Re: Rep Retirement Lodge 77: Arcade Games of the Reagan 80s
Where is she? You know who.
Sadly, Miss Kelly was unable to join me on the voyage. I kept an eye out for her in every port of call, but no sightings
IMHO Due to the fact that while on an Alaskan cruise you are rarely in vast open water therefore motion sickness tends to be rare.
Besides the train ride, what other excursions did you do?
Wow, a casulty on the tracks. That is to bad.
We went to the Yukon while we were in Skagway. Very cool bus trip with a great driver who was a history minor and knew all there was to know about the Klondike gold rush. We also stopped at
The Yukon Suspension Bridge. In Juneau we did "The best of Juneau", which was a four hour whale watching trip, grilled salmon dinner on an island and a trip to the Mendenhall Glacier. Saw lots of whales. In Ketchikan we split up. I went salmon fishing on a charter and she went on a nature walk/crab feast. The Captain of the salmon boat was really cool. He'd done the Bering Sea crab fishing for two years (Lots of insight on Deadliest Catch) and is usually a tug Captain all over Alaska. He was doing the day trips for a buddy who owned a couple of boats between tug runs. There were three other guys on the boat with me. Two from Michigan and one from Chicago. Everyone was an experienced fisherman. Once the captain saw that we weren't going to let him do everything, he just drove the boat and netted our fish. We re-rigged our own lines and down riggers, cut the bait and hosed down the bloody deck after landing fish. Captain was thrilled since he usually takes guys who have no clue and expect him to do everything. We said we came to fish, not just reel in when there was a strike. We swore, smoked cigars and peed over the side of the boat, just like fishing is anywhere.
We caught around 30 fish, mostly Silvers (Coho) and a few Pinks. One King salmon, but we didn't have tags since the run was mostly over. The largest was a 15 lb. silver caught by the guy from Tawas (sp.?) MI.
The first part of the trip (Fairbanks to Whittier, before we got on the ship) was cool, but a bit of a hassle since we were constantly going from here to there on trains and coaches, living out of our suitcases. Denali Nat'l. Park, Denali State Park and points between were awesome. Lots of wildlife sightings and scenery. I do have to admit that the whole midnight sun thing, while cool at first, is tough to adjust to if you don't have good light inhibiting curtains on your room. Even after "sunset", you could still see as well as the rest of the day. It never got truly dark at all until we were in SE Alaska.
