Waking up today was difficult for me.  I'm exhausted!  We go to bed around 10 or 11 local time each night, but then wake up at 4:30am and get ready for a busy day.  I'm not complaining, just stating facts.  And since I'm so tired, this could be my shortest journal yet.

Our morning started out as always - with breakfast.  It was quick and not terribly exciting.  Then we were off for a whale watch and salmon bake.

The first 2 hours of our whale watch, though incredibly beautiful, weren't terribly exciting.  We ran across some really great sea lions (see photos).  There was a huge one (they guessed 1000-1200 lbs) that kept trying to get his huge body up onto the buoy.  When he did, a few of the smaller ones fell off (they were all juveniles, so varied greatly in size).  Then he fell off, too.  He finally got back on.  You can see in the pictures how much it tilted with him on, him in the water yelling at the others, and him trying to pull the smaller ones off so he could get on.  He was a lot of fun.  Quite the bully, but entertaining.

When we finally found the whales, OH MY GOSH.  We found a mother and calf.  The calf, shown in most of the pictures, was playing in the water.  It was a young humpback that continually flopped his tail against the water, rolled around showing us his pectoral fins, and threw his body against the water.  I have the whole thing on video, but we're including some of the photos as well.  He displayed this very rare behavior for more than 20 minutes.  It was truly unbelievable.  Just before leaving we found a small group of sea lions playing in the ocean.  Those photos are also up.

From whale watching we went to our salmon bake.  It was in yet another magnificent setting.  We were greeted by a young girl handing out appetizers (salmon dip on crackers), then McKinley, an Alaskan Malamute.  He was so cute!  It made us miss our Misty more, but he was sweet.  But the food was calling.  We could smell the salmon.

Lunch was yummy.  The salmon was an unusually bright red color, with a sweet honey/brown sugar sauce that went over the top.  Alan was in heaven with the moist corn bread (seems like an oxymoron, but it was the truth).  We enjoyed a leisurely lunch, followed by a short walk to a breathtaking view of a waterfall, before catching a bus that would take us into town for some quick shopping.

Shopping in Juneau was great.  No large purchases today.  Unfortunately, we had under an hour and there was SO much to see.  I could easily have spent a couple more days here.  There were some great historical places (Red Dog Saloon) and much fun to be had.  The views of the city are just amazing.  Our tour guides were very informative and had some great stories to tell.  Mel Gibson has a very large home (9000 sq ft) on a mountainside up here.  It's isolated so he's not bothered.  He spends about 1 1/2 months up here each year, right around this time.  I can't say as I blame him.  The views truly left me speechless.  

Back on the ship, we took a little time to ourselves to look at pictures and video before I headed down to a short knitting class.  It was more just a chance to visit with my friends.  Then it was off to the Chocoholic's Buffet!!  You heard it right - a rather large selection of all sorts of chocolate desserts.  And that was BEFORE dinner!!  While indulging in our pieces of heaven, we headed to the upper deck for an amazing tour of Sawyer Glacier.  Lots of those pictures are shown.  It's hard to believe it's a huge chunk of ice.  Personally, I didn't think it looked like that at all.  It kinda reminded me of an enormous area of freezer burn.  Ok, maybe dry ice, but more like freezer burn.  What can I say?

There are many, many large and medium-sized pieces of floating ice.  We call them little icebergs.  I don't know what the official name is, but they're cool.  If you look at the pictures closely, you can see some of them look like they're glowing blue.  They really look that way.  It 's the prettiest thing.  It has to do with the color of the ocean, the light, and the way they're sitting.  It gets pretty technical, so I'll just leave it at that.  I'm too worn out to try to explain further right now.  This vacation stuff is exhausting!

Some of our group got to see the glacier calve, but we weren't among them.  I'm a little disappointed about that, but you can't win them all.  Frankly, I thought it was cool just to get as close as we did.  There were hundreds of small seals all over the little chunks of floating ice.  I'm not sure why they weren't freezing, but they weren't.  The cool thing is that during all of this, it's about 80 degrees and incredibly sunny outside.  In fact, I haven't seen a cloud all day.  Not a single one.

Time for dinner.  We're all exhausted, so we just headed into the buffet.  We didn't need to change clothes for it and could eat quickly and get to bed early.  Alan and I stopped afterward to check on our excursion for tomorrow, then worked on the pictures and deleting some.  

Tomorrow is our most exciting trip.  We're taking a helicopter, landing on a glacier, then dogsledding.  It'll be a great photo opportunity, I'm sure.  We're looking forward to it.

Until then, goodnight.  I'll be having sweet dreams, wishing I could fall asleep staring at this scenery every night and wake up to it every morning.  I hope Skagway is half as beautiful as Juneau was.  That's a place I'll be going back to someday.  Until then, I'll be dreaming of it.

 Pictures from today - Note from Alan: I'm taking so many pictures that we just can not upload them all. I took 377 today, the rest will be uploaded when we get home. (The images loaded from home will be larger too)

Go to Day 6 - 06/23/03