8/31/2013

Juneau, Alaska

So, today we are to kayak around the Mendenhall Glacier!  How cool is that!?!

Well, very cool, actually… as in, warm, moist air flowing over cool surfaces and forming an extremely thick blanket of fog…

No no… think thicker…

No no no… you can still SEE through the fog, can’t you?  Stop that.

So, the fog was SO thick this morning that no sight was to be had.  Or kayaking, for that matter. 

They canceled my excursion… (sob!)

Yea… Juneau turned out to be cold, wet (extremely wet), and kinda dull.  We tried to make up for the kayaking with a tram ride over the city… but you can see the problem with this, right?  Yea, this wasn’t the brightest idea as the fog essentially meant we trammed our way into a dense, wet, cold cloud for awhile where one could hear lots of "ooooh!  Look at THAT indiscernible blob of whiteness! ... No, no!  Look at THIS indiscernible blob of whiteness over here!  There's just TOO MUCH to see!!  OMG!!".... 

Ok, so maybe 'one' wouldn't have heard that if I hadn't been in the tram... have I mentioned 'hush, you' yet this entry?  Insert hushing now.  

At the ‘top’ of the tramway, we then shopped (of course… I got a magnet!... you are SO surprised… I know it!)… and then watched a movie covering the entire history of the Tlingit Native Americans from the very first Tlingit hunting his first Caribou all the way up to present day…

It lasted 18 minutes.

I’m assuming it was abridged.  Uh-huh.

Anyway, after that, we headed back into the dense, white, cold, endless cloud and emerged in Juneau. 

So what is Juneau?  Well, it’s the capital of Alaska… with a whopping population of 33,000.  To put this into prospective, my Dad mentioned that Murfreesboro, TN, had a population of 114,000. 

Think about that. 

Yea, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to do except shop.  Mendenhall Glacier was the big tourist draw here, but paying for the various means to get there seemed rather pointless when any view of the glacier would be shrouded in pretty epic mists.

Ah well.  Juneau was a bit of a let down, but there were a few beautiful sights right as the boat left dock.  The fog, of course, miraculously began to lift as we sailed out of town and you could see multiple waterfalls coming out of the cloud line and coursing down the mountains… quite amazing =).