I'll start you all with one of my favorite moose pictures, since I hadn't uploaded those for my last post. And because my moose pictures make me laugh. Since it is the start of spring, all the animals are losing their winter fur and they're really skinny. So all the animals look a little mangy. :)
Well, this has surely been an adventure - one that I want to be over, already. It is now Day 18 or so of us living out of suitcases and we still have another 10 days or so to go. That is the part I’m most looking forward to being over. That, and I no longer want to be on this ferry anymore.
We left Bellingham, Washington on Friday. It took us a few hours to load the car on to the ferry, get checked in, and then wait for everyone else to get loaded. It was a long day, Friday. We spent the morning packing up everything and re-loading the car. That is a process, because everything can really only fit in the car one way. Meaning that if we take something out from the bottom, everything from the top has to get taken out to load it back in. It’s been a hassle, but we progressively move faster at each location. Then we headed to Best Buy, for a surge protector for the boat, and Trader Joe’s, for all my wine. J We tried to determine how many cases of cheap wine we’d be able to fit in the car. We thought, we should stick with 2 and if we can fit more, we’ll just go in and buy more. So we got our 2 and learned that we could’ve easily fit another 3. But, that’s a bit excessive. So we decided that 2 cases (24 bottles) would last us a long enough time. We then headed to Subway for lunch, to finish off a gift card before the $5 foot long became $7 foot longs in Alaska. While eating lunch I managed to convince myself that 24 bottles of wine equals out to one a month for only two years. We plan to be there for close to four and therefore we needed more wine. So, we headed back to Trader Joe’s for another case + 2 more to try some new ones.
Final wine count – 38 bottles :D
After that it was about time to head to the ferry dock. We needed to be there at least three hours before sail, due to us bringing our car. We wound up sitting in the parking lot for a couple hours while they got everything organized. But we met some people, watched the very eccentric drug-sniffing dog and heard others discuss how they had cases of wine loaded up in their trucks. Hooray!! I’m not the only silly one!
Our room on the boat is about the size of a closet. There’s barely enough room for us to both brush our teeth in there let alone live in there. The room has a bathroom and 2 twin beds stacked on top of each other, like bunk beds. That’s it. And the beds are so close to each other that you can’t even sit on either bed without hitting your head. The boat itself, called the Malaspina, is fairly nice – not too large, not too small. There’s even a movie theater, although I would hardly consider it one when it’s just a plasma screen on a wall with 20 seats around it and they only play the same 5 movies/documentaries the entire trip. The restaurant is expensive and the food, while it isn’t bad, isn’t too exciting either. Fortunately, we brought on a lot of our own food, so really only have had to purchase one meal so far.
I have to say, overall, that this boat ride is rather boring. We’re not moving all that fast – 16 knots, about – so you see the same scenery for a while. Our first day aboard, the scenery wasn’t even that great., just okay. We didn’t bring any books or cards, because they all got packed up too fast and before we could even think about it. There’s no internet on board or at port. Eric has been busy studying and I’ve been trying to clean up my pictures from Yellowstone. This new camera is troublesome, I’m learning, because it takes pictures so fast and so nicely that we just keep snapping away. I think between 5 days we took about 800 pictures in Yellowstone and Grand Tetons, so I’m still working on cleaning those up. Our second day aboard, the scenery got much better. We passed gorgeous mountain ranges and we even saw a couple whales. It was a better day overall too, because we stopped in Ketchikan and Wrangell and were able to get off the boat and walk around for a little while. We had the most time to wander in Ketchikan, but from what we saw I don’t ever feel the need to visit there again. The town looked really run down with shabby houses and empty storefronts. There were two cruise boats in town, but it just seemed that they were taking water tours. Later in the day we stopped in Wrangell, while most everything was closed on this Sunday evening, it had a charm too it. We only got to spend about 25 minutes walking around, but it looked cute.
Our last stop of the day, and the last one before Juneau, was Petersburg. It was supposed to be our shortest stop of the trip – less than an hour. We didn’t bother getting off in this town because we would’ve only had about 15 minutes to wander. We did however start packing and loading our car back up so we could be better prepared for our 5:15 a.m. arrival to Juneau. And by that I mean, so that we could just roll out of bed and get in the car the next morning. We arrived there around 8pm to a gorgeous sunset setting over a beautiful mountain skyline. After getting our stuff in the car, we decided to try to get cozy in our room and watch a movie for the night. About an hour into the movie an announcement was made that we are still in Petersburg because we were waiting for clearance from the coast guard. Shortly after that, another announcement is made: The coast guard is requiring that we get a signed piece of paper from an electrical technician because the boat was having some engine troubles, giving us clearance to continue on. Now, here’s the kicker: There is no such person in Petersburg, they need to fly an electrical technician to Petersburg to look at the boat and they are working on making those arrangements for the morning. Damnit! All I’ve wanted to do all trip is get off this boat and get to Juneau. Now they are telling me I’m going to be spending at least another day on this thing? Argh.
So we wake up Monday morning to another announcement that we are still in Petersburg and the technician is expected to arrive later this morning. The boat is providing free breakfast and we are welcome to get off the boat and wander through town. So that’s exactly what we do. More announcements are made throughout the morning, but the gist is we’re stuck here until noon. They are expecting to leave by noon though. So we wander through Petersburg, which is also known as the Little Norway of Alaska. It has a lot of Scandinavian charm throughout, but we didn’t get a chance to see much. I’m not sure how large the town is, but I can only guess it’s pretty small. We didn’t wind up leaving until almost around 1p.m., but we’ve left. We’re still 8 hours from Juneau, so we’ll arrive close to 9p.m.
Here's a view from the ride, in between Petersburg and Juneau.
Thank goodness we scheduled the closing on our condo 2 days after we expected to arrive. But, of course, this also added on some extra stress because Eric is required to be at work Tuesday morning in order to report for duty, or else he’s considered AWOL and officially he can be fired. It seems now that we’ll make it just fine, but of course we’re also missing appointments with our insurance guy, realtor and mortgage consultant that we had intended to take care of today. Eric will probably be tired tomorrow, because we have no idea how long it will take us to get off the boat once in Juneau, then we have to check into the hotel and then pretty much unpack the entire car into the room so that Eric can get all his uniform elements and then iron them for his first day.
On the bright side, upon leaving Petersburg today we saw a bunch of sea lions catching some sun on the buoys and swimming around them. We’ve also seen a handful of whales and a school of black and white porpoises swimming past the boat. And the scenery has just been stunning the entire way. It’s almost a shame that we were expected to miss all this.
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