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All things must come to an end, and this amazing trip did too. We disembarked in Seward early, following an easy and relaxed procedure, finding our luggage right away, and boarding the transfer service that would drive us to Anchorage for the next three hours. But on the way we made a few “last stops” where we saw black and brown bears, moose, lynxes, oxen, elks, rain deers, bisons, eagles, owls…
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Before breakfast, we woke up to the sound of the ship’s hull breaking ice plaques in the water. The captain warned us that we were sailing next to Hubbard Glacier, so we got dressed in a hurry and ran to the observation deck (level 12). The glaciers were spectacular. Amazing. Breathtaking. And any other similar adjectives you can think of.
Their intense blue is due to the way they are formed: layers upon layers of heavy snow compresses the bottom, squeezing any tiny bubble of air out, until only pure ice crystals remain, glacier crystals, which are intense and beautiful blue.
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As if we had not experienced enough adventure and beauty, Sitka was awaiting us with even more. Early in the morning, after an in-room breakfast, we boarded the St. Michael catamaran to go on a wild life quest between the narrow island passages and open bays of the Sitka Sound, with the dormant volcano Mount Edgecumbe providing an unsurpassable background to one of the world`s most beautiful coastal environments.
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Caviar on warm blinis and Montaudon champagne for breakfast, while docking in Skagway. That is the right way to start an amazing day. As soon as we finished our breakfast, we disembarked right in front of the “graffiti” that cruise lines have been painting on the mountain (with their logos, captain and vessel names) since 1928, and went to the heliport to board a Eurocopter that took us, through narrow canyons and spectacular valleys, flying over very high peaks and several glaciers, to the dog camp on the Denver Glacier.
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June 15 we woke up in Juneau, Alaska’s capital (the largest and best known city is Anchorage, but Juneau is the official capital).
After breakfast, we attended a very rare screening of a 7 minute animation film called “Destino”, a little known collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney started in 1949, but unfinished until 2007 when Roy Disney decided to hire a team of French animators to complete it.
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On Tuesday, June 11, and not believing that it had not rained on our trip yet, we asked the hotel for a couple of complimentary bicycles and were told that only one was available but the other one should be available soon. So in the meantime we took the aquabus from the foot of Davie Street in Yaletown to the Public Market on Granville Island, False Creek, where a former industrial site was long ago converted into an indoor public market.
