Filling time

The ferries in Southeast Alaska don’t serve every town every day, so we have a few extra days in Juneau. As for the top attractions in Juneau, we’ve either done them or we’re not interested. So we spent today on some of the lesser attractions. Worse, when we return to Juneau next week, we’ll really have to look for something to do before our ferry back to the mainland. But, as our son Ari says, that’s a problem for future us.

We started the day at Glacier Gardens. This was a bit of an odd place: a couple who owned a local nursery bought some land after a major landslide, then developed the land into a nature preserve. It looked a lot like the rest of the Tongass National Forest, except that a guide from Glacier Gardens drove us up and down the hill in a golf cart.

When we reached the top of the hill and saw the Juneau airport below, we heard the weirdest tidbit of our trip so far. Our guide told us that the Juneau airport is the only airport that has had a collision between an airplane and a fish. The story sounded fishy to us until Amy found the story on the Alaska Airlines website! An Alaska Airlines 737 jet nearly hit a bird, who dropped its fish to avoid the plane.

Next, we returned to Jerry’s Meats & Seafood to buy more fish. We also bought a smoked salmon spread made with their house-made smoked salmon. The spread was so good, we ate the entire package for lunch, so Greg went back one more time to buy another package for later.

After lunch, we drove across the bridge to Douglas. Greg read about a walk near a park, but it wasn’t that interesting, so we returned to Juneau. We tried to drive to a trailhead on the residential hills of Juneau, but it was terrifying to drive the RV through the narrow, hilly streets. Greg turned around and managed to find a parking spot near downtown, so we walked to the State Capitol. Along the way, we saw some nice totems.

We learned that Alaska has the smallest legislature of all the states; the chambers for the state senate and house were formerly courtrooms.

We walked a bit more around the downtown, then drove towards some waterfront picnic areas. Once again, the parking was too tight for our motorhome, so we simply returned to our campsite to get ready for a very early ferry tomorrow morning.