In Skagway via cruise ship
It’s now June 20, but although I was unable to blog during the trip, I’m back-dating the posts as if I had. June 6, Day 6 of our trip and Day 5 aboard the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam, included a 13-hour stop at Skagway, Alaska. In general I enjoy seeing Skagway from this perspective, and we got far better weather than expected.
When I posted the first photo on Facebook at 04:50, we were just pulling up to the Railroad Dock at Skagway. Shot from my balcony, this was one of my many shots enabled by a “sixth sense” that gets me to places at just the right time. I commented on this Facebook post “There’s fresh snow on the highest peaks. Funny to be almost home but then we’ll leave again tonight 🙂 “
Skagway has become a challenge to the cruise industry due to the increasing danger of rockslides at the Railroad Dock. Mitigation measures taken at the dock and by the ships are costing tens of millions of dollars. The night before we arrived, we had received a letter from the captain explaining why we would need to use tenders to get ashore.
Inching up to the dock.
Shipping containers have been modified to create a safe(r) passage for workers. For a year or two they were used for ship passengers as well.
Seven old GE locomotives are being used as rock barriers. An attempt to sell them a couple of years ago was unsuccessful, and they don’t have enough power to pull the ever-longer trains required by ship passengers.
The most recent of the major rockslides. This one isn’t considered to be a major threat.
This one is a major threat 🙁
At 08:11 I posted on Facebook “I may just spend the day on our balcony, waiting for The Rock of Doom to finally tumble and destroy the dock.”
A few minutes later: “Soapy Smith is waitin’ with me 😁” ‘Soapy Smith’s Skull’ has been on the ship signature wall forever, but nobody seems to know exactly when it was painted or by who.
Fresh snow on the peaks.
The final safety fence is actually cabled to the locomotives. To see the most beautiful locomotives on the WP&YR ends this way makes me very sad. And the Yukon Transportation Museum doesn’t even have one.
Back inside the Nieuw Amsterdam, the floor of each elevator car helps keep us on track 🙂
Outside the elevators on each floor, this deck plan is extremely useful for navigating the miles of decks.
The art throughout the ship is wonderful. The painting below, showing the Nieuw Amsterdam in Venice, is in the staircase between Decks 7 and 8. On our last cruises we almost always used the stairs rather than the elevators, but Cathy has hurt her knee again so we mostly used elevators this time.
Looking down at Deck 1 at the Atrium.
The Ocean Bar on Deck 3, which is the Promenade Deck and has a sheltered walkway right around the ship.
Another Facebook post at 09:04: “Imagine people showing up on Dragons’ Den 40 years ago, trying to convince the investors that they could get people to pay 4 times as much for water as for gasoline. ‘Get out of here!!’ 😁”
The Majestic Princess backing in behind us.
The Disney Wonder beside us at the Broadway Dock.
The Quantum of the Seas, badly in need of a paint job on the lower hull (!), brought Skagway’s passenger total for the day to 11,788 (that’s 10 times the population of the town).
A fleet of busses arrived to take passengers from the Majestic Princess on various excursions. They drove through the danger zone – without and then with passengers. Best to not try to make sense of it, I suppose…
A White Pass & Yukon Route train was waiting for some of them.
At about 11:00 Cathy and I went ashore by tender for a wander and then a planned family lunch.
I don’t have any strong feelings about the tendering one way or the other. Perhaps if there were lineups that would be different, but it’s not like we had any place important to be in a hurry.
Restaurants are a pretty stable business in Skagway, but for some reason this one changes hands regularly. “Salty Siren” was new to me, but apparently the owners of Skagway Brewing have it now, and it reviews well.
My day sorta went to hell then. Facebook at 12:36: “The rest of the family was determined to have lunch at Skagway Brewing Company – the modern Alaska gold mine – but it was a 40 minute wait and absolute chaos. I was unable to deal with it and am heading back to my safe place aboard the ship.” My safe place is my balcony.
I thought that perhaps spending a few minutes solely with my camera would help, and shot a few photos on the walk back to the marina. The next photo shows a couple of the historic buildings owned by the National Park Service – Skagway is part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.
My favourite restaurant for many years, Sweet Tooth Cafe, closed about 3 years ago and appears to now be a jewellery store.
There are local shops, too – here are 3 of them.
The Red Onion Saloon is not only a perennial favourite, it gets more and more popular as the years go on. A “brothel tour” of the upstairs used to be free but is now quite pricey.
It didn’t help – I needed to get out of there 🙁
The seas were quite rough on the return to the ship, driven by a strong south wind.
Walking back to my cabin.
Facebook at 2:45: “A little afternoon pick-me-up then off to the therapy pool in the spa.” That probably means that Cathy was back on board.
Sailing down Taiya Inlet at 9:03 pm – next stop, Glacier Bay.
An HDR-enhanced photo of part of Haines as we passed by.
This turned out to be a very bad day, and its results have lingered. That evening, I needed Cathy’s help to walk to dinner, and would have been using my cane if I had brought it. I mentioned to the brain-injury support group I go to that as wonderful as the trip was, it also forcibly brought my limitations to the fore. I have only very vague memories of the trip – if I don’t have a photo, it didn’t happen. That’s why I need to blog it – this is now I create “memories.” My only journal entry of the trip was written this evening: “Skagway. Bad day – brain-sick. Might have started yesterday. Haven’t been this bad for a long time. Couldn’t deal with Skagway chaos, came back to my safe place and went to bed. Going to stop drinking – that’s the only thing that’s changed – yesterday I had 3, maybe 4 drinks.”
Glacier Bay would make the world better 🙂
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Murray, even to a neuro-typical, being on the street in Skagway during a busy ship day will tip the sanity scale big time. Don’t take that bad day too much to heart. Dealing with slow moving crowds and constant hurry up and waiting gets to the best of us❤️
Thanks, Carlie. I always avoided heavy ships days even before I got injured, but the degree to which it makes me sick now will ensure I completely avoid it in the future.