Thursday, June 2, 2011

Day 3: Tracy Arm

Well here we are at day 3 of the cruise. Today we made it into Tracy Arm, which is a glacial fjord, and we traveled far enough in to see Sawyer glacier. Pretty cool!



We had breakfast at the Beach Blanket Buffet on deck 9 aft. The food hasn't been great but there sure has been a lot of it. After that we went up and staked out our claim to a piece of the rail on deck 10. It was very windy on our way into Tracy Arm, but most of that slacked off as we slowed down.


Tracy Arm was a really spectacular place, but I had a hard time working up a lot of excitement for it. Southeast Alaska looks a lot like the Pacific Northwest.  A lot of what we looked at looked like a combination of the Columbia River Gorge, the Cascade mountain range, the Coast mountain range and the Oregon Coast. Don't get me wrong, it was really cool to see it laid out before us all at once, but at the same time I couldn't get over the feeling that I was looking at Cannon Beach, or Hood River, or Multnomah Falls.





That feeling changed when we started to see ice in the water. That's not something we see at home. Tracy Arm fjord is pretty incredible. I'd show off pictures if I had any that did it justice. It was very hard to get a picture that showed the steepness, and height of the slope. We did see arctic tern, whales, seals, and mountain goats. Amazing what you can see from 10 stories up on a cruise ship.






Somewhere along the line Heather left for her pedicure. I couldn't leave because I'd lose our spot along the rail. Those Disney cruisers with their pushing and shoving are a bunch of brutes. I think that's when I managed to get my sunburn. More irony, I managed to come home from the Bahamas the year before last with no sunburn. I go to Alaska and fry my forehead. More of an issue now because of my receding hair line. Then there was our final destination; Sawyer's glacier. Now to be fair, there is a north Sawyer's glacier, and a south Sawyer's glacier. I don't know which one we saw, but it was impressive.


So that's Tracy Arm. Dinner was at Animator's Palate on deck 4 aft. Fun place to eat. The restaurant, and wait staff starts off in black and white. Over the course of the evening the restaurant adds more and more color. Finally the wait staff runs out for a quick change and when they come back they're all decked out in colorful clothes. It is a lot of fun, but really loud.

Entertainment for the evening is Tangled, being shown in 3-D in the Buena Vista Theater on deck 5 aft. Anything with Zachary Levi couldn't be all bad.

Tomorrow, Skagway!

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