When most people think of an Alaskan cruise, they think of the ships the size of small cities. We saw many of them in Juneau, docked, three, four, five at a time, inundating the town. In a town of around 30,000 the population can nearly double when five cruise ships are in port at the same time.
Juneau has a lot of services in place to handle the tourist demands. You can sign up for glacier tours, or whale watching tours, or both right at the landing dock. You can have a fine meal, you can buy tanzanite or brown diamonds, or fine sporting gear just across the street, or you can take a cable car up to the top of Mt. Roberts – right from the dock where you landed.
No. We didn’t do that.
We boarded the M/V Kennicott out in Auke Bay, where the Alaska Marine Highway Ferries come in and out shuttling the locals from town to town. There are ferry routes that are regional, like you can take a ferry to Haines, or Skagway, or Ketchikan, or Petersburg, places on the SE panhandle of Alaska, or you can, like us, take a ferry that goes all the way around the Gulf of Alaska from Juneau via Yakutat, Whittier, Chenega Bay, Kodiak Island to Homer. You can even continue on to Seldovia before you head back. Some years, when the ferry hasn’t broken down, you can take a ferry all the way down to Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, all the way down on the very tip of the Aleutian Islands. Wouldn’t that be a grand adventure!?
It’s all part of the Alaska Marine Highway System, a very practical part of the entire Alaska transportation system which is a lot like Africa. You take a big plane or a big ship to get there, then you take a smaller ferry or a small – even tiny – airplane to get to the more remote places. Juneau is not connected to anywhere. All the highways end. Kodiak Island is . . . well, an island. There are many remote places that there is no way to reach without ferry or tiny aircraft service.
We picked up our tickets at the Ferry Terminal a couple days in advance, and were surprised to see that while the ferry was scheduled to leave at 12:00 noon, boarding said 0900 in the morning.
No problem. We were packed and ready to go, grabbed a little breakfast and coffee, and the shuttle took us out to the ferry terminal, about 15 minutes away. The Best Western Country Lane shuttle makes everything so easy; they take you to the airport, they take you to the terminal, they take people to the restaurants they want to go to, they run you downtown – a trip that costs about $35 if you come in to the Ferry Terminal and want to go into downtown Juneau. The shuttle is one reason why we chose this hotel, and we were so glad we did.
So we arrived, on time, at 0900 to board the ferry and the guy at the counter looked surprised and said “You want to board now?” and I said “It says we are supposed to board at 0900. It doesn’t make sense to me, either, but here we are.” He said “OK, you can board if you want.”
It’s not like an airplane. It’s not like you see “Boarding at 0900” and it means you MUST be there at 0900, in this case, it means “you can board if you want to.” LOL, this is my culture, and it’s confusing to me!
Laurie, the boarding purser, checks our I.D. and checks our tickets and waves us to the vehicle entrance with our rolley-bags, saying “just go in here and take the elevator.”
It wasn’t until after the trip that I learned the M/V part of M/V Kennicott means Motor Vessel, i.e. this is a ship that transports motor vehicles. We love learning new ways how things are done, and the boarding and unloading of the vessel was endlessly fascinating to us. Great technology, and it also requires great planning and execution.
We went to the purser’s office to get our cabin, but the cabins weren’t clean yet. He suggested we go up to the forward lounge, have a cup of coffee, he would call us when the rooms were ready.
The forward lounge was full of Alaskan art objects. This is a shaman’s mask:
This is a Haida clam basket (basket weaving is so fascinating to me, all those patterns. How did people figure out, oh so long ago, how to gather living plant material and weave it in these ways? On our trip, we saw baskets woven so finely that you could boil water in them. Imagine!)
I explored around a little, well, I snooped. While the cabins were being cleaned, I looked in to see the various kinds of cabins. It was so interesting. The majority of the cabins did not have bathrooms.
There were one person little cabins, like a booth, with two seats that would slide down and together, and a table that could be clipped up when a person didn’t want to sit at the table and wanted to sleep on a flat surface. It was a pretty narrow surface, and a room like a coffin, but it locked, and it would be a safe place for one person to sleep and keep their bags safe, too.
There were two person roomettes, they also had a little table and two bunks that attached to the wall unless you wanted to sleep, in which case they came down.
There were four person cabins without baths and four person cabins with baths. If only two people were in the cabin, the unused bunks were attached up to the walls, and you had a couch to sit on during the day. The outside cabins had nice large windows, big square ones.
There was a solarium up on top designated for campers. There are a LOT of campers in Alaskan, not just Alaskans, but also visiting campers from all over the world. The solarium gives them a safe dry place to pitch their tents. There are also big lockers where they can stow their gear.
People are also allowed to camp in the aft lounges, upper and lower, but the signs ask that you only roll out your sleeping gear between 8 at night and 8 in the morning, so that all the passengers can use the lounges during daylight hours.
This isn’t a cruise ship. This is transportation. This is how people get from one place to another, how they take their kids to boarding school when their village is too small to support a school. This is how high school teams might travel to their away games. These are working ships.
When the purser announced that people could come check in to their cabins, I went, but I ended up at the end of a long line. I saw people get assigned and then the purser would hand them a set: one pillow, two sheets, one pillowcase and one blanket. (@) (@) ! No! No! I did not sign up to be making up bunk beds! Enough democracy!
Lucky me, those sets were for the roomettes, and you don’t even have to rent them, you can do without them if you prefer. I think the rental per night for the set is $3.00, but they also have it broken down, so if you just want to rent a pillow and pillow case it might be $1.00 per night, or just a blanket. Our cabin is beautiful and spacious. We have a big window, and dolphins romp by, and beautiful mysteriously foggy islands. We have our own toilet and shower, thanks be to God, and a washstand with plenty of clean towels. This is heaven. 🙂
The food is not elegant, but neither is it institutional. It is a giant step above McDonalds, or any of the fast food outlets. These are the menus posted in the hallway leading to the galley (kitchen):
There are a variety of food stations – drinks of all kinds on the left, a salad and soup station on your right. Every day there were three soup choices, a soup like chicken noodle or French onion, a smoked salmon or clam chowder, and a chili. There were four prepared salads, and a big bar with greens and accoutrements; carrots, tiny tomatoes, peas, etc.
There was also a deli sandwich and pizza station, where the lady would make you what you want.
There was another station, the hot station, where you could order several different hot things. There would be three main meal choices at every meal, like beef stew, salmon steak or pork fried rice, for example, and a veg and a starch. They even had brown rice.
After you paid, cafeteria style, you enter the dining hall. It’s a working ship, remember, so it’s not just paid eaters who eat there, but also there is a microwave available for people who bring their own food. I saw one young man who had the BEST food, the first day he had a cucumber with salt and pepper, and bread. At breakfast, he had brought his own granola kind of mix. (Then he was gone, it’s a ferry, and people come and go.)
There are families with children warming up spaghettio’s, and single women with bowls of Ramen. It’s all very democratic, everyone sitting in the same dining hall.
There is always a large display full of desserts; they must have specialized in desserts, very tempting desserts. AdventureMan succumbed one meal to a piece of Coconut Cream Pie, and I yielded to a Blueberry Pie at another meal.
They also had all kinds of condiments, in case you like a little kick with your foods, the more common ones, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise you pumped into small containers, but there were also things like Thai chili sauce, Tiger Sauce, Tabasco sauce, soy sauce – things different people like.
There were several booths with Alaskan wildlife and bird life on them:
Near the dining hall, across from the gift shop was a small room for small children with a rubber floor 🙂
This is the bar, which was closed every day until around 5:00 and it was the only place on board that sold alcohol. You weren’t supposed to take it out of the bar. They had Alaskan beer, which is very tasty.
This was lunch our first day on board, Smoked Salmon Chowder and a shrimp salad:
After every meal, we walk the decks, and, in fact, other than climbing in and out of my bunk, most of our exercise was walking, walking, walking, and climbing stair up and down. It didn’t do us any harm 🙂 The scenery is ever changing. Our first day out, we pass the same humpbacks we had seen on the whale watch the day before, spouting, someone always can be counted on to shout “Thar she blows!” The Alaskan waters team with wildlife; sparkling fish jumping, dolphins, seals, sea lions, otter – we saw them all. I would be typing up notes in our cabin, facing out the window, and I would see a couple dolphins just zipping along, so graceful, just doing their dolphin thing.
As we were hiking through the Eagle River Camp Grounds, we could hear a dog barking, barking as if he were having a lot of fun. We saw a cabin, and one of the park rangers playing with a big brown happy dog. We walked over; he had just finished cleaning out the cabin and it was empty. He asked if we would like to take a look.
I hope you are sitting down. The rental of this beautiful cabin, per night, is $45.
This is the interior. You can see where people can sleep, downstairs and up. Maybe room for 8 – 12 people.
From the table, this is your view:
Sign on front of cabin:
View from your front porch:
You have to bring in your own equipment, including propane to run the heating stove, and your own bedding. There might be running water. You would need all your sleeping gear, food prep, and there are many electrical outlets in the cabin for charging up all the electrical gadgets you probably can’t use. I think we did have phone coverage in the area. 🙂
Although it feels remote, you are not that far from Juneau, and there are major grocery stores even closer. There is a Fred Meyer – where you can pick up just about anything – near the airport.
I dream of bringing our grandson here with us one summer. We’d have to be sure he was old enough to be careful about bears, and any other wildlife. At the same time I dread the logistics. Maybe if I think about it for a couple years, it can become do-able . . .
“Terminal T? Is that new? I don’t remember arriving at Terminal T before!”
Not even two weeks have passed, and we are going through SeaTac again, this time en route to Alaska. As we enter “Terminal T” we discover terminal T is like saying “Shrimp scampi” you are saying the same thing. T is the Terminal, it used to be the only terminal. It’s what used to be the original airport before all the South Terminals and North Terminals and others I don’t even know. Oh yeh, A, B, and C.
But the Main Terminal is a delight. Seattle loves public art, as do I, and arriving in Seattle at the main terminal, you find schools of little brass fish swirling under your footsteps, if you think to look. These little touches delight me.
We are flying out of Seattle to Alaska, and Alaska Airlines flies out of terminals C or N, and as it turns out, our flight flies out of N, or the North Concourse. On our way there, we are wondering if we will find something healthy to pick up for our dinner, when we come to the Food Court.
We’ve eaten here before, breakfast. They have an Anthony’s-in-the-Airport, and my best friend recommended their breakfast egg dishes. I hate oatmeal, but discovered that the oatmeal at Anthony’s is delicious! It must not be good for me; how can oatmeal that is good for me taste so good?
And, as it turns out, Anthony’s has a take-out section! Woo Hooo!
Well, hmmmm, not quite. They don’t have the Ceasar Salad with a piece of grilled salmon or halibut on the top, but isn’t salmon and chips almost as healthy? Although in intend to wait to eat on the plane, the odor of delicious deep fried salmon calls to me, along with a cup of freshly brewed mocha, and I go ahead and eat my dinner in the Seattle airport.
I love it that there are so many options. Anthony’s has a great restaurant, right in the old main terminal, with floor to ceiling glass, it is a glorious situation. There are other eating establishments where you can order and then sit in the same area at tables and chairs – Ivars, some Mexican, some others which are good, it’s just I love the take out from Anthony’s. Normally airport food can be a total drag, unless you go through Memphis and have some BBQ – or Seattle. Seattle does airport food right.
We were having a lazy Sunday when the buzzing started. At first I thought it was someone mowing the lawn, and then we looked outside – and discovered we had a world class view of the SeaFair Air Show. Oh, what fun! Single engine planes, bi-planes, and a military-appearing jet squad that I don’t think was our Pensacola home team, the Blue Angels:
Boats tie up days in advance to have a key position for the hydroplane races; many of the people are scantily clad. This used to be more family oriented, but now the rescue teams are called upon frequently to rescue the drunks who fall into the water, or worse – hurt themselves while drunk doing stupid things:
There is nothing so exciting as the sound of hydroplanes racing:
It is a picturesque village. Along Main Street, and Fifth Avenue there are corner gardens, maintained by the city. This year, they are planted primarily with white flowers, big, fluffy flowers which make all the other flowers POP! with color. Overhead, from the lamp posts, are huge hanging baskets, full of a variety of plants, mostly purples, blues and fuchsias. The overall effect is stunning.
On our way to her manicure-pedicure, I drove Mom around looking at the sights. Down at the Edmonds Beach, I was shocked to see an eagle, perched on a piling. The shot isn’t very good, I jumped out of the car in a hurry and snapped, not taking enough time, but I was so surprised – I had never seen an eagle there before.
After lunch, as we headed out, we saw people touching up one of the murals Edmonds has painted on the sides of buildings there:
Here is another one, nearby:
I love it that this sweet little town, with its ferry coming faithfully in and out, preserves its identity and character in the face of changing times.
Today’s meditation from Forward Day by Day touches on one of my very favorite stories – and its opposite. It’s all about the power of belief. The woman, suffering from bleeding, would have lived a terrible life, considered unclean, untouchable, and trying everything to be cured without success. Just a touch – one touch – and her illness is gone. Jesus is astonished and tells her that her faith has made her well.
In contrast, the people in his own village are skeptical. How can good ole Jesus, son of Mary and that carpenter, how can he be anything special? In the face of such callous disbelief, Jesus can do little.
SATURDAY, July 27
Mark 6:1-13. And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.
What a contrast, in just a few verses. Yesterday the bleeding woman merely touched Jesus’ garment, and Jesus’ power streamed into her. Today he is home, and those who watched him grow up ask, “Just who do you think you are?” and the Son of God is stopped in his tracks, like Superman when he is exposed to kryptonite.
My field education rector preached on this passage a year ago, and I was spellbound by his ending. He asked, “If Jesus came to All Saints, would he be able to do deeds of power?” Then the rector got even more personal, asking, “If Jesus came to you, would he be able to deeds of power?”
Oh, how I hope so. I’m not sure how to have the faith that allows Jesus to perform deeds of power, but I can see what kind of behavior does. It is hopeful, brave actions that seem to open the way for Jesus to work; and it is arrogant, fear-based behavior that seems to block the way.
Lord, teach us not to fear the change you bring. Teach us to reach out to touch your garment.
When my Mother was still living on her own, there was a revolving guest room, and my sister left a CD for me there, as she departed and I arrived, which contained the song above. I want it sung at my funeral. It is a succinct statement of faith; it is the song of the bleeding woman who believes and is cured, and nothing is ever the same.
The luscious Pantone Fall 2013 picks are already showing up in the department stores Fall collections. Oh yummm, they’ve held on to that emerald green!
In today’s A Word a Day, Anu Garg quotes that great science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein. If you don’t know him, get a copy of his Stranger in a Strange Land, and move on from there. He makes you laugh, and cry, and THINK. I am in the middle of reading World War Z, very different from the movie, very thought provoking, and this quote fits beautifully the mid-crisis work of survival after society has collapsed. People need to be able to do things with their hands, things that help with the very real business of survival:
Science-fiction author Robert Heinlein once said, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
(How can you not love a man who believes that everyone should be able to change a diaper?)
I’ve always wanted to spin wool. I think I need to learn. I’ve often thought about how we would manage the basic necessities in a post-unthinkable-collapse society, you know, the basics like food, shelter, clothing, medications . . . Maybe, living in the South, I should learn how to work with cotton . . . or linen. Now I have to find out if flax will grow in Florida . . .
How cool is this? We saw this car at Taco Rock and loved the optical illusion. We also loved it that the car makes a memorable impression; you’ll think of it and you will think Pensacola Specialty Pawn. It’s an effective ad if you remember who the ad is for 🙂
When we walked inside, AdventureMan asked “Whose car is that with the mobster paint job?” and a guy picking up a take-out order grinned and said it was his. He told us it was a shrink-wrap technique – it’s temporary! When you get tired of it and want to try something else, it just peels off and you put something else on. I think that is so totally cool.
“I miss the highs. . . ” my friend said – just before she went off her meds.
I totally understood what she was saying. We belonged to a quilting group, and when she was beginning a manic phase, she produced knock-out quilts, quilts combining colors in unusual ways, and she could stay up all night to finish one. She was a lot of fun to be around, totally up and enthusiastic and creative. As the phase progressed, however, she got thinner and thinner, fell in love with the wrong men, and I always knew when she was just about to crash because she looked fabulous – new clothes, lots of shoes, and she talked a mile a minute.
Then the crash. Her biggest fear was the credit card bills; when she was on a high, she felt like it didn’t matter. When she slid into depression, it was complicated by the fact that she had real things to be depressed about – STDs, huge bills, and concerns at her workplace and her security clearance.
As long as she was on her meds, she was fine, but the medications made her feel sluggish; she said even colors were less colorful on her meds. She said it was like spending your life underwater, where things were not so clear. She said it was dull.
It’s easy, when you are not bi-polar, to say “stay on your meds.” It’s really hard to do it when the meds can make you feel like you are living in a prison.
My friend recommended a book by Kay Redfield Jamison called An Unquiet Mind. It was one of the most helpful books I have ever read, helping me to understand just how hard it is to give up the mania in spite of the huge price you pay for it with the depressions.
Fewer than half of Americans with bipolar disorder are properly diagnosed and treated, recent research shows. Could you spot bipolar symptoms – in yourself or in someone close to you?
Fewer than half of people in the United States who show classic signs of bipolar disorder actually get diagnosed and treated, says a recent Archives of General Psychiatry report on a survey of more than 61,000 adults in 11 countries — the United States, Mexico, China, Japan, Brazil, Colombia, India, Lebanon, Bulgaria, Romania, and New Zealand. Bipolar patients in lower-income nations get even less treatment — in some cases, as few as 25 percent receive help.
Compared to the other 10 countries studied, the United States had the highest rate of bipolar disorder (4.4 percent of those surveyed fell somewhere on the bipolar spectrum). India had the lowest (0.1 percent). Overall, about 2.4 percent of those interviewed in the face-to-face survey could be classified as having bipolar disorder.
Bipolar Disorder’s Most Surprising Symptoms
It may be buzz-worthy these days, but many people don’t fully understand bipolar disorder and the symptoms that can lead to proper diagnosis and treatment. Bipolar, also sometimes called manic-depressive disorder, is characterized by shifts from extreme highs (known as mania) to emotional lows (depression), with “normal” moods in between.
It’s bipolar disorder’s manic phase that most sets it apart from other common mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. While many people associate mania with high energy and exaggeratedly good moods, these other key symptoms are more subtle:
Reckless spending. If a friend is blowing her paycheck on shopping sprees she can’t afford, watch out. A person in a manic phase of bipolar disorder is more likely to take big risks, including spending splurges that can lead to mountains of unmanageable debt.
Super-charged sex drive. A sudden revving up of a person’s sex drive, obsessively thinking or talking about sex, or engaging in sexual encounters he otherwise wouldn’t (like a one-night stand or sex with someone he doesn’t know well) are all symptoms of hypersexuality, another less-obvious mania clue.
Alcohol or drug abuse. These often go hand-in-hand with manic episodes: As many as 60 percent of people with bipolar disorder have abused alcohol or drugs at some point in their lives. Depressants such as alcohol or pain pills can send a person with mania straight into depression, while stimulants like cocaine can have the opposite effect.
Skimping on shut-eye. Little need for sleep is another red flag that a person may be having a manic episode.
Keep in mind that bipolar disorder can vary greatly in severity, and not everyone experiences every symptom. In fact, some patients experience hypomania, a less mild form of mania. But even hypomania, if left untreated, could spin into depression or develop into full-blown mania.
One important takeaway from the Archives study is that across all countries, patients with bipolar disorder faced challenges in their daily lives and were at increased risk of such health problems as panic attacks, substance abuse, and suicide. Untreated bipolar disorder can also lead to troubled relationships with friends and family and problems at work. If you’re concerned about yourself or a friend or loved one, get more information here on the best treatments for bipolar disorder.
Here There and Everywhere 