Planes, trains, automobiles - and a very big ship

I am a homebody. The comforts of my recliner, my bed, my books, my TV, my routines, overwhelmingly call to me. But even recluses have families, and bucket lists.

So over the past several weeks, Barb and I went traveling. First to California, to celebrate our oldest grandson's graduation from high school. Strange. I'm sure that it was only last Tuesday that his father called from Prague to tell us that we were grandparents.

And since we were so close, it seemed this was the time to check Alaskan Cruise off the list. Juneau, Skagway, Glacier Bay, Ketchikan, Victoria B.C, and Seattle. Check, check, and check.

Close is a relative term. We traveled 4,389 miles on airplanes, 2,328 miles on a very big boat, 269 miles in rental cars, 261 miles on tour buses, 44 miles on a train, 31 miles on airport shuttles, 15 miles in a taxi, and an unknown distance in a smallish boat watching whales feed in Auke Bay. That's a total of more than 7,337 miles. We called this the "broken butt" tour.

The Alaskan Cruise is big business. At each port of call there were three and sometimes four giant cruise ships docked, each capable of carrying about 3,000 passengers. From port to port we seldom cruised alone; there was usually a companion ship just behind, or just ahead, or on one day right alongside. It was a Dutch ship and all day it felt like we were racing - at 20 knots. Go, team! USA! USA! Our ship left Seattle at 4pm on a Saturday and returned at 7am the next Saturday. At 4pm that same day, it set out on the same cruise again, and will do so all summer long.

When we would dock, scores of tour buses would line up on the wharf areas to gather up passengers for the various excursions. In Skagway, the train rails came down to the docks, alongside the boats. In Ketchikan, the restaurants, shops and tourist attractions were built dock-side. Every day boats arrive and 10,000 or more passengers troop off to spend their money and then they troop back on - for the most part - and then we would slip away to the next port, making room for tomorrow's boats. But the tourist season in Alaska, like the growing season, is short and there were tip jars in the vans and buses that read, "Because Winter is coming."

It was interesting to see the towns we stopped at. It was interesting to ride the train up over the pass that so many would-be-miners crested on the way to the Yukon gold fields at the turn of the century.

 It was interesting to venture into Canada for a few miles (my second time to visit Canada without documentation). I enjoyed the parks and flowers of pretty little Ketchikan, which is not entirely dependent on tourists.

 We found Victoria to be a lovely little town. Were it not the capitol of British Columbia you would think time had passed it by, preserving in its passage beautiful old buildings and idyllic parks.

 But I loved Glacier Bay. Snow-capped Mt Fairweather in the background, the massive, noisy, walls of convoluted ice were almost too big to comprehend. Two hundred feet of centuries-old blue ice showing above the water; another hundred feet below and stretching a half-mile wide, the glacier spoke loudly of its daily six feet of movement with cracks like thunder and  booming like cannon fire. We saw a small piece crack off and fall into the sea. Just a little piece. About the size of a house.

But my very most favorite thing of all was sitting on our balcony, cup of coffee in hand, watching Alaska drift by at a placid 20 knots on a calm ocean.