[Juneau, AK, July 28, 2024]

First thing in the morning, we dropped off our luggage at our cruise headquarters. We picked up name tags and were instructed to return by 5 pm. We saw our ship getting prepared and loaded! I was so excited!

Then we were off to get some breakfast. We tried a cute little cafe in downtown Juneau, the Rookery, but oddly, it was closed on Sundays. Luckily, Heritage Coffee across the street was open and we got our much needed caffeine! The next best breakfast joint, the Sandpiper Diner, was 15 minutes away. After a short wait to get seated, we finally had food in front of us. I got the smoked salmon omelet and Olivia and I split a pancake. We had a hike ahead of us after all!

Juneau is surrounded by mountains. Aside from the tiny stretch along the main street in town, everything else was up the mountain slopes. This included our walk to the trailhead, which was uphill through some serious stairs. I even noticed a park with pickleball courts down some stairs and across a small creek. Thanks for all this uphill, we got some unexpected extra exercise before even starting our 2-mile hike to Mt Roberts.

The trail was steep and muddy from the get go. Just a few minutes in we took a wrong turn but quickly realized we were off trail because it got so overgrown. Not long after, I got up to a junction. I waited there for Olivia when I looked to my right and saw a black bear! I was so surprised and startled! I think the bear was, too, because it climbed up a tree when it saw me. Let me tell you, as cute as bears are, it’s something else seeing them on a trail 30 feet away from you! I got really nervous and almost wanted to turn around. “Did we even tell anyone which trail we are doing?”, I asked Olivia. But she calmed me down and convinced me to keep going.

I must have still been in the throws of the emotions of the bear encounter when I suddenly saw something black moving in front of me a little further up the trail. I thought it was another bear but it was just a dog! His owner seemed like a local and when we told her about our bear encounter, she asked who it was. Apparently, the locals can tell their bears apart! 🤣

The trail seemed to get steeper and muddier and not at all the easy 2 miles we were expecting! We were over it after about an hour but it took more like 1.5 hrs to get up to the top, which was also the terminus of the Mt Roberts tram we had seen yesterday. We had gained over 1,500 ft in those 2 miles!

The weather was pretty good at the lookout platform and it even got partly sunny.

Since we didn’t get any pics of the real bear on the trail, we took some with the taxidermied one inside the gift shop and restaurant.

We sat the bar to rest and have a drink. While we were sitting there, some pretty serious fog came but it lifted quickly.

We weren’t about to go down the same muddy slippery steep mess we came up on. Instead, we happily paid $20 to go back down on the tram. It was much better than paying $55 both ways.

The tram spit us out right by Tracy’s King Crab Shack, which someone had recommended to us. We were definitely due for lunch! We shared a super yummy combo of chowder, crab cakes and red king crab legs. Olivia smartly picked the type of crab with the biggest legs – it made getting the meat out so much easier!

Our walk back to the hotel took us the length of Main Street through downtown Juneau. With a couple of hours still left until we had to be back at cruise headquarters, we made a few stops along the way.

First order of business was to go into a random jewelry shop for my free cruise charm, now that we had our cruise name tags. Olivia, ever the introvert, was never going to go along with this so she just ducked into another shop nearby. But the sales pitch she was afraid of didn’t materialize. The saleslady pointed out a necklace and earring set that was on sale and once I said I wasn’t interested, she gave my my charm and wished me a good day.

The cute tee shop we had seen the day before was finally open. I was excited to get a shirt form there, but they barely had any ladies sizes. Lame!

Our final stop was Amalga Distillery again because it was so good. As were were sipping our gin drinks, we noticed that cloud failure (what they call sunshine in SE Alaska) was in full effect.

And then it was time to go back to our ship and board! The staff took our photo as we embarked, showed us to our cabin and outfitted us with a personal floatation device (PFD). We got a free upgrade on our cabin, which was great. We were going to be on the third aft instead of the second. This meant a great view out the window and a much more spacious hallway compared to our original cabin. It was still really tiny though! The shower was basically on top of the toilet, and the sink was outside by the bed.

Then, it was time for dinner and a short orientation. Terrah, our expedition leader, explained the general schedule each day would follow. Breakfast would be at 7:30, followed by a morning activity. Lunch would be at 12:30, followed by an afternoon activity. Then cookie hour at 3:30 pm, happy hour at 5:30 and dinner at 6:30 pm. Our choices of activities would be mostly kayaking, bushwhacking or skiff tours, with some slight variations possible depending on the exact location we’d anchor at for the day. We would sign up for our activities the day before, so that the staff could work out the times and divide the groups in such a way so that everyone could do the activity they wanted. With 76 passengers and an average of 8-10 people per activity, it would take about 10 separate groups to get everyone out each time.

And with that, we were ready to depart! The boat was headed for the outback of Glacier Bay National Park, which we were supposed to reach by morning. We departed after dinner, and we fell asleep to the gentle, barely noticeable rocking of the boat as it glided its way across the water.