long time ago, leaving bare cliffs where water used to flow over.  Visited the overlook at the top of the cliffs where the visitor center is, then headed down into the area.  Did think it was a little odd that they made the visitors center white.  From down below, it kinda stuck out pretty badly.

From there we followed 2 across the rest of the way, which seems to be a fairly scenic route.  Got into Seattle to once again hit the rush hour traffic, although again we seemed to mainly be moving against the main flow, so wasn’t too bad.  Checked into the Grand Hyatt, then walked down to the Pike Street Market.  However, at this point apparently everything was pretty much shut down.  So after wandering for a bit, then catching dinner, headed back to the hotel for the evening.

Spent the day wandering around with Cathy’s aunt and uncle.  In the morning, went out with Cathy’s aunt and introduced her to geocaching while wandering around the WSU campus.  Found a couple, skipped a couple others that were in areas I was less sure about.  Stopped by the bear research area and saw the couple of bears that were out.  Also stopped by Ferdinands, WSU’s version of their dairy store.  As usual for a college dairy store, their ice cream was pretty decent.

In the afternoon, headed out to the Snake River.  Crossed the Lower Granite Dam, where they seem to be somewhat on the overkill side of security.  ID required for everyone in the vehicle, no pictures while on the dam (yet you can take them from just below the dam).  Visited the visitor center and watched the fish swim through the fish ladder.  Apparently we were between salmon runs, so there really weren’t many salmon visible, only saw a couple.  Lot of carp in the river, which did kinda surprise me, always thought of them as lake fish.  What was also kinda amusing is that the young salmon going downriver are actually filtered out of the water with some big fish filtering plant, and then actually put on boat and taken downstream by boat.  Apparently at one point they used to actually truck them downstream.  Just seems kinda bizzare.  Then we went a little further downstream to a dunes area that you can actually get out and swim in the river.  Well, you can swim in it if you manage to get far enough out in the water.  At about 50 or 60 feet out, I was still only knee deep, although in about another 25 or so it did start to get deeper faster.  Water felt pretty cool considering it was about 95 degrees or so, walking back over the dunes not so cool.

Long day on the agenda today.  We headed south out of Seattle (glad we weren’t heading north, traffic looked pretty bad), aiming for Mt Ranier National Park.  As we’re headed down one of the roads towards the park, we pull off at a viewpoint that had a view down a valley, thinking the view looked kinda decent.  Someone else was at that view point, and he pointed out that you could see a bald eagle nest that had a fledgling bald eagle in it.  Cathy found him pretty quick with the binoculors, but as I’m searching, all I can find is what looks like an adult not sitting in a nest at all.  Turns out, while they were standing about 5 feet left of me, they could see the nest and not the adult, while I could see the adult and not the nest.  Sure enough, once I could see the nest, there was indeed an imature bald eagle in it, occasionally flapping its wings.

Continued on towards the park, but as we got closer, we starting seeing signs that part of the park road was closed on the east side, so you couldn’t connect to 123.  That was a bad sign, since we had planned on going through that way, since our ultimate destination was the east side of the state.  Driving through the park we made several stops at places where we could see the mountain or some of the waterfalls.  Kind of would have liked to do the hike to Comet falls, but we really didn’t have the time it would have taken, plus, the record high heat that has been plaguing the northwest was also affecting this area.  Heck, even the walk down to where you could see Narada falls was pretty tough (it’s a steep walk).

Visited the new visitor center in Paradise.  Nice place, but the whole area seemed to be having some issues, which meant they had not running water, so all the rest rooms in the area were out of service.  Great view of the mountain from here, but the clouds were starting to build up a little bit near the peak.  Ended up following the road all the way to the point where it was closed to check out the bridge over this deep gorge the stream had carved out.  Then we had to completely back track our way out of the park, and take a different road that runs a little further south than the park road.

From there, it was largely a lot of driving.  Turns out that the middle of Washington is a lot of farmland.  Fair variety of crops, I know we saw hops, apples, grapes, wheat and cherries.  The hops took a little bit to identify, but then I remembered an episode of Dirty Jobs that I watched where Mike was helping to harvest hops, and it was setup exactly the same.

Ended up skipping Palouse Falls, which had been on our plans, because we were running later than we planned.  Got into Pullman around 7:30 (about 12 hours after we started), just in time to pick Cathy’s aunt up to head over to Moscow, Idaho.  Cathy’s uncle was performing with his group at an alehouse there with open mic night at 8pm, we got there about 7:50.

Hopped on the plane after sitting all day in Detroit waiting for Cathy to finish a workshop. Boring flight,  too many clouds to see anything pretty much the entire flight.  After arriving, took some effort to locate the National car pickup point (does help to actually look at the sign telling you what floor you’re on).  They had a Cadillac CTS available, which I have to admit I had some interest in trying out, but when we stuck our heads in, the thing smelled badly of smoke.  Ended up with a DTS, which wouldn’t have been my first choice, but over the time we drove it, I have to admit, it handled a lot better than I expected.  Got into our hotel room to discover that while Seattle was having record high heat, the room’s AC was off and the window open.  Took a while for it to get cool enough to get to sleep.