Cruising TricksOnce more, we ordered room service with the aim of carrying it up to the crow's nest. That's where we could eat with more elbow room and comfort. This time, however, the room service staffer caught me carrying the tray. He was an Indonesian man about my height, dressed in white kitchen clothes. He insisted on taking over my job, putting the tray back on his cart, and delivering our full and somewhat fancy breakfast to the crow's nest area. There, he placed our breakfast on the table of our choosing. He was solicitous about it every step of the way.
At 6:00 in the morning Pacific time, there were only five other guests in the crow's nest. They stared in awe at us.
"How did you get breakfast delivered here?" A man asked me as soon as the server left. He was tall, bearded, and rather genteel-seeming. He kept his voice low.
"My wife has been ordering room service," I said. I gestured to the direction she had left in search of the fancy coffee drinks we blended with our regular coffee. "We've been taking it up here every day, pretty much."
"But he delivered it!"
"Yeah, he caught me." I shrugged. "And he insisted."
"Wonderful," he breathed.
Not much later, a middle-aged woman approached me ask. A taller woman approached right after. This made for three out of the five early risers in the crow's nest who asked about our food delivery, all of them in tones of awe. The tall woman, who had a German accent, repeated the question and added an eye roll as we talked, as if she were stunned by the obviousness of my answer.
"Your wife is a genius." She said after she heard the story. She gave me a thumb's-up.
I didn’t think the ship's crew had really understood what we were doing until today. Now I was worried that everyone would know. And yet we were following the ship's rules. Our cabin was too small to eat breakfast. We could take it someplace better. We did.
Ketchikan, Alaska
On Thursday, we arrived late to the port in Ketchikan. I had time for an extra-long workout on the ellipticals in the ship's fitness room.
To be clear, we were following the Holland America schedule. The ship's plan was to dock in the late morning. Traveling on the ocean takes time. Even revving at all-out power, all night, the engines of the Koningsdam couldn't get us southward through the straits from Glacier Bay to Ketchikan any faster. For our berths at Juneau and Skagway, the captain (and the cruise line, I'm sure) timed our arrival for roughly dawn. That gave the crew enough light to operate and it gave the ship's guests their maximum time in town for nature hikes, train rides, shopping, rafting, or whatever.
In Ketchikan, we were scheduled for a cross-country jeep drive plus a canoe trip. It was one combined adventure.
It was our least adventurous excursion of the trip. From the description, I thought I would be steering or at least paddling the canoe. The pictures looked reasonable. Not to give too much away at the beginning, but the guides were pretty good. The excursion itself, as designed, was the problem.
Well, I said the guides were fine but mostly I meant the bus driver. He was an unusually articulate fact-fountain about the Ketchikan area. He had been working in Alaska, not always in the same position or for the same company, for six years. He observed the weather was sunny but he mentioned that, in Ketchikan, it's usually not. Ketchikan gets thirteen to fourteen FEET of rain per year. In May 2025 alone, it got two feet of rain. The area doesn't get much snow.
"So this is a good day for your too-er," he concluded. The first few times he said the word 'tour,' I had to figure out what he meant. I still have no idea what accent that is.
The normal population of Ketchikan is 8,000. We had arrived on a day with five ships in port. The next day, there would be seven. Basically, cruise ships can triple the population because Ketchikan is so small without them. It's a good example of an Alaska town, though. It's isolated. It's near the water. It's got mountains. (Deer Mountain, right at the southern foot of the place, rises over three thousand feet.) It's got a cog railway going up one mountain, a tunnel near the town center (built by dynamiting beneath existing houses), a boat in the marina from “The Deadliest Catch” television show, a place called Danger Island, and impossible parking.
Many residents have no parking near their house or apartment. Lots of their buildings sit on steep hills. It's not unusual to park downslope from home and take a hundred-foot staircase to the front door.
The bus driver unloaded all this info in five minutes. We spent at least twenty minutes riding and he did not stop talking. We heard about the Tongass National Forest, people living on houseboats, the logging industry, area construction projects, and high retail prices on everything.
Finally, we arrived at the base camp for the jeeps and, unfortunately, we were not done. The driver selected a few guests to start their jeep tour. The rest of us had to endure another bus ride to the lake because, due to overbooking, we had to start with the canoe leg of our excursion.
We endured a terrible drive not meant for buses, with potholes taken at two miles per hour, and enjoyed another great lecture on Alaska. On the way, we learned about three major native tribes, totem pole builders, how to make paint from salmon eggs, and more. There are no moose near Ketchikan, the driver pointed out, and very few wolves, so the only large animal we were likely to see hiking was a bear. At last, we arrived at the lake.
Kind of Lame
Well, it was a pond, really. It had deep, black water, as many Alaskan ponds and lakes seem to hold, but you could skip a rock across it to the picnic site.
This is the start of my not recommending this particular excursion. After a lecture that covered material we'd already heard (not the canoe guide's fault, I think), we got into our watercraft. If you've ever paddled a boat with two dozen other people, you may have some idea what it was like. Four paddlers did all the work. Another four dipped their paddles in and tried to help. Someone's child back-paddled randomly, slowing our progress. The people in front had the most control over the steering but they didn't want to steer. The back-paddling child influenced our course almost randomly.
The pond is so small, all of this made no difference. And the trip was so brief, only a few minutes, our uncertain paddlers had no time to learn how to improve.
The pond itself was great. The water was interesting. The place is nice. But our experience: boring.
Then came the nature hike. I've had longer hikes coaxing an escaped cat to return to my house and seen more wildlife then, too. The nature path was well built. It simply didn't go far enough before looping back. There were mushrooms and fallen trees to discuss but, compared to most hikes, that's not a lot. After the walk, we paddled back in pretty much the same muddle in which we'd arrived. Finally, it was time for the off-road experience.
Beep-Beep, another Jeep
Well, I've done some off-roading. It can offer great sights and sometimes a challenging experience. This driving, though, was equivalent to driving on a bad road in Pennsylvania. We rode on logging trails with potholes. We were surrounded by vegetation at all times so, except for one pile of bear poop, there wasn't much we could see. There were no sights, no challenges, no learning. At the halfway point, we got out to talk.
Right away in the discussion, I learned at least one woman seemed entertained by the off road experience. So I withheld my comments. Still, I kind of felt that if you were entertained by the drive you would also be entertained by parking at a Wal-Mart if there were sinkholes. We drove out; we turned around; we drove back. There was no discovery of a place or an emotional arc of achieving more and more difficult terrain, and no wildlife. We didn't see any unusual plants. I ate salmon berries at the brief stops because my wife made the effort to find them. They were moderately bad, as salmon berries usually are, but they were the highlight of the trip.
