This is, I believe, the only stop in Alaska on this cruise that we’ve been to before. Juneau is the capital city and it’s the only capital city in the world that is completely inaccessible by road to the rest of the surrounding area. You can only get here via plane or ship. Interesting that neither I nor Rob remember the tram being here, but I just read that it opened in 1996 and I looked at my pics from then and it’s there. We did dock at the pier farthest forward last time, so maybe we just didn’t come back this far then. Anyway, it’s a cute little town.

This is the view from our balcony, which is also the view I have as I’m typing this.

But first things first: brekkie - very similar to yesterday’s. The scrambled eggs were still really good. Then we had rehearsal, which went well.

Then we had auditions for the All-Star group… and I think I did OK overall, but there are some very good ringers here. Twenty-nine people auditioned for just a dozen openings… Stiff competition! My big worry is that I committed the ‘cardinal sin’ of handbell mistakes right in front of the conductor: the key changed and I needed to ditch the A and B bells in my hands and pick up Ab and Bb - but I only switched out the B and still had A natural in my hand. That’s not the cardinal sin, though. The cardinal sin was that I didn’t notice until many measures had gone by. Ugh. I was concentrating on the tricky rhythms and didn’t hear that my A was the wrong note for awhile. Le sigh. We’ll see if that was enough to keep me out.

It’s been fun, ringing with and meeting all these other ringers.

A quick lunch at the buffet - soup (salmon and corn chowder) and a tuna salad sandwich for Rob, some baked rigatoni and a hot dog for me, then it was time to get off the ship. We set out in search of a bluetooth keyboard for Rob’s iPad, as his has apparently decided to die mid-cruise. There’s only one electronics store mentioned on google maps in Juneau and they also sell luggage and sneakers. The town is PACKED full of people, as there are five cruise ships (at least) here at the same time. Our ship and the other Holland America ship here hold 1900 passengers, but the other three ships are larger than ours. That means we’ve dumped an extra 10,000+ people into a town whose population is only 32,000. Yeah, it’s crowded.

If not for the giant cruise ships at the dock and the throngs of tourists, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that you’d stepped back in time to the gold rush days. Many of the buildings here are likely left over from those days and they’ve been well-preserved. It definitely still has a ‘frontier town’ feel to it.

No luck on getting Rob a new iPad keyboard, but I just tried it and it’s working again, so fingers crossed it will hold up until we get home. It’s easy to get one in Calgary. Dinner was at another specialty restaurant, Tamarind. It’s an Asian place and we started with tempura shrimp for Rob and coconut-crusted scallops for me. They were both delicious.

Rob had more of the tempura shrimp for his main and I had coconut curry chicken, specified “very spicy”. It was delicious and yes, it was spicy. Also, hello there, lychee martini! Where have you been all my life?

After dinner, we managed to find a quiet bar and have an espresso martini while we waited for the All-star results to be posted. Around 8:30, they were finally up…. Annie made the cut, I did not. With more than twice as many people trying out as there are slots to fill, the competition is fierce and you simply can’t make the mistake that I made and still get in. Ah, well. I’ll cheer Annie on.

It’s 9:30 now and still mostly daylight - welcome to the far north in summer. That’s one of the things that took me awhile to get used to in Calgary. That and the winter days having the sun set at 4:30pm and pitch dark by 5!

Not sleepy yet and I don’t want any more drinks… Rob’s off to bed, so I think I’ll just watch a bunch of Pete and Bas videos. YouTube is blocked here on the ship for bandwidth reasons, BUT I foresaw that and downloaded all of their videos to my hard drive before we left, so I won’t suffer from Pete and Bas withdrawal on the cruise!

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