The rest of our cruise will be spent at sea. We cruised into Glacier Bay this morning. We took on the two park rangers who must have ticked off someone in the National Park's Service to get such outstanding duty. They are stationed somewhere out in the fog and their two duties consist of guiding cruise ships through the waters of Glacier Bay and making sure nobody steals a glacier. I'm sure the two Park Rangers did a better job guiding the ship than an experienced ship captain with only radar and GPS at his disposal.
One of the rangers narrated the site before us. That is glacier ice. It is very cold. It is very old. Fascinating stuff I'm sure. They had all year to come up with this stuff and that was the best that they could do? Perhaps they were busy with glacier poachers.
One of the glaciers we saw was called John's Hopkins. Not many people get to see this glacier as it is closed all year until September 1st and then the season closes a couple of weeks later. This was what I assume to be a "cow-glacier" as it had a calf right before our eyes. I didn't see the calf because I was distracted by the big chunk of ice that broke away from the bigger chunk and then crashed into the sea.
As we left the calm waters of Glacier Bay I noticed the ship's personnel distributing barf bags to different areas of the ship. A couple of hours later we found out why. We had 10' swells hitting us just a few points off of our port beam. That is nautical talk for you are about to be bounced left and right, but not necessarily in that order. We had a full day and part of another before the rocking stopped. We got off the boat and it still seemed like we were bouncing around.
We were herded on a train that was to take us to Anchorage from our Seward port. It was aboard this train that our sea legs were put to use once again. We rode the train for 5 hours and enjoyed the scenery. From the train station we were once again herded onto a bus which drove us the short distance to the Holland America Hospitality Center. It is here you must wait from noon to 3 p.m. Then, promptly at 3 p.m., a bus drove us the two blocks from the Hospitality Center to the Hilton. It was organization and coordination like this that made the invasion of Normandy so successful. The Normandy invasion was, of course, an operation run on a much smaller scale than the ship-train-bus-wait-bus-hotel process we had just encountered.
We had dinner at the Snow Goose Bar near the hotel. I had a much needed dark beer. The beer was a local micro-brew whose name escapes me. Since it is only served in Anchorage I doubt I will be seeing it again, except a few hours after dinner. We had to set our alarm for 4 a.m. to shower, down a cup of coffee and have our bags packed for a 6 a.m. pick up. We were hustled aboard a bus for the 6 block trip to the train station. There we boarded a luxury coach owned by Holland America. This coach had comfortable seating at a higher elevation than our first train leg. We had an 8 hour train ride to Denali. We were able to walk out to the platform between coach cars to breathe the fresh air that is Alaska. This air was also appropriately mixed with the cigarette smoke of the few individuals in our age bracket still left alive. Most were considerate. One poor guy spent at least 7 hours of the 8 hour ride chain smoking. He took breaks for the nearby bathroom and to get a fresh puff inhaler for whatever health issue he seemed to have.
We managed to get a few pictures from the platform that may be keepers. You will have to wait until I have access to a real computer to see these postings as my iPad is just not up to the task. Google also changed their protocol for picture placement as all images need to be posted to a linked Picasa website. I was surprised that an internet connection was not the issue I had anticipated. My biggest problem is that Holland America only had me scheduled for 4 hours of sleep each night.
At Denali we boarded busses for our hotel situated just a couple of miles from the park's entrance. We checked into room 316 in the two story cabin in section N located at the bottom of a hill from the main restaurant and lobby. They have conveniently placed a road between the cabins and the main hotel which is appropriately named "heart attack hill". Tourists who succumb to the rigors of the hill are left where they drop and are cleaned up by the local grizzlies. I walked the hill once, downhill and Sue braved it once in both directions. We both now ride the shuttle bus.
We had an early 7:15 a.m. departure from the hotel lobby the next day. I really feel like I am back in the Navy with all of the "O-Dark-Thirty" wake up times. We got to the lobby in plenty of time for a quick Starbucks and bite to eat. So did the other 500 guests with early departures. The line was huge. We just barely made it through the line, sat down at a table, wolfed down a packaged breakfast and heard our boarding call.
We were told that these busses were almost brand new as ours only had 13,000 miles on the odometer. The seats were comfortable. My left cheek had to tell my right cheek that the seat was comfortable as the right one was hanging in the aisle. Someone needs to tell all public transportation seat manufacturers that the average American is slightly wider than 12 inches. The windows can be lowered for photography but as a practical solution this was next to impossible. Our window took a Herculean effort to move in either direction. Our driver said it was because the bus was so new. I said, "huh"?
The windows themselves had been dirty before someone cleaned them before our trip. This left the windows with a few clear spots between the streaks of white. At the first stop I managed to grab a few towels and cleaned our window and the window next to the seat in front of us that we regularly used. I would have left the window open but the elderly crowd wanted the bus temperature to be somewhere north of 85 degrees and the outside temps were hovering around 50.
The day was beautiful and the fall colors had the landscape streaked with reds and yellows accenting the evergreens and multi colored rock formations. Our first animal sighting was a moose. I managed to get a rather nice shot of his but before he disappeared over the rise. I am thinking of having this picture framed and sent to the bus seat designer.
We next spotted a grizzly bear. He was on the right side of the bus so I managed to get a few shots after smashing Jerry just a bit. Jerry was my aisle mate. His left cheek was nearest my right cheek on the aisle. I offered Jerry my website business card and promised that he would be able to download all of the pictures I took. I had requests for more business cards and now had access to much of the right side of the bus. Picture taking was still an acrobatic feat. For a 4'-10" photographer with 12" hips the bus was ideal. For all others it was a challenge.
The animal highlight of the trip was a couple of grizzly cubs about two years old. The bus driver called their coloring blonde. It certainly was a very light brown. They looked really cuddly right up to the point where one of them began digging the earth and plucked out a ground squirrel and dispatched it right before our eyes. He then ran off away from his cub mate and finished off his squirrel lunch.
Speaking of lunch, our Denali Wilderness Excursion bus provided us with box lunches. When I saw its contents a little ground squirrel was looking mighty good. They had Alaskan chips, reindeer sausage, cheese and an Andes mint. The reindeer sausage has pork, reindeer, beef heart, water and salt along with those other ingredients that let you safely eat it anytime before January 12, 2086. The rest of the date was blurred but looked like 10:32 in the morning, probably Alaska time. I forgot that the lunch also had carrots but I don't consider that food.
We spent about 8 hours on the bus for the round trip in and out of the park. We got dropped off at our hotel and took a walk across the street to try to book an excursion for the next day. We signed up for a flightseeing trip where a plane flies all through Denali National Park culminating in a circuit at 12,000' around the peak of Mt. McKinley. It is a 200 mile journey lasting about 65 minutes. We bought the excursion tickets and headed for the hotel bar to celebrate our decision.
We had a couple of drinks at the bar and had a nice conversation with our bartender who was getting married at the end of the season in a couple of weeks. That night we had tickets for the Cabin Night Dinner. This is an all you can eat dinner and show. The pace was hectic and, while the food was very good, you weren't given much time to enjoy the meal. The ribs and salmon were accompanied by corn, baked beans, salad and dessert. It was served "family style" which is a term used by restaurants to indicate that they don't have enough servers so you are "allowed" to serve yourself. They had one server for several long tables with uncomfortable bench seats. The bench seats would accommodate buts larger than 12", but not for very long. The wood they used was a type of pine that must have been chosen for its hardness which approached the density of tungsten. The wait staff were also the entertainers. The voices were good even if the show was a bit hokey. It had an Alaskan theme which would have been totally out of place except for the fact that we were, in fact, in Alaska.
This morning we awoke to heavy clouds and light rain. We received a call from the Denali Air folks and were informed that they wouldn't recommend flying that morning but they would reschedule for 3 p.m. We agreed and did laundry. At 2 p.m. we called and agreed that the weather didn't look good. The forecast is for sunshine tomorrow so we scheduled a 9 a.m. pickup for a 10 a.m. flight. This should get us back in plenty of time for our train trip to Fairbanks.
That's it for this leg of the trip. More later.
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