The Pitts Stop

Monday, August 18, 2003

Today is our last day in Haines and the weather is beautiful. Unfortunately, I have to work and we have lots to do to get ready for the ferry. We can access the RV once a day, but all the power will be off and we have to pack our things to take to our onboard cabin. We will be out of touch until this weekend. The ferry lands in Bellingham, WA, north of Seattle on Friday morning. It makes stops in Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell and Ketchikan. We don’t know how much time in each port the ferry spends, so we don’t know if we’ll have time to explore. We have thoroughly enjoyed our trip to Alaska, but are ready to head back to the lower 48.

Haines to Seattle via Ferry Friday, August 22, 2003

We were on the ferry from Monday till this morning. We saw humpback whales and Orca whales. The weather was rather miserable – misty and rainy with low clouds that obscured the tops of the mountains, but the trip was still beautiful. Most of that area is considered rain forest, so rain is the typical weather – more than 12 feet per year. We left at 6:30 in the evening and stopped in Juneau in the middle of the night. We could have gotten off and walked around, but we were too tired, it was dark and raining.

The next day we stopped at Sitka where the Russians had their capital for the territory. We saw two eagles in Sitka – they are so much larger than we expected. We took a short tour around Sitka and checked out all the shops – there were lots because it is a major Inside Passage cruise ship stop. They had a Russian Orthodox Church there that had burned down in the 60s, but the townspeople had saved all the icons in the church that were from the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The church was rebuilt exactly according to the original, including mismatched windows and other “mistakes”. On the tour we also saw the totem poles that the natives make to tell the story of their ‘clan’ or to honor an individual. During the night, we stopped at Wrangell and Petersburg, but again we slept through – at least as much as we could, given they would make loud announcements every time they stopped.

We spent half a day in Ketchikan the next day, taking a short tour around the town and doing some shopping in the pouring rain. I don’t know how people can stand living there with all that rain. We strolled around Creek Street which used to be the red-light district that was shut down in the 50’s – the 1950’s!! While we were visiting one of the bordellos, Jack rain into a bank customer – Paul Shore, a dentist and his wife. The world gets smaller every day!

The ferry was much, much nicer than we expected, although our cabin was pretty basic – bunk beds, but we had our own bath with shower. The ship had a cafeteria, a formal dining room, a lounge-chair movie theater, a cocktail lounge and a couple of inside comfortable lounges with great big windows for viewing. We spent most of our time in the lounge, reading and watching the sights. They also had a Park Ranger onboard and he gave short talks about a variety of subjects – the cities along the way, Indian life (he was a Native), animals and history of the region. We really slowed down, read a lot and just sat and looked out the windows at the stunning scenery. Our last night, we were summoned to the purser’s office (figured they found out Jack stole a towel with the logo on it), but instead, they had crashed a large dumpster into the side of the RV and put a good-sized hole in the outer wall. Oh well, just another ding to be fixed (at their expense).

We arrived in Bellingham, WA at 8am and we separately drove the car and RV off and hooked up right at the terminal. We were originally going to drive down to Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens, but decided we will be up this way again to see ALL the sites and so we headed straight east. An absolutely fantastic drive on route 20 through the Cascade Mountains and then through hilly ranchland – just like the old west in the movies. At a viewpoint rest area in the Cascades, we saw smoke up in the mountain. A few minutes later, we saw a helicopter dropping down to the river to pick up a giant bucket of water, fly over the fire and drop the water. We watched him do that a few times, and the smoke was reduced to a small plume, so I guess they caught it early. We stopped at Coulee Dam (on the Columbia River) – it is massive! Did some grocery shopping, as we had used all our perishable items before getting on the ferry.