Alaskan Vacation- Day 5

Today our ship docked at Juneau. On the ship they push you to buy the excursions through them, but they charge so much that we took a chance on finding an excursion in the city. As soon as we got to town they had a row of booths with people fighting to get us to go on their charters. We found a guy that gave us a trip to Mendenhall Glacier and a whale watching tour for only $115 each! If we would have bought that on the ship they would have charged us $200. I love good deals!

First, we rode the shuttle to Mendenhall Glacier, which was very beautiful. In the visitors center they had telescopes set up so you could see the glacier and mountain goats. I looked forever and couldn’t find anything when the ranger helped me. She found the mountain goats in about one minute. So, I saw 2 mountain goats that looked like to white blobs on the side of the mountain. Brandon and I went back to the shuttle drop off and while he was in the restroom I waited for him by a drop off. There was a ranger standing right next to me and she said “Did you see the porcupine”? I looked down and he was about 2 feet away from me! I had my own personal photo session with him before every other person in the park noticed I was taking pictures of something. Did you know porcupines have bright orange teeth? I do now! We also saw a yellow bellied sap sucker (woodpecker).

After the glacier the shuttle driver took us to Auke Bay where we met the captain of our whale watching boat. He was a colorful man with about 5 teeth left in his mouth and a gravelly voice. We boarded the boat with 20 other passengers and headed out into the bay. Almost immediately we started seeing whale spouts, so we would race over to them and watch the whales come out of the water and we even saw a few tails. In total, we saw about 20 humpback whale spouts and I got some amazing pictures. None of them fully breached, but it was still an amazing experience to see them. Along the way we saw tons of eagles and a few seals that didn’t dare venture out into the water to come see us because there were so many whales nearby.

Tracy's Crab Shack- Best crab in the world!

We even had a Sarah sighting!