Alaska Cruise to Benefit Home Hospice 2005

Today we finally arrived at a port. It was nice to be able to get off the ship. The ship is lovely, but it's nice to get out onto dry land from time to time as well. I was able to stop at the payphones and call home. Sounds like Philip is doing well holding everything together at home. He will drive the kids to Alabama tomorrow and they will be with Bama and Grandpop for the remainder of my absence.

I started out the day again with a run. this time, instead of running around in circles I was able to run on a road! In fact, I ran off the ship and ran the half mile into town from the ship, then I ran pretty much the whole downtown area a couple of times, then turned around and headed back to the ship. It was great to be able to be oriented to where everything was before starting the official touring.

Neither Christine nor myself planned an organized shore excursion today. After I ran, I went and ate breakfast and got dressed. We threw some laundry in the washing machine on the ship, then headed out to downtown Skagway. We found the local grocery store and picked up a couple of items we needed. At that point, we headed back to the ship to eat lunch and to switch the laundry. After lunch we folded and put away the laundry.

Now that we had all of the chores done, we were free to embark on exploring Skagway. We found it to be a charming place. Of course there were lots of shops, many of them the same ones you see on Caribbean cruises. I hate to see chains come in and take over local places, but it is just to be expected I guess. Thankfully there were still quite a few locally owned places to enjoy.

It fascinated me to learn about the Klondike Gold Rush. Of course, growing up in Alaska I had heard about it alot, but being there where it actually took place made me stop and think about what brave (crazy?) people they were. They left the lives they knew and took a huge risk in order to make a better life for themselves and their families. Some were successful, some died, many fell somewhere in between those two extremes.

I'm finding, as I update this site..that it is hard to fit in time to actually experience the ports and destinations, while at the same time having adequate time to modify the images, write about the trip and write the code...not to mention sleep and eat. I see that our page hits were down yesterday, hopefully these two new updates today will remedy that. I didn't find anywhere in Skagway where I could upload from the laptop. Since we were going to be in Juneau today, I didn't pay the $10.00+ to upload from the ship, I just waited until today.

Chris and I talked to some people who are in their second year of owning a jewelry/art type store on Broadway in Skagway. They used to live in Oregon where they created art and wholesaled it to people who sold it in Alaska. They decided to try their hand on the retail side of the business. In Oregon they homeschooled the children, but when they moved to Skagway they put their kids in the public school. The dad said (and I haven't verified this) that the budget for the school system is over two million dollars and the Skagway school system educates 100 children. The teacher/student ratio is 1 to 8. They just bought a house in Skagway and are excited about the future.