A DAY IN JUNEAU

Our excursion today was to visit a glacier. When you visit a glacier, it is always polite to do it as part of an organized gang known as an excursion. This way, an excursion company can charge you a fee which in turn helps the local economy. I guess this is a good thing because I have to imagine it costs a fortune to keep the whole place cold enough to keep the glacier from melting. The refrigeration bills have to be enormous.

The excursion company, in order to make you feel like you are getting something more than a bus ride to a location, has to add extra stuff. They will talk to you all through the bus ride telling you interesting facts like how old the glacier is and if it is growing, like hair, or receding, also like hair. By the way, glaciers are very old. Some of them were even older than many of the folks on our tour. The excursion company will also take you the long way to visit the glacier. In our case, instead of driving us to the visitor's center, they had us walk down a long pathway through the woods first. This way they can point out the trees and ferns and rocks, none of which I would have seen without their narrative. Add in the fact that we got to do this in the rain and you can just imagine our excitement. I did get a nice shot or two of mushrooms in addition to my pictures of the glacier.

Our photographer/guide, Brandon, spends the long winters writing his material for his narration. He peppered his talks with witty remarks. When nobody laughed he would wait for a bit and then announce that his last remark was a joke. I suggested a laugh sign to let us know when it would be appropriate to let out a good chortle. Unbeknownst to Brandon the bus driver used her spare hand and eye and created a sign on her clipboard with the word LAUGH! Having heard Brandon's presentation before, she was able to hold up the clipboard at the appropriate time, behind Brandon's back, and we all responded accordingly. At the conclusion of the ride Brandon remarked that we were his best audience ever. The driver just smiled.

After the visit to the glacier, his name was Mendenhall by the way, we proceeded to the second portion of our trip for our whale watching. This would more appropriately be named "tail-watching" as you almost never see anything but the tail. The photography aspect has a degree of difficulty that I would rate a 10, on a scale of one to five. It is cold, it is raining, it is windy, the boat is bouncing and the cabin is crowded with photographers. Blast a little salt spray through the open window to help clear your lens which is fogged from the cold and you have some idea why there were only 14 of us from our ship's passenger list of around 1,500.

This is either a whale diving or a macro shot of a guppy

We spent 1/4 of our time shooting pictures of whale tails and the rest of the time drying off our cameras and cleaning our lenses. We had all level of expertise in our photographers group ranging from iPads and cellphones to the big lens crowd with expensive DSLR's. The best photographs were taken by the cellphone and iPad crowd. The long lens guys were generally bobbing with the waves and shooting very nice high resolution close ups of water or sky. I got the shot above with clever planning, a steadfast will, nerves of steel and the luck of the Irish. You may ignore the first three as they had nothing to do with any of the good shots I may have made.

We made it back to the docks in plenty of time for departure. We walked the one block to the Red Dog Saloon which, according to many travel guides, is a mandatory stop in Juneau. It looked like a rough place, by cruise ship travel standards. They had sawdust on the floor. When I asked our serving wench she told us it wasn't sawdust but just last night's furniture.

That's it for Juneau, on to Glacier Bay.