Alaska - Day 4, Juneau

Well, when we were planning out our excursions before the trip, we decided we wouldn't book anything for Juneau, because we would only be docked for half a day, and we might be pretty tired from the day before.  Turns out that was a brilliant idea.  The bad idea was not getting up at the crack of dawn and getting off the boat anyway to go exploring.  There were five cruise ships in port at the same time.  Ridiculous.  My dad, brother and I got off the ship, and we had to take a bus over to the main dock, and then were greeted by a carnival barker style line of tour salespeople.

This was a picture on our way back, when the hordes of people weren't in front of them.

Talk about crazy crowded.  All we wanted to do was get over to the glacier, and ended up on a crammed in, standing room only, cram them in some more bus, only to get to the glacier for a few short minutes before stressing out that maybe we wouldn't get a bus back to get on the ship on time.  The glacier wasn't exactly as expected - I thought I remembered from the literature that this was a glacier you could walk out on.  Nope, maybe they just meant you could walk out close to it, but my sister also had the impression we would be walking actually on the glacier.  Anyway, it was a gorgeous view, beautiful weather, but bummer about the crowds and being time strapped.

Reflections by the glacier

Glacier!

Close up

 And the rest of our crew actually did make it to the glacier also, for a whole, oh, ten minutes or so.  Enough time to take some pics.

Was Bubba taking this pic?

We didn't have time to see any of Juneau besides at the curb waiting for our bus back to the ship.

This is what we saw of Juneau

 
And then on the way back, someone was awfully tired... once we got back on the ship, it was naptime!


The rest of the afternoon we spent sailing through fjords to another glacier, awesome views!  While this was going on outside...





This was going on inside...

 Let's try that again, outside...

 And inside again...

Finally all decided outside was better.

Along with the glacier, waterfalls, we saw cute little spotted seals.  Watched one swim around trying to get on an iceberg.

Success!

Apparently lots of birds have parties on icebergs - I never knew!

My sister went to her room for a minute, and found the day's towel animal.

 

To be honest, she wasn't exactly sure what it was, but brought it back to my room anyway, and Bubba yelled:  Dinosaur!  As you can tell, we love the towel animals!

 

My animal that night, was an elephant!

And another beautiful sunset!  Later a cruise ship went by all lit up, my sister called it the party boat.