Breakfast in Juneau

After a day at sea, we pulled into Alaska's capitol city, Juneau, in the early morning hours. J. R. got up early for breakfast and took some pictures while walking along deck 4 before waking the family for the day's excursion, which was "Mendenhall Glacier and Whale Quest"

Mendenhall Valley

We boarded a bus near the port which took us through the city of Juneau and the Mendenhall Valley to the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor's Center. From there, it was short walk down to the observation point. If we had not seen Hubbard Glacier the previous day, Mendenhall would have been much more impressive. Still, it was nice to see the glacier close up and it was much warmer than the day before on the ship.

Nugget Falls

We checked out time and decided that if we hurried, we could do the 2-mile hike down to the Nugget Falls waterfall. The waterfall drops over 200m into Mendenhall Lake, a freshwater pool at the base of the glacier. Prior to the recession of the glacier, this waterfall would fall directly onto the glacier's surface, and before that would be buried inside the glacier. We were able to get very close to the waterfall before hustling our way back up the hill to the visitor's center. We didn't spend much time there as we had seen all the views but found it interesting that just fifty years ago, the glacier would have come right up to the visitor center windows.

Whale Watching

We had more whale watching on the agenda so we took the bus to Auke Bay and boarded another Allen Marine catamaran so Rebecca would get a chance to see some whales. We once again were extremely lucky, seeing numerous humpbacks, some seals resting on a pylon, some sea lions along the coast and even an otter frolicing in the water. This excursion would have been perfect had it not been for a group of obnoxious children (or rather their parents, really). We had seats on the enclosed upper deck and there was an empty row behind us. So the father of these kids, apparently tired of dealing with them, sent them over to play on the empty bench, which meant them screaming and yelling behind us while playing with the stuffed animals they had bought at the galley. So much for relaxing nature. So we went downstairs, as did everyone else. So I guess this family figured out how to get the entire enclosed upper deck to themselves.

Mount Roberts Tramway

We met our bus driver after the whale watching boat docked and he was kind enough to drop us off at the base of Mount Roberts, about a 20 minute walk from the ship. This allowed us to buy tickets for the Mount Roberts Tramway which was a gondola to the top of Mount Roberts. The gondola was fairly expensive but afforded some good views. We visited their resident bald eagle, who had been captured after being injured and cannot be returned to the wild due to her wing injury and then hiked up a mountain trail loop where we saw a mountain goat in the distance on a rock. We hiked back down and took the tram back to the city. We did a little bit of shopping in some souvenir stores near the tramway and then caught a free shuttle bus back to our ship.

Trivia and Tiana's

Michael Harrison, a ventriloquist was doing a show in the Walt Disney Theater, but we had seen him several times before and decided we would just wait and see his adult show. So we went back to the pub and did some sports nickname trivia. J. R. did really well with this, but somehow someone else managed a near-perfect score, which seemed unlikely given the obscurity of some of the nicknames (like "Golden Balls"). We hung around the pub for 80's Music Trivia and Janie's days as an 80's girl shone through as she flew through most of the "Name that Tune" snippets with ease, finishing tied for first place. J. R. sent her up for the tie-breaker, expecting one last question, but instead it was "rock-paper-scissors", a game she had apparently never played. She managed to tie two rounds before losing the coveted DCL rap caps.

It was time for dinner in Tiana's and our tablemates had returned, saying it was their favorite restaurant. They had tried Cabana's dinner and room service the previous nights to try to get the little ones onto a Pacific coast schedule by eating a little earlier. J. R. had the baked oysters and goulash soup. The soup tasted like they had dumped in the overcooked boar from the night previous. His beef tenderloin, however, was cooked a perfect medium rare and Janie's pork cordon bleu was perfect as well. Janie's dessert was a chocolate torte.

Caberet Show

Janie was tired so she headed back to the room while J. R. went to Azure for the Intuition game show and Susan Egan's cabaret show. Ms. Egan originated the role of Belle in Broadway's Beauty and the Beast and was the voice of Meg in Disney's animated film, Hercules. She sang a variety of show tunes from her Broadway shows as well as talked about her life on Broadway.

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