Juneau

We only had about an hour to explore town before meeting up with our excursion group, but I had to pull out the big camera for some bird pictures:

There were so many eagles hanging around the docks!

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Mendenhall Glacier & Alaska’s Whales (aka Whales and Trails)

This was advertised as “small group” but there’s still about 20 of us.  The actual small group tour I wanted (which was like a dozen people) booked up fast and while we could have booked a tour outside the ship, this is our first cruise and trying to coordinate everything seemed a bit overwhelming.  Plus, I hoped if anything went wrong or we got back late that we’d have a bit of recourse since the boat should know we were missing.

This ended up being kind of a bummer of an excursion.  Our guide was quite green- this was her first season here and tours just started running a couple weeks ago.  It was a pretty hike, but I learned absolutely nothing.

There are actually quite a few trails here- I wish we had more time to go exploring!

I mean, there’s a waterfall!  I love waterfalls!

We also saw some kayakers, which is something I wanted to do, but Matt wasn’t so interested.  Probably for the best.

Heading back to the bus:

The sky opened up just as we were getting back to the parking lot:

Perfect timing!  It can rain all it wants while we drive to the marina to meet our boat:

it had really cool windows that opened inward so we could shoot out them but stay protected from the rain!

Because the rain definitely followed us:

Seal:

Our first whale!

I kept snapping too early- I wanted a shot of the tail, but didn’t want to miss a whale shot so I took a picture of his dorsal fin, but travel camera doesn’t focus fast enough to get both:

All the boat captains in the area communicated their whale sightings:

This whale was wily and we lost track of him after he dove:

All the fog made it hard for my camera to focus:

We found a whale!

other boats came to join us

FINALLY! a tail!

We cruised all the way out here before turning around and heading back to our boat:

I wanted to hike down to this statue, but it was probably a half hour walk from the boat and we just didn’t have time 🙁

Our departure time was approaching when the captain came on the speaker- there was a group running late and we were going to wait for them.  And that answers the question I had: would the boat wait if our tour ran long?  Apparently yes, if booked through the boat.

We ended up waiting about half an hour for the missing group to arrive.  They didn’t seem to be in any rush to reboard- just walked back at a very leisurely pace.  I mean, if that was me, I’d be running back and apologizing profusely.  I would not want to figure out how to get to the next stop if the boat left without me.

But we finally pushed off and got underway:

Three other boats had joined us while we were docked:

Farewell, Juneau:

Hello, inner passage!

Strange patterns in the water- maybe related to the tide?

a rainbow!

Tonight, we’ll be winding our way south toward Ketchikan:

and I spotted a whale from our boat!!!

It was pretty far off in the distance, but it breached!!! then dove down, but we spotted several spouts along this stretch!

The sun in starting to set at a more reasonable hour (930pm-ish)

so maybe I’ll actually get some sleep now?