The thing about a massive floating Vegas-style hotel, aka The Ovation of the Seas, is the sheer amount of people traveling alongside you. And with that many people, the odds of encountering my favorite type of tourist (The Spatially Unaware cluster of families) increases exponentially. And sure enough, on my morning walking loop, I may or may not have almost mowed down a family blocking the path. At least I am polite, as my mother taught me to be, and said “excuse me,” as I navigated through them.
At 12pm, we finally arrived in our first port in Alaska: Juneau. Spotting the Alaska Brewing brewery from our balcony, we stopped there for lunch. Remember all that real estate stuff I’m going through while trying to relax on vacation (3 escrows for those keeping score)? Well I’m supposed to be signing documents on Saturday the 27th – the day I was planning to come back from Seattle to San Diego. I have a funny feeling that something would be going wrong so I changed my ticket to come back a day earlier, Friday the 26th. This is me on the phone, praying cell service reception isn’t lost while I change all our tickets to come back a day early.
After some souvenir shopping, we headed to a tour bus to take us to a boat for a whale watching adventure. For those new to my blog, I am something of a whale whisperer. I’ve spotted whales off-season in Cabo. The tour started off pretty slowly but with a “whale sighting guarantee” our Captain found us some wildlife. Sightings guaranteed, even if we came across a sleeping whale. “Look Dad, that whale is broken.” I think I prefer the Mexican whales – they are family oriented and livelier.
Sadly, no orca sighting, but we did get to see a unique feeding ritual called “bubble net feeding.” Humpback whales will work together to generate bubbles underneath schools of fish. The fish, quite stupidly, think they are about to swim into a net and swim for safety … into the mouth of another humpback. And your favorite whale whisperer caught the tail end (pun intended) of this feeding frenzy on video! Cell service is crap in the last frontier so here’s a still. And yes, that’s the whale eating a fish.
The wildlife sightings kept coming as we saw bald eagles and bears from the safety of our tour bus. Arriving back at the cruise ship terminal in Juneau, I made a quick call to my boyfriend while enjoying a beer outside – a pretty warm evening for Alaska standards. I boarded the ship again and enjoyed a glass of wine as we pulled away from the town.
There She Goes... 