Juneau

Our primary goal for the Juneau port of call was to see Mendenhall Glacier. OK, you'd think we'd seen enough glaciers by now. But when we booked all these port adventures, we weren't sure that the ship would be able to get close enough to Sawyer Glacier in Tracy Arm Fjord to see it. Mendenhall was a guaranteed sighting, so we booked it. It also allowed us to get a bit closer and access the visitor center to see some history and details.

I'd condemn the photographer for chopping off the top of my head, but I'm the one that set the timer on the camera. Gotta better estimate where my head will be compared to the family...

William got new hiking boots for this trip. He was working them out climbing everything in sight.

And proving the Gortex lining by walking through every puddle and creek we came across... OK, he's a boy, he'd do the same thing in tenny runners... William and I hiked to Nugget Falls which you can see in the video at the bottom of this post.

We rode the tram to the top of the hill. As expected, it was a nice view and there was a gift shop.

While Caroline and William returned to the ship to relax, I took a tour up to the Alaskan Brewery. The picture above is of their original brewery and their pilot beer brewing system. They now have a 100 barrel brewing system in a separate building that we were not able to tour through. This tour consisted of a gift shop with windows into the brewing area... and free beer!

It was Pirate Night on the ship where everyone was encouraged to dress like a pirate. Most everyone had something from the ship's Disney Store to make them look like a pirate, but Caroline saw the schedule before hand and brought along some items that made them look like a bunch of rebels!... OK privateers...

Skagway

Skagway was our most Northern port of call. It was one of the ports where gold rush miners started their overland trek to the Klondike. They would bring all their supplies by boat and then carry them all over the pass via the "Trail of '98". As time went on, they put in a train line to make the trek a heck of a lot easier and they provide scenic rail tours on that track to entertain us cruisers. Of the cities we visited, this was the only one that you could access by road. It was also the only one where we had wonderful weather.

William and I walking along the train to find a car for ourselves. They had to leave the train split to not block the road. When they were ready to go, they backed the train up to pick up the other cars and then headed out.

The train wound it's way along the mountain side going over trestles and through tunnels. This might not look like a tall trestle, but...

...this was the view from below!

One of the trestles had been retired from service 45 years ago. I'm kinda glad they did so.

The pass is just on the other side of the Canadian border. We didn't need our passports since we were considered a "Closed Container" since none of us were getting off the train.

At the top, we exchanged places with the train that went up before us (they can service up to 4 cruise ship's worth of passengers with these trains. Two trains twice a day.)

On the way down, you get a peak down the valley. If you click on the picture and open it up large, you can just make out our ship in the bay.

Once we got back from the train ride, we took a self guided walking tour of Skagway. Here, William is posing with a statue of prospectors.

A tired old engine from the era.

We'd passed the cemetery on the train and they told a story of a crooked sheriff, Jefferson Smith, that was running the town (and taking money wherever he could) and how one day, a gentlemen named Frank Reid challenged him on the pier after a town meeting. They drew guns and fired at each other. The crooked sheriff was killed instantly, but Frank Reid took an unfortunate bullet in the groin and took several days to die. They buried Jefferson Smith off by himself in the cemetery giving him a basic headstone and "The only bars that would ever hold him" to fence it off. For the town's hero though...

They erected the biggest monument in the cemetery.

A few minutes hike up from the cemetery is a very nice waterfall.

One of us needs to loosen up a bit...

The Red Onion was a brothel and now has a bar on the lower floor and a brothel museum on the second floor. The waitresses were all dressed in halter top outfits to fit the history of the building and they offered tours of the brothel and advertised them as "15 minutes for $5." It was like an 1800's Hooters. The best IPA I found in Alaska was here, but it was from Pt. Defiance Washington...

After a long day, we headed back to our ship. It was a nice day.

Tracy Arm Bay

Next day was Tracy Arm Bay where the ship sails up a long fjord hoping to get far enough in to see the glacier.

The sail in was almost more intriguing than seeing the glacier. It was a tight and winding path through the mountains that jutted out straight from the water.

And we weren't the only ones navigating through. It seems they purposefully don't meet up in the tighter sections of the route.

We inched our way every close, avoiding the larger chunks of ice.

Especially the ones with seals on them. The rules state that they can only get as close as they can without disturbing the seals. This one, apparently, is not disturbed.

The smaller ferries can get closer. This gives you some scale to the size of the glacier.

And the full glacier as we could see it from the ship.

At Sea on Disney Wonder

The happy Putaansuu family starting their Alaska Disney Cruise from Edmonds Washington! OK, the ship didn't pick us up in Edmonds, but we did catch an Amtrak train up to Vancouver BC where we stayed the night and then boarded the Disney Wonder in the morning.

I remember visiting this pier during the 1986 World's Fair. Didn't realize that I'd be coming back to catch a ship.

The ship has 3 or 4 pools. The Mickey pool is pretty much for kids only. Anyone over 65" can NOT go down the slide. There was a family pool that was a bit more normal and then there was the "No Kids" pool where adults could relax away from the clammer.

I didn't realize it, but each Disney ship has unique characters hanging off the back of the ship. Ours was Donald Duck and Huey.

The first full day on the ship was an "At Sea" day with no Ports of Call planned. The ship cruised up the inner passage where we could enjoy the tree covered mountains shooting up on both sides of the ship. It wasn't long before human influence on the land was no longer visible. Truly beautiful.

Our Stateroom wasn't a fancy one, but it certainly beat the one I had on the aircraft carrier. Not only did we get a porthole, but it was HUGE. You could almost call it a "Window". And if we didn't like that view, we could turn the channel and we could watch the view from the bridge. The room had a double bed and the couch flattened out into a single bed for William. We had a separate shower room and toilet room. A nice feature when the whole family is trying to get ready for the day.

We usually dine in one of the three big dining rooms and rotate which dining room we eat in every night. For the second dinner on board, we signed up for five star dining in Palo's where our truly Italian server guided us through an exquisite Italian dining experience. Where is William, you ask?

At the Oceanier's Lab! Disney Cruise has kid's clubs for many different age groups. The one targeting William was the Oceanier's Lab. This is the Piston Cup where the kid's teamed up to build soap cars (carved bar of soap with wheels and flag attached) and they race them until there is a final winner. William's team won, earning their car a place on the shelf (for the week anyway) and a Magical Moment Certificate. He was pretty proud.

This allows the parents to party it up... Here we're in the movie theater where they run current Disney movies through out the day. It's a quality theatre with most of their movies showing in 3D. We hadn't caught the latest Pirates movie, so we caught it here. I also caught up on "Mars Needs Moms" and "Tangled". I'm about 3D'd out...

Disney characters were available daily and their schedule and location were posted so you could catch them (or in our case, avoid them) except...

... for the Character Breakfast. One of your mornings on board is a character breakfast where all the characters stop by your table for hi-jinx and pictures (Pluto gave me a wet willie while I was trying to butter my toast...) We got a few pictures, but Chip is one of my favorites!

You always sit at the same numbered table (even though you rotate dining rooms) and you get the same servers and you sit with the same people. We were paired up with a five membered family from California that were a delight. Here is William with the three kids.

Lots of activities to participate in. Here is a beer tasting. It wasn't a wonderful selection of beers on board, but certainly drinkable.

Yes, it was a little cold at times, but it was truly beautiful and worth eating outside to see it (or were all the tables taken inside.?)

Here is Jorge from Portugal who was our lead server. He, and the others, were an absolute joy. They catered to the kids and kept us all entertained as well as fed. Here we are in the Animators Palate dining room. The whole room is black and white to begin with and then the whole room slowly gains color (even the server's vests go from black and white to colored).

Before..

After...

Video is of the train we took, getting on the ship and the Welcome Aboard party:

Eugene: Start of Vacation

OK, OK, it's been pretty darn quiet on the blog front here for the last couple of months. It's not to say that we haven't been doing anything. We've actually been quite busy on vacation and have had limited internet connectivity and very little time to sit and blog. So, as William and I hang out at home and recover from the vacation, we'll try to share our vacation adventures with you over the next week or so. First off, visiting Eno Brad and Mummi Kay in Eugene, Oregon.

Brad scored some tickets to the Track Finals that were being played at Oregon State. William loves to run and we got to see some of the best runners out there. We also had choice seats in front of the pole vault and got to watch these guys do something that seems impossible to do.
Though, many of them did miss (if you look closely, this guy is just touching the bar...) Made me feel a little bit better knowing they weren't perfect.

A happy family at the start of a vacation... No, we didn't fall apart at the end of the vacation, but we were getting pretty road weary...

Eno Brad found this can of pancakes. Looked a little sketchy to us...

So we took precautions...

We borrowed some bikes and went for a nice family bike ride along the river. Eugene has some wonderful bike paths.

The cats usually go to their hiding places when William comes to visit. Sometimes the only evidence that they are in the house is the food being eaten. To determine where and when they were moving about the house, William set up several data collection dishes and kept regular track of how much food was being eaten from each location. Lots of data... still waiting on a correlation...

The video is the first pancake to come from the can: