Gustavus

On our last day at Glacier Bay we rented bikes at the lodge and pedaled in the drizzle back towards town. A mile or so outside the park entrance we dumped our bikes in the woods and walked an unmarked trail a quarter mile back into the woods to find the remains of a small transport plane that crashed in 1957. Sort of eery - I guess it would be even weirder to encounter this on a walk without knowing ahead of time it was there.

Glacier Bay

We spent one of our days taking the Glacer Bay tour from Bartlett Cove - the boat wasn't very crowded, which made it easy to move around between decks and seats, depending on inclination and view.

Glaciers and icebergs, otters and sea lions, puffins and kittiwakes, bears and passing cruise ships.

Bartlett Cove

We settled into the Glacier Bay Lodge for three days. The weather was gray, though there always seemed to be some distant peaks poking through the clouds to tease us. D was appalled to find there was no TV - not in the room, not even in the common area - but he checked his fantasy teams from the computer in the lodge when he could and was easily calmed with beef and chocolate.

D&I kayaked for a couple of hours one day and we all took the boat tour on another. But mainly we relaxed. I read John Muir's accounts of Glacier Bay. His lodgings weren't quite so nice, but he camped where he could hear the glaciers calving and it seemed like he was usually up in the middle of the night tromping around the mountainns above the ice anyways.

Gustavus Airport

We flew in a Cherokee Six from Juneau to Gustavus, where we waited to get picked by the shuttle from the lodge. I think we pretty much had the airport to ourselves for 25 minutes. Definitely not DFW or ORD. We returned a few days later to catch our flight (a 737 this time) to Anchorage - a long delay in the drizzle waiting for our plane to show up from Juneau.

Taxidermy

Juneau, like Ketchikan, is strung out along the steep edges of the valley, and like Ketchikan, it seems to be dominated in the summer by the cruise boat crowds. The gift shops peter out as you move away from the cruise terminal.

Most of the wildlife we saw on this trip was a long ways away and tended to avoid us, but in Juneau, the critters are trained to pose for the tourists.

Juneau

The rest of the family wasn't very cheerful about having to get off the ferry in Juneau (Auke Bay) at 3:45AM. We shared a cab into town and M&D tried to sleep in big chairs in the hotel lobby while I walked around town. As always happens when traveling on too little sleep, I have no recollection of how we spent most of the day, but the photos suggest it was spent wandering past stuffed animals in front of gift shops and taking the bus up to Mendenhall Glacier, where Devon found a bench in the Visitor's Center to sleep on. I think we had lunch at the Silverbow Bakery and dinner at Twisted Fish.

There were four cruise boats in town at dinner - and a different four by the next morning.

Southeast Alaska

From Ketchikan, the ferry wound its way north to Wrangell. We had dinner as the boat threaded Wrangell Narrows - too small to handle the big cruise ships - and we arrived in Petersburg to rainbows and great late-day light.

Ketchikan

Sunday morning, after sailing from Bellingham on Friday evening. This was our introduction to Alaska and cruise ship economies. I expected the t-shirt stores and the knock-off native crafts, but I hadn’t forseen all the diamond and jewelry stores. Apparently all owned by the cruise companies and all clones of similar shops in ports of call in the Caribbean and on the west coast of Mexico. Stupid me – I thought cruises were an opportunity to travel without having to deal with local people and local food, but really they are just ways to shop.

We had three hours, so we took a cab downtown with Sarah and Amanda (who we had run into on the ferry), had breakfast at the Pioneer Café, and wandered down Creek Street and then past the cruise ships.

Arkansas was my 48th state, in 1978, just before I turned 20. This spring I got to Hawaii (49) and now I’ve finally gotten to Alaska (50) - just before turning 50. Time to start all over again.

CN Tower

I checked out of my Scarborough hotel at 8:25, just in time to join the rush hour traffic down the Don Valley Parkway, but I was still able to find a parking place near the tower by 9AM. I was one of the first ones up and for a little while I had the Sky Pod all to myself - 147 stories above the city. Clear blue skies would have been better, but the views were still spectacular. This tower dwarfs Toronto - and puts the Space Needle in perspective.

Then it was time to race to the airport so I could stand in line for customs, then head back to Seattle.

Toronto

Toronto is the largest city in Canada and seems most like Chicago geographically - a large city perched on the edge of a Great Lake. I left myself little more than a day in the city and spent most of that wandering the shoreline from Scarborough to the west side of Humber Bay. I had a nice lunch at Quigley's in the Eastern Beaches district and spent several hours walking along the downtown waterfront.

Tobermory

This little town is the end of the road at the very tip of the Bruce Peninsula. A car ferry continues across the mouth of Georgian Bay to Manitoulin Island but this was as far I was going to go on my little weekend jaunt from Seattle. The Grandview was pretty basic lodging, but it had a great dining room, where I watched the sun set Saturday night while eating local whitefish.

Tobermory is the end of the Bruce Trail, which extends almost 500 miles along the Niagara Escarpment to Niagara Falls. I stuck to a couple of short sections along the spectacular cliffs and beaches east of Tobermory (Storm Haven, Singing Sands, Halfway Log Dump, Flowerpot Island, and Cabot Head - all at Gravel Beach).

Ontario

The prospect of a long Memorial Day weekend. M had papers to grade. D had school projects to work on. I decided to check out some new beaches. So I flew to Toronto and rented a car. (It wasn't quite this impulsive. I made the decision last December 31st. I had finally accumulated enough miles for a free trip - I'd never done that before - and United was threatening to yank them.

I had originally thought of checking out Long Point and Point Pelee on the northern shore of Lake Erie, but gave them up for Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. I also left a little time for Toronto, since I'd always wanted to see the Scarborough Bluffs and the city's urban waterfront and shoreline parks.

What a neat weekend! As usual, lots more pictures at Gravel Beach.