Alaska Diary - final day.

Our last day. :-(

Let me take you step by step through what we did

1. Woke up. Freaking early.

2. Ate Breakfast.

3. mom's too paranoid to let strangers touch her luggage, so we drag it off the boat ourselves.

4. Go through customs. No problem.

5. We're cheap. And smart. And figure out that if we rent a limo we would actually save money and not have to sit on a shuttlebus with 40 old people. So we ride in style!








I'm sad to be going home.




My 2 seals were stuffed in my backpack, so i let them out for a bit of fresh air.

So we got to the Vancouver airport about 6 hours before our plane was to leave. We couldn't really do any sightseeing since we had enormous amounts of luggage. So we just sat around and tried to amuse ourselves.

Jan tried to show off her butterfly eyebrows . . . squit and concentrate and you might be able to see them.




I, on the other hand, took this opportunity to practice my camera smile.

After a loooonnnng airport day, we made it home!

Alaska Day 7 - i'm too lazy to rotate my picture

So, even though we aren’t going to anymore ports or anything, there are still numerous adventures all over the ship.

First of all, let me share a little snippet of our on-ship itinerary options with you:



Bridge Play with your fellow guests
Sailaway Music with the Sun Show Band
Art Lecture
Color me Beautiful Seminar
“The Glaciers of Alaska” lecture
Board Games with your fellow guests
Pilates class
“How to buy the best mutual fund”
Amber seminar and sale
Bingo
Eat more to weigh less seminar
Yoga
Afternoon Trivia
Enjoy the Music of the Brothers and friends Trio

And that’s only between noon and 5 pm. There is ALWAYS something to do. The casino, bingo, scavenger hunts, bands, crafts, movies, shows, 70’s dance parties, seminars, entertainment. You’re definitely never bored.

There are also 10 different restaurants on board. We were treated really well. Throughout the week I ate dishes such as filet mignon, new york strip steak, lobster tail, some fancy fish, etc. And everything was so excellent. Always good desserts, it was very fun to feel so pampered.

Did I mention that everyday our room steward comes to our room twice – once to make up the beds for the day and again in the evening to get the beds ready for bedtime? We are way too pampered here. Plus, my favorite part, at night they leave a towel on our bed folded as a animal of some sort. Isn’t that awesome?




Today we got to go on a ship-wide scavenger hunt which actually turned out to be one of the funnest parts of the trip. We were ripping around the ship trying to get signatures, tokens, and answers to questions before the time ran out. We did pretty good and got 2nd place! Below you can find a picture of me modelling our stellar prizes:



Also, today my family has developed a taste for Karaoke. My mom and my aunt stole the show and sang like 4 songs. This wasn't hard since there was about 4 more people listening in the audience. I went up with Lisa and Jan, both whom kindly kept their mouths as far away from the mike as possible so that it was only me that everybody could hear. Thanks, guys. Thankfully there were only 4 people listening.

We met up with these 2 other girls our age for dancing in Dazzles Disco a few times. They are cousins from Montreal and Ottawa. They are pretty dissapointed that there's like 7 of us on board under the age of 40. I think maybe they were wanting to hook up with some single guys, but there are slim pickings on this boat, for sure.


Finally, I got chosen to be one of the participants in “The Weakest Link.” Seriously, my worst nightmare – I got voted off first. Perhaps the other ladies were just concerned that I was the prettiest and they wanted me off the stage. But it probably has to do more with the fact that I answered every single question wrong. Who was the dictator of the Philippines? Seriously. Am I supposed to know every single oppressor in the world? I’m not quite that good.
I couldn’t remember anyone’s name so I relied on an arrow to try to vote out the guy beside me. It didn’t work.

A break...for Canada Day Events!

THE FORKS:
A mix of kid-friendly daytime activities, evening concerts by bands
including Ego Spank, Novillero, and The Harlots, and a fireworks show to
cap off the night.
Time: Programs running from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., Scotiabank Stage from
2:45 p.m. to 11 p.m., fireworks at 11 pm.
For more information: www.theforks.com


JAZZ WINNIPEG FESTIVAL:
Old Market Square, the Exchange District
Free childrens’ programming during the day, with evening concerts by
groups including Jodi King, Little Boy Boom, Athavale, J.P. Hoe, and
dbClifford.
Time: Activities kick off at 11 a.m.
For more information: www.jazzwinnipeg.com


FORT GIBRALTAR:
866 St. Joseph St.
Interpretive tours of the historic fur trade site, with performances by
roving magicians and voyageur games, like hatchet throwing.
Time: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
For more information: www.fortgibraltar.com


OSBORNE VILLAGE STREET FESTIVAL:
Winnipeg’s biggest Canada Day street festival, with Osborne Street
closed to traffic to accommodate an artisan’s market, more than 70
local bands, street vendors and children’s actvities.
Time: All day.
For more information: www.mts.net/~ovbiz/


ST. BONIFACE MUSEUM:
494 Taché Ave.
Costumed guides on hand, as well as a period reenactment and
blacksmithing demonstration.
Time: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
For more information: www.msbm.mb.ca

Alaska Diary Day 6 - On the way home

So, we are on our way back to Vancouver. But there are still lots of cool things to do.

First, I forgot to tell you about our stellar day through the Inside Passage. Our cruise ship maneuvered its way through this relatively narrow passage – the pictures below show just how narrow it was. See how close we are to those mountains? The other side of the ship looks just the same. It felt like we were squeezing through!
This is where Mom dropped her camera on the desk, and it broke, which is why she looks a bit unhappy.
It was so cool to be on the ship during this time. It was so cold, but so beautiful.
Check out the picture below – there is a mountain goat! You can’t really see him, so I drew a little box around him just to show you which little white spot is actually goat-like. Isn’t that wild? Who the heck would live on there?

It is on this day that I literally had the worst hour of my life. First I ate a dessert with nuts in it. Eating was a challenge on this trip - normally it's not a big deal and nothing that I really need to worry about, but since all of the food served was so fancy, they put nuts in lots of things. I thought I was safe eating this dessert because I ate one just like it the day before with no problem. But apparently today was special and they decided to put nuts in it. jerks. Then I went to go eat at the Pasta bar. Pretty cool. You pick your pasta, sauce, and toppings, and they fry it up for you right in front of you. Or at least it was cool until I found out that they just used the same fry pan over and over again without washing it and that some people chose to put pine nuts into their pasta. My allergy to pine nuts is different than my allergy to other nuts. Normally I can detect nuts right away and my throat swells up. But pine nuts don't affect me until about an hour later and it give me VERY itchy hives all over my body. It wasn't cool. I was in my stateroom when it happened and went crazy and was hoping for somebody to come and help me or at least give m some good sympathy, but alas, nobody showed up. So I had 2 allergic reactions, plus got something else bad which is too womanly to speak of here, all within the same hour! Pretty funny, now that it's over.

After my crazy hive attack, Janessa and I headed over to the Nintendo Wii challenge. Everybody who signed up got to play in the Wii tennis tournament and had a chance at playing in the championships on the last day in the main theatre and got to play for prizes. I almost made it to the championships, but wasn't quite good enough. I really wish I would have known beforehand so that I could have practiced more on our Wii at home, but haven't played tennis there for so long I was pretty rusty. Lisa and Janessa tried out too, but none of us made it. Oh well.

Alaska Diary Day 5 - Thursday May 10, 2007

Today we stopped in Skagway. This is the best part of the trip, I think. We paid a chunk of money to go on a train ride up to the mountains. it was AMAZING! It is the same train line that they built during the gold rush to move miners up and down from alaska to the Yukon. It was so beautiful, so cool. WE started off pretty close to the ocean level, but ended up so high in the mountains that there was snow everywhere. Luckily we got the last car in the train so we had a stellar view out of the back. I spent most of my time out there. i think it was too cold for many of the guests so most just stayed inside, but what the heck, us Manitobans think the weather up there was pretty mild. It was so cool to be on that old train ride. rocking. i took so many pictures!
What is really interesting is that the train crosses the US/Canadian border. It was sort of cool to be in Canada, but sort of a pain as well. The reason being is that before we got off of the train we had to wait a long time for Canadian customs to come and check us all out, and then when we went back to Skagway on the bus we had to pass through American customs again. It all seemed sort of silly.
On the way back to Skagway we were able to stop at Dead Horse Gulch. It is one of the harshest parts of the gold rush trail, and many many many of the miner's horses died while going through this area. I love history. It was so cool to be in this place where there is so much interesting gold rush history, that was awesome. Which brings us to our next excursion.


Before we went to the cruise ship we stopped at Liarsville. Liarsville is sort of like a museum village where visitors could see and walk through a replication of the original liarsville village/campground. It was called Liarsville because it was where most of the newspapers during the gold rush was stationed, and they had a local reputation of just making up wondrous stories of miners finding crazy amounts of gold. Everyone in the area knew that these stories were false, but people who got these newspapers out of town trusted them and it was the reason why many many hopeful miners came to Alaska and the Yukon to look for gold. pretty cool. We watched a little show which included a dramatic poetry reading of "The Tale of Blasphemous Bill" by Robert Service (I LOVE Robert Service!) and some other cool stuff. Mom got called up on stage - isn't she hot?

After the show we got to pan for actual gold. It was fun, but freaking hard and I can't imagine the frustration of these hopeful miners when their dreams of pounds and pounds of gold are traded in for a very hard and very arduous process of panning for gold nuggets/specs/dust. It was fun, but we all sucked at it. The gold we got we only did because we sort of cheated and didn't use the real techniques we were taught. It was super fun! For sure I won't be able to retire with the amount of gold I did pan.
The town of Skagway is pretty fun. Full of lots of history. There is a great story of the local mobster, Soapy Smith.

Alaska Diary Day 4 - Wednesday May 9 2007

***Hey! I am off to Saskatoon and New York, so don’t expect any posts until June 18thish!***



Today we stopped off in Juneau, the capital of Alaska. It is a nice town, but not as nice as Ketchikan as it is a bit too big and governmental. We chose to go on the "glacier and garden tour." First we visited a glacier. It was pretty cool – both because it looked cool and because it was freaking freezing. The glacier acts as a giant air conditioner in the valley. It was a stellar valley, by the way. As I am a lover of museums, I was pleased to find out that there was a good interpretive centre there as well. Although the 1970’s glacier video they showed us was a bit ridiculous. Glaciers are pretty – it was fun to see non-Manitobans so excited about seeing a big hunk of ice.

After the glacier we headed off to a place called "Glacier gardens." It was a place this guy carved out on his property in the area of a temperate rainforest. Saw lots of trees. They were very beautiful and it was cool riding in the golf carts to the top of the hill to be able to look down at the city, though mom was freaking out because she was afraid of heights. It was very pretty - the pictures don’t do it justice for sure. Didn't have much time to do shopping, though, which saddened many of us, but really, it was probably a good thing considering we can’t take much back in our suitcases.

While the rest of us went on this tour, Lisa and Jan went ziplining through the forest. Some pictures of them are below.

In the evening we saw a really good show, called Cirque Pan. It was fabulous! Sort of like Cirque De Soleil.