Alaska and out!
- CARAVAN HALEN
- Oct 13, 2019
- 9 min read
This is the end, my bloggy friend, the end. One state to go, via one crazy cruise, and then homeward bound…
We headed back to Seattle for the last part of our US adventure, and the final state in our quest for all 50: Alaska, on board a cruise ship. We left our caravan in the ‘cruise parking’ part of an RV park, and boarded an outlandishly enormous boat in Seattle. It is difficult to explain just how bizarre the cruise ship experience is. As a starter for ten, I might just offer a list of some the facilities on our boat: a casino, about 15 restaurants and bars (including an authentically dark and dingy craft beer pub, and an inauthentically bright and shiny replica of the Cavern Club, complete with Beatles cover band), a go-kart track, a mini-golf course, a gym and running track, two giant waterslides, a huge theatre, and most ridiculously, a laser tag course, because the logical thing to do after an afternoon gazing at glaciers and whales in Alaska’s wondrous serenity is to wander around a plastic maze pretending to shoot people.
Getting to Alaska is a bit of a challenge: it’s too far to sensibly drive to, so the choice was between flying or sailing. We looked into flying into Anchorage and finding our way to Denali National Park, but the logistics were a little niggly, plus it’s getting a little cold in early October that much further north. So we decided to head to Glacier Bay National Park, which left two options: a cruise up the Inside Passage, or catching the ferry up the same route with our truck (and maybe caravan). The latter appealed: it felt like the proper, adventurous way to do it, and most of my adult life, I had never really understood why anyone would want to go on a cruise. After a fair bit of research, we realized the costs were not all that different, and the ferry schedule made it tricky to fit in everything we wanted. So, despite not owning a bumbag, we opted for the cruise.
I now do understood why people would want to go on a cruise. There is something to be said for spending a week eating and drinking in a large floating hotel, with the occasional bit of sightseeing squeezed in between second breakfast and morning tea. After living in a caravan for six months, our relatively tiny room on the ship felt enormous, and a break from driving and the routine of hitching and unhitching the trailer, hooking and unhooking up the power, water, gas, sewer etc was awfully nice. We didn’t get the full-on rancho relaxo version of the cruise experience, because kids, but it was awfully nice nonetheless.
After being as frugal as we could for most of the trip to stay on budget, the cruise was a bit of a splurge at the end. The tickets themselves are fairly pricey to start with, and boy could you blow some money on add-ons if you were so inclined. We did things as economically as we could: our room was at the cheaper end of the scale (although I’m glad we didn’t go for the cheapest of the cheap, an interior room with no window or balcony), we stuck to the restaurants that were included free in the package, and didn’t book any of the expensive ‘shore excursions’ in the various ports. We managed to get by with only a few extras: a few drinks and proper coffees here and there, and a bus transfer to see a glacier in Juneau. But if you weren’t watching your wallet, you could spend a fortune on the all-you-can-drink packages, the many pay-for restaurants, the casino, and the vast array of excursions which all seem to feature a hefty markup for the cruise company.
Our cruise was seven nights: Saturday afternoon to the following Saturday morning. After a couple of days at sea to get up to Alaska, there are three stops in port: the towns of Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan. All are very much cruise ship destinations, for better or worse: the cruise trade must be a blessing and a curse for the locals, with lots of money and in-season employment coming in, but you lose your high street to a whole lot of dorks in leisurewear roaming around infinite versions of the same store selling duty free jewellery and ponchos with orcas on them.
The weather was great on our days at sea, and the scenery is as wonderful as you expect. We were lucky enough to be on deck at the right time to see a pod of humpback whales playing alongside the ship, going through the perfect routine of spouting off, whale tails up, and even a truly gobsmacking flip. We weren’t as lucky with the weather when we got into the port stops, although like in North Cascades, the rain and mist felt fitting. It sure rains a lot up here: the locals call it liquid sunshine.
Juneau is the largest of the three port towns, with about 30,000 inhabitants, and is the state capital. There’s no road access to the town, only boat and plane, but it acts as the hub for the ‘panhandle’ that is the southeast part of the state. In our few hours ashore we headed for the town’s most famous feature, the Mendenhall Glacier. The crappy weather meant the views of the glacier weren’t the best, but it was still a worthwhile excursion: the visitor centre is a cracking example of ‘parkitecture’, outside of which Bo saw a bear ambling across one of the trails (our first bear sighting of the trip!).
Skagway, despite sounding like an unreleased Irvine Welsh novel, has a fascinating history: in the late 1890s gold was found in the Yukon, the Canadian interior territory to the east of the Alaskan panhandle. Despite being properly in the middle of nowhere, thousands of people went in search of their fortune, with most using Skagway as their base for the gruelling journey inland. Overnight a city sprang up, with merchants and outfitters selling all you needed to head for the goldfields, and many bars, dance halls, and brothels to take your money once you returned. Most of the buildings were temporary structures and are long gone, but a few survive, and the NPS have reconstructed a bar with the artefacts and clues found in a dig under the original site. There’s also a great museum with some amazing stories of the journey from Skagway to the goldfields, where you started with 50 miles through the snow to a mountain pass, descended to a lake where you built a boat from scratch, and then sailed several hundred miles up a dangerous river. I’ll stick with the cruise ship, thank you very much.
Ketchikan was my favourite of the three stops: it has some cool public art, and some even cooler totem poles. The most interesting part of town was Creek Street, a ramshackle lane built on and over a creek where salmon run, which was the town’s red light district back in the day (hence the slogan “the only place where the salmon and men come to spawn”). Fish using their incredible homing mechanisms to find the stream where they were born, then swimming upstream is one of nature’s coolest tricks; the bit they don’t tell you about in the Little Golden Book of Fishy Miracles is that a whole lot of fish don’t make it and get washed up on the side of the creek, so if you visit at low tide, there are fish corpses everywhere stinking to high heaven with seagulls pecking at their innards, and seals swimming in to pick off any stagglers. With its rickety buildings, shady history, and oh-my-goodness-it’s-whiffy fish tales, Creek Street is pretty choice.
The highlight of the trip was definitely the day in Glacier Bay National Park. The vast majority of visitors to the National Park are on cruises, and the park rangers sail up alongside and climb up a rope to come onboard and run their educational programmes. The Bay itself is a fascinating geographic case study: most major landscape changes take thousands or millions of years, but Glacier Bay has changed dramatically in the last 300. The area was the ancestral homeland of the Tlingit people, but they were forced to move south as the massive Grand Pacific Glacier rapidly advanced (in their oral history, it moved “as fast as a dog can run”, and the geological evidence is that it truly was moving in real time). Once the glacier hit the North Pacific it began to retreat backwards, carving out what is now Glacier Bay. There are seven tidewater glaciers in the Bay: tidewater glaciers have much short cycles of advance and retreat, although global heating means all of them are likely to do more retreating in future. The two that are most visible from the water are the Margerie and Johns Hopkins glaciers: both are truly spectacular, with fabulous blue-tinged ice, fringed by blocks of calved ice floating in the water. There’s great wildlife spotting here too: we saw harbour seals, sea otters, and bald eagles.
On our last day I gave the water slides a go. One of them was bloody scary: you stand on a platform that whips out from under you, and it’s a sheer drop and several disorienting loops before you remember to breathe again. Even scarier was standing on the scales at the start of the ride (you can’t be too light or you don’t make it round the loop). The first part of the trip featured more hiking than burgers and beers. The second half evidently didn’t, topped off by a week of solid eating and drinking on ship. Oh dear.
Cruise ships are just such a weird little world unto themselves. Our ship had 3,000 passengers, and 1,500 staff: chefs, waiters, and bartenders; stewards and cleaners; engineers and maintenance folk; childcare and entertainers. Over 100 countries were represented on our cruise, with the majority being Filipino and Indonesian. Most work a long 6 or 9 month season, often leaving family and kids behind: there weren’t many children on our cruise, and Mo and Kitty were very popular with the staff, especially those missing their own kids. There’s a strange mixture of emotions in all of this: cruise life is very enjoyable, but you do also feel an acute discomfort at being a reasonably well-off Westerner being waited on by someone whose job has taken them away from their young child all year.
After a week in the cruise bubble, we got back to Seattle, picked up our caravan, and drove north to the border. Thanks America, that was an awesome six months. 39 states, including 18 new ones, 26 National Parks and a bunch more National Monuments, Historic Sites, Seashores, and Lakeshores. Equal portions of great beer, and great museums, art galleries, and music history (OK, probably slightly more of the beer). A solid list of wildlife: a bear, bison, elk, deer, wild horses, prairie dogs, raccoons, turtles, alligators, seals, sea otters, a mink, a skunk, snakes, bald eagles, chipmunks, squirrels, and the mighty banana slug.
I really like Canadians. Crossing the border into the States in April was a bit of a painful experience: our caravan was officiously searched for any food that shouldn’t be taken across, and we got the third degree about our visa and what our plans were in the US. The trip back into Vancouver couldn’t have been more different: the whole thing took about 90 seconds, and was as friendly as can be.
Next time I plan a once-in-a-lifetime trip I’ll leave a bit more time at the start and finish. Vancouver is a terrific city, but we didn’t really get to see much of it at either end, with too much admin to do. This time round the focus was trying to pack up the caravan, and sell both it and the truck. We got there in the end, but it was all a bit frantic and stressful. We got a good deal for our caravan, and a crappy one for the truck, but after coming in under budget on a few things during the trip, we ended up about even on the budget front.
We did get to hang out with our buddies Glenn and Sarah a little bit more, which was awesome (and which Mo had been excited about for weeks in advance). We miss you guys already!
Bo did a miraculous job packing all our stuff up, and we only needed one extra suitcase. We had some fun and games at the airport with an overly officious check-in lady. A couple of our bags were overweight and a couple under: you’d think this would average out ok, but no, she required us to repack until each bag weighed exactly 23kg.
The flight was not terrible: Kitty slept for a good half of it, punctuated with a rather spectacular hour-long screaming fit, and Mo managed a decent amount of kip in amongst a lot of TV. Aggregate amount of sleep for Bo and I: around 19 minutes. I quite enjoyed watching some movies though, after six months of no TV (save for one Netflix movie, one ill-fated Champions League final, and some football and cricket highlights online). If you haven’t seen “Booksmart”, you should do so immediately.
And so we are back home, which feels strange but also nice.
BEERWATCH: Alaska has a handful of microbreweries, but there’s not a lot to write home about from the few things we sampled. Vancouver, on the other hand, has an excellent beer scene, but we’ll save that for the blog of a future epic road trip (dear work, just kidding. Probably). So this edition of Beerwatch is a clip show: the best of the best, my top 13 beers from the trip, in alphabetical order, because I can’t deal with the pressure of ranking them.
The Alchemist “Focal Banger” - NEIPA
The Alchemist “Heady Topper” - NEIPA
Allagash “Curieux” - barrel-aged tripel
Budweiser Clamato - flavoured lager
Cigar City “Guayabara” - pale ale
Founders “Breakfast Stout” - stout
Hill Farmstead “Edward” - NEIPA
Rogue “Kulture Clash” - imperial blonde ale w/kombucha
Stone “Arrogant Bastard” – American strong ale
Stone “Tangerine Express” - fruit IPA
Surly “Pentagram” - dark sour ale
Sweetwater “420” - XPA
Victory “Sour Monkey” - brett tripel
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