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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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We woke up in Ketchikan, Alaska’s fourth largest city with 14,000 inhabitants, which almost gets doubled by today’s visitors (via 4 cruise ships): 10,000 cruisers.
As is the case in many communities around Alaska, things are spread out between many little islands. So, for example, Ketchikan has an airport in which a 747 can land… but the luggage has to be picked up in another island, accessible by ferry, because the “airport island” is too little to have both the landing strip and the luggage collection area.
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We decided to sleep in to recuperate from a very active week, so we ordered the breakfast in the room. While not a friend of in-room service, everything (muesli, wheat meal, blueberry pancakes, cheese omelette, smoked salmon bagel, fresh pineapple) was perfect. The restaurant schedules are very “American”, with breakfast served until 10:00am, lunch until 1:30pm, and dinner only until 9:30pm!
We spent the whole day at sea, cruising North through the Inside Passage.
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Wednesday, June 12, woken up by a false fire alarm, we had breakfast in the room, worked on our laptops until check out time, and had the hotel car (a BMW series 7) take us to the Vancouver Cruise Terminal. After a quick US immigration check, we boarded the luxury Regent Cruises’ “Seven Seas Navigator”.
Champagne glass upon reception, and a very nice crew welcomed us to our comfortable room.
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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.
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On Monday we spent the whole day in Grouse Mountain.
Getting there is not difficult, but it could definitely be simpler. First we walked up Granville, where we passed a medical marihuana dispensary (“Victorian Pharmacy”), to Canada Place, where we bought the tickets at the tourist office assisted by a very nice old lady. From there we walked to Waterfront Station where we took the SeaBus to North Vancouver. Then the 236 bus at dock 8, that took us all the way up to Grouse Mountain, stopping at several cute residential streets, including Cortell street!
