Skagway

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Today we awoke to the view of a side of a mountain with graffiti. Welcome to Skagway! Although to Skagway’s defense it was scenic graffiti, very artistic and some of it was around 50 years old. We hadn’t booked a tour today in an effort to save money (ha!) but Mark was feeling like just seeing the town wouldn’t be enough for him. So once we got off of the ship we went to the tour office and booked “Dolly’s Wildlife Adventure” which was supposed to be a little bit of local color combined with nature touring. Our tour wasn’t for a couple of hours so we went to the tourist office and grabbed a walking tour map. We saw an original cabin, a building where the facade was antlers and driftwood, and a bunch of other cruise ship passengers (with four ships in port, the town was hopping). We had a great pizza for lunch at the Skagway Brewing Company where I also got a good beer. Then we went to meet our bus. Oh my gosh. I guess we misunderstood. The Wildlife was Dolly herself who is apparently some kind of local celebrity. The really funny thing was the look on Genevieve’s face. She does not suffer fools and she clearly had decided that this woman was a fool. So our wildlife tour consisted of barrelling along a windy mountain road listening to Dolly regale us of her life exploits, and then briefly unloading from the bus for maybe five minutes, saying “wow, no bears” and then loading back up and barreling along some more. We got to stop and play dress up and then on the way back she actually sang us a song. She asked us to recommend the tour to the cruise ship…uh, I think not. Maybe just to tell them whatever they do DON’T add this tour to your list of options. Mark and Charlotte elected to get dropped off back at the ship while Genevieve and I thought we’d try to salvage the rest of the day by walking around Skagway some more. We ran into Mamama and Grandpa which was fun, and we also saw this fine little harbor seal playing with a fish head near the pier. Another thing we saw that wasn’t so cute was two burly native Alaskans holding a third under water in a local pond. Some other picnickers intervened, although their mistreatment of the smaller guy continued. Disturbing. Once we were back on the ship we went swimming in lieu of our sit down dinner and then went to the buffet. After dinner we saw the illusionist. I don’t really like illusionists. Oh well.