Paradise News’ Pete & Renee Roos share their summer trip to Alaska.
By Peter Roos | Photos by Renee Roos
Some long time readers may remember our visit to Alaska a decade ago. That time we flew to Barrow, then to Fairbanks, visited Denali by train and continued to Anchorage. Then we drove all over the state from Homer to Valdez and back on the Maritime Highway.
“We’d never been to Juneau, Skagway or Ketchikan,” Renee pointed out late in June as she perused an offer for a last minute inside passage cruise, round trip from Seattle. It would give us a chance to see those amazing glaciers first hand before they all melt away.
Early July is the only time our schedule permits such impulsive thoughts, and since this summer marked a landmark birthday for Renee and the 25th anniversary of Paradise NEWS, we decided we deserved it. Seemed like summer had already been here for several months by the middle of June.
Getting to Seattle proved challenging with the Boing MAX fleet grounded, but with flexible flight schedules, we were able to save enough airfare to budget a few days in our cruise’s home port.
We learned to use the light rail and the monorail at 1/2 price for seniors and visited the amazing Chihuly Museum & Gardens in the shadow of the Space Needle. We also visited Paul Allen’s popular and crowded MoPop the Museum of Pop Culture, as well as the spacious Pacific Science Center and rested while we took in an incredible Imax movie about the brown, black and polar bears that visit and inhabit the Olympic Peninsula.
We enjoyed a balcony cabin aboard the Bliss, Norwegian Cruise Lines sister ship to the Joy, floating hotels with 4,300 guests and 1800 crew aboard. While these ships appeared to be the newest and the biggest, there were at least four supersized cruise ships in each port we visited, Juneau, Skagway Ketchikan and Victoria, British Columbia.
Our ship had amazing amenities, including a go cart track and laser tag for children, a casino and theatre for the adults. The Alaskans were for the most part relishing the “hot” weather. While we were there Anchorage set a new record of 90F degrees, a full 5 degrees over the prior record.
In Juneau, Alaska’s capital we took a bus tour to a salmon hatchery where we learned a lot about salmon, then took a hike to Gold Nugget Falls for a closer view of the Mendenhall Glacier.
The next day we were in Skagway, base camp for gold prospectors headed for the Yukon Territories. They were having an incredible heat wave by Alaskan standards with highs in the eighties and nineties. A train was built to take prospectors to the gold fields and bring the gold back, but, by the time it was finished, the gold rush was over. The train has become a success more recently however, taking cruise passengers over the route the prospectors took. It was sold out the day we were there, so we rented the last Jeep, complete with an Ipad powered tour of Skagway and the road to Emerald Lake, with stories about the gold rush days. The Jeep came with a lunch, which we enjoyed at a campground picnic table overlooking a lake and the mountains behind, screened by a haze of smoke from fires burning near Fairbanks, Alaska. We got a great shot of the train heading back to Skagway, and a photo of the sand dunes at the Carcross Desert.
The next day, floating in Glacier Bay we felt about as far away from Florida as one can get in a week.
The last day in Alaska we had just 5 hours in Ketchikan, famous for salmon. We’d booked a local fishing charter, and since we were a couple weeks early for salmon, we fished for Halibut and cod. It was a couple of fun hours on the water and we have fish in our freezer to show for it.
In Juneau we visited a salmon hatchery. There we learned there are five types of Alaskan Salmon. Coincidentally there are 5 fingers, so a handy memory tool evolved: Thumb – Chum; Index – Sockeye; Middle – King; Ring – Silver; and Pinkie – Pink. Fourteen hatcheries like this one each release millions of young salmon, increasing and ensuring the bountiful harvest for generations to come. From there the bus took us to the local glacier Visitor’s center.
We made a quick stop in Victoria BC, a compulsory foreign port that legitimizes the casino gambling aboard, and a visit to Bouchart Gardens for the fireworks display we’d missed ten days before.
When he heard we were going, my cousin David sent me photos he took camping there in 2017, and photos his friend Andy took on an “Un-Cruise” to Alaska in June 2019.
We are going to try to post all of them on our website www.paradisenewswfl.com under Alaska photos. It might take a little while to get his permission, as cousin David is in Africa for a month.