Our excursion in Skagway involved a trip on the White Pass railroad, a dog sled mushing demonstration and a bit of gold panning.
Since the excursion was expected to be gone from 12:00pm - 5:00pm we were provided with an adorable snack package of Milano cookies, crackers and cheese for later in the afternoon.
Crystal had arranged for our tour group to have 2 train cars, but the train operators had trouble with one of the train cars that was designated for a different group. The operators made the entire Crystal group pile into one train car. This meant that Ross and I were unfortunately unable to sit next to a window on the cliff side so we mostly saw a lot of trees.
We actually entered Canada while riding on the train and had to pass customs before we got off. The scenery at the top of the pass was lovely.
We took a bus to the gold panning site and Kenneth from "30 Rock" was our driver. He was a tall, skinny, blond from Utah, very enthusiastically doing an internship over his summer break from BYU. Ross informed me that it wasn't actually Kenneth since he claimed his name was Steve, but I am not so sure. I'm very sorry I didn't snap a picture.
"Steve" stopped so we could get out and take a picture when we entered Canada again. It was very very foggy.
On the bus we had a cliff side window seat so we were able to get a better view of the mountains. If you look closely in the middle of the picture below, you can see the train we rode on our way up the White Pass.
At the gold panning site, we were shown a brief film about the Ididorode and then were able talk to a man who had raced in the ididorod several times. This is a picture of the racer, Matt Hayashida, with his sled.
We also saw a demonstration of dog sled pulling. The dogs loved pulling the sled and started jumping, yelping and barking like crazy as soon as they were hooked up to it.
I am holding a very young "Alaskan Husky" puppy in the picture below. An "Alaskan Husky" is just any dog that pulls well, not necessarily a Siberian Husky like you might immediately picture as a sled dog. They were all mutts.
I have always been fascinated with gold panning. My great uncle went to the Klondike around 1898 and even returned home with some money from his adventures. So I was extremely disappointed that this part of our tour was rushed and we weren't able to pan for gold nearly as long as I would have liked.
We were in such a hurry, I forgot to take a picture of the actual set up, which was very pleasant since it involved troughs of heated water. I did get a picture of the little tag they printed for me when they weighed the gold I had found.
We were late getting back to the ship. Kenneth, I mean Steve, was so excited about winning a date with a girl at a local charity auction that was to be held tonight that he drive us back to the wrong ship!
We really had to hustle to make it to our Cruise Critic (an online message board) meet and mingle party.
There were a ton of people and we had a good time. It was especially nice to be able to put some faces with some of the user names from the Cruise Critic message boards.
Here I am next to the infamous Keith, who I found charming and sincere. He is a frequent poster on the Crystal Cruise Critic forum and writes his own travel blogs.
While at the party, a few of our fellow Cruise Critic posters invited us to dine with them this evening.
Before dinner we played San Juan. Ross won again. We also played The Very Clever Pipe Game and tied.
We had such a lovely time at dinner with our new friends that I totally forgot about taking pictures of the food.
I had a fantastic Saltinbocca and Ross had an okay pan-fried Dover Sole that the head waiter expertly deboned table side.
We talked with our companions for quite a while and then retired for the evening.
Tomorrow we will be cruising Glacier Bay.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone.
No comments:
Post a Comment