3 Weeks in Juneau, Alaska

Thanks to a leaking raw water pump, we spent 15 days in Juneau, many more than we had expected to. While we were there, Juneau experienced a heat wave. The temperature hit an all-time high of 91 degrees at one point. The locals acted as if this was the end of times.  The local newspaper showed a picture on the front page of kids swimming in the Mendenhall Glacier lake.  It was a pretty neat picture of kids swimming with a tidal glacier behind them.  Most of our days there were great weather.

We stayed in Douglas Harbor, which is across the water from Juneau, which means to go to Juneau, you need to take a city bus. Luckily, the buses were cheap and convenient. $1.50 per adult, and they departed every half hour from the Douglas post office, which was about a five minute walk from the harbor. We twice took our laundry in to town and went grocery shopping a couple of times. All of us got to know the bus system very well! Mark took the bus several times in to Mendenhall valley to attempt to work on the part that we needed to fix, and Amy went to the valley to do some shopping for Robert, who is out-growing his 12 month clothes and needs some warm p.j.'s and new shoes.

When in town we highly recommend going to the Juneau downtown library.  It is a new library with a large area of kids books.  They also have a lot of PC's to connect to the internet and the also have WiFi, so bring your laptop.  One night I needed to find something on the net, but the library had already closed.  I discovered that they leave their net on around the clock, so I was able to climb the exterior fire escape stairs up to the forth floor and access the WiFi connection there sitting on the steps.  It gave me 5 bars of strength.

Each day 5 huge cruise ships arrive and then depart the downtown area.  It is amazing to see 20,000 tourist scream into town and leave within 8 hours, feeling like they have gotten to know the town.  Several locals told me that Saturdays are the best time to head into town because there are fewer cruise ships there.  The town has built up a huge shopping area for the tourist to deposit their money.  One person told me that the cruise ship company's owned many of the shops, there buy expanding the opportunities to get more of your money. 

No locals shopped in those areas.  The place to be was at the Juneau Fred Meyer super store.  It had beat out K Mart, forcing them to close.  Walmart was going to move into the K Mart store until they learned there is a structural problems with the site.  For now, Fred Meyers is the place to shop, the city bus makes a special stop at their door stop.

We were in Juneau over the weekend waiting for the part to arrive, so we took the bus (again) to the Mendenhall Glacier in the Tongass National Forest. The bus actually stops 1.5 miles away from the glacier park, so we walked the 1.5 miles to the park, and then walked to a look-out point to see the glacier and also walked a trail that allowed us to see salmon swimming up the creek, which was fun.

Finally we fixed the boat and set out for Glacier Bay.