Month: July 2022

Overcoming Connectivity Challenges in Skagway

We’re in Skagway, Alaska, today and took a tour into the Yukon. We booked our tour with Thomas Pickerel from Skagway Yukon Custom Van Tours, so there were only four of us instead of a busload of our close personal friends. Tom was a great guide – he’s lived in the area for 40 years or so, so he was a fount of information and knew quite a few of the people we met along the way.

We didn’t see Sergeant Preston; in fact, we didn’t see any Mounties at all. We did see interesting and beautiful sights, though.

Devil’s Club can be very painful to encounter; it’s also the basis of various healing salves.
On the way out of Skagway
The border is here at the summit. US Customs is 8 miles south and Canadian Customs is 8 miles north.
The weather got better the farther we went into Canada.
Our first stop in Canada was the Yukon Suspension Bridge; it’s actually in British Columbia.
This is Jacqueline, the owner of Yukon Rustic Jewelry, and the only resident in this part of British Columbia. She set up her shop at the BC/Yukon border.
We stopped in Carcross,YT, for lunch, shopping, ice cream, and good internet connectivity.
Our final stop in Canada was at Emerald Lake, just north of Carcross. Light reflecting from the limestone deposits on the lake bottom are the source of the green color.
Our final stop before returning to Skagway was this waterfall on the US side of the summit.

We returned to Skagway and asked Thomas to drop us in town so we could explore more before retiring to the ship.

Our guide claimed this is the most-photographed building in Skagway. I’m willing to believe him.
We walked back to the ship after doing a bit of shopping in town; I also looked for good Internet connectivity with no success.

We’re back on the ship now; their Internet connectivity is non-existent but our friend is getting LTE from the land and I’m leeching from his connection. I’m hoping the ship’s connection will improve when we sail away, but I don’t want to bet on it.

Tomorrow, we go to Icy Strait Point; connectivity is not supposed to be good there either, but hope springs eternal!

We bat .500 in Juneau

We planned to take two excursions today, whale watching and a helicopter to the Mendenhall Glacier.

The whale watching was more successful. We walked off the ship and onto a bus, with just enough time to take a photo of one of the interesting fishy sculptures on the pier.

The whale watching boat left from the harbor at Auke Bay, about half an hour from the pier. As we passed the Alaska State Capitol, the driver mentioned that it had been voted “50th Most Beautiful State Capitol” and I think the voters were quite generous.

The operator of the tour guarantees you’ll see a whale or they’ll refund you $100 in cash – it didn’t take long before we saw our first whale.

Over the course of the three-hour cruise, we saw about a dozen whales – some alone, some in groups of as many as four. Most of them were humpbacks, but one had a white fluke, so it might have been a different species.

Whales weren’t the only wildlife we saw on the cruise; we also saw a bald eagle and even some ducks.

We saw a few more whales on our way back to the dock.

And then it was back to the ship to discover that they’d cancelled all of the helicopter tours due to weather, so we spent the afternoon wandering around Juneau. There were a lot of jewelry shops there – we visited many and spent money in none. :-)