Chapter 45
Regular (Not Liquid) Sunshine

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After grabbing a quick bite, it was time to meet up for our Port Adventure. The name of this one was Lighthouse, Totems, and Eagles (actually quite descriptive). Here’s the description from Disney:

On this tour you will:

Board your transportation and travel approximately 25 minutes while enjoying a narrated tour through Ketchikan.

Arrive at a private dock, board the vessel and set sail on your scenic voyage.

Grab one of the binoculars and see the abundant eagles in their native rain forest habitat. See Loggerville, the “Floating Ghost Town of Alaska.”

Drink hot chocolate, coffee, tea, water, soft drinks and savor salmon spread, cheese, crackers, fresh fruit and cookies all included in your tour.

View Totem Bight State Park totem poles and clan house, including Ketchikan’s tallest totem pole. Hear a native legend and learn about the native culture.

Circumnavigate the historic Guard Island Lighthouse and watch for harbor seals, sea lions, moon jellies and occasional whales at the Vallenar Rocks Wildlife Viewing Area.

Listen, laugh and learn as your tour guide shares humor, knowledge and unravels the mystery of Danger Island during your approximate 2 hours sailing time.

Return to the dock and board your transportation back to the ship.

Tracy found this particular excursion when she was browsing the website. Since we didn’t know at the time whether we’d actually get to see any eagles in the wild on our cruise, we thought this seemed like a good one to do because it basically guaranteed animal sightings.

Our tickets for the day directed us to meet in Wavebands Lounge right at noon.

There, we were given stickers to indicate our tour group and then led back down to the gangway. Our group got Beast stickers for this Port Adventure.

Tracy wore her new hat that she had picked up in Skagway.

Now, I hated how pushy the people trying to sell last-minute tours were at all of the different ports, but the ones in Ketchikan were especially annoying. As we waited for the bus to pick us up for our Port Adventure, they were trying to talk us into buying different excursions from them…

While we waited, I looked up at the ship and was able to find approximately where our stateroom was.

Our bus was running a little late, but it got there before too long and we all piled on.

As we set off from the dock and started driving across town, our bus driver narrated the journey. We learned a little about the history of Ketchikan and its major industries. It’s currently known as the “Salmon Capital of the World” because it is a major commercial fishing hub. The city was originally founded because of its lumber supplies, however, and it was the center of Alaska’s logging industry until the 1990s when new laws began regulating how much timber could be harvested from national forests. When the pulp mill—previously one of the city’s largest employers—closed in 1997, residents were afraid that the town was truly going to go belly-up. It wasn’t until cruise ships began making regular stops there a few years later that tourism took over as the city’s number one industry.

Ketchikan is also known as Alaska’s rainiest city. In fact, they get so much rain every year that they measure rainfall in feet instead of inches. The average rainfall is about 160 inches (or more than 13 feet) annually, which means that every day sees an average of almost half an inch of rain. Rain is so abundant that the locals refer to it as “liquid sunshine.” You can imagine how surprised we were, therefore, to hear all of this when the weather outside today was absolutely beautiful.

Honestly, of all the ports of call we’d visited, this was by far the best weather we’d encountered. The bus driver told us just how incredibly lucky we were to be here on a day like this because the usual weather forecast either states “it’s going to rain” or “it’s raining.”

After driving all the way through town, we pulled up to the private dock where we would be boarding our boat.

Again, let me just point out how gorgeous the weather was.

We found our boat.

Even though we had just made it to dry land about an hour earlier, we were excited to hit the seas again. This time, however, we were looking forward to seeing some eagles! And some totems. And a lighthouse.

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