The ferry ride from Haines back to Juneau was grand. During our whole Northwest tour, we avoided buying tickets on whale watches because we couldn't afford them and because our friend Rob the fisherman had told us we'd probably see something if we just kept our eyes open on the ferry. Well, we'd kept our eyes open on 10 ferries and hadn't seen much. But on the ride back to Juneau, we saw three orcas! swimming near the boat. One, a male, had a dorsal fin that was huge. We also saw a humpback whale spouting at a distance. Eric actually saw the tail, but I missed it.

Cousin Kathy assumed we were staying with Tom, but actually, we wanted to try out Juneau's youth hostel. Tom is a big fan of hostels and he said the Juneau one was really good. It is a great place. In summer hotels in Juneau usually run $80 or more, and the hostel is only $10 per person ($7 if you're a member).

We were excited to have such a cheap place to stay. The only problem was, we couldn't sleep together. We ended up in separate dorms, with several room mates each. We agreed to wake up at 7:30. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke from a solid sleep when someone pushed the door open to my dorm room and then walked away. I thought it was Eric trying to tell me it was 7:30. I got up and got dressed and stepped into the hallway but didn't see him. Finally I went upstairs to look at the clock: it was 12:28 a.m. I ended up waking up nearly every hour on the hour, thinking it was 7:30.

That day (Wed. Aug. 27) we had a bunch of errands to run. We parked our bikes outside the bike store, and ran around town mailing things and buying duct tape, etc. When we got back Eric was happy to find a note from the Executive Secretary of the International Horn Society on his bicycle. We later heard that she had burst into the bike store, insisting on knowing whose bike held the horn. We never did hook up with her but later Eric found her e-mail address so we may try to mail her.

We were at the bike store because we needed boxes to ship our bikes ahead to LA via air cargo. At some point, we figured out that it would be way cheaper than paying handling fees for bringing them on the plane to Seattle, and then on the train to SF, and then on another train to LA.

The bike store, Mountain Gears, was amazingly helpful. They managed to set aside two boxes for us even though there was a long line of tourists waiting for boxes, and it was slow season: they weren't selling bikes very fast, so they didn't have many boxes to offer.

Eric spent a couple of hours packing the bikes in a parking lot near the shop. While he was doing this, an apparently drunk Tlin git' man and woman accosted him. Eric's bike lay in pieces all over the lot, and the man asked if he was adjusting his brakes. Eric said no, he was shipping his bikes. Then the man asked where. Eric said San Francisco (he misspoke; he meant LA).

The answer set off a tirade. The woman stormed off, angrily. I was standing several yards away waiting (in vain) to use one of Juneau's precious few pay phones (They charge only 10 cents so they don't pay for themselves, so no one wants to install more. Then, when a cruise ship unloads a few thousand people, it's impossible to find one that's free). As the woman walked by me she muttered San Francisco! in a very disparaging tone. I hadn't heard any of the rest of the conversation, but I knew she was talking about Eric so I looked to see if he was all right. He was smiling and talking to the by-now very animated man.

Later Eric told me that the man had launched into a tirade about how Eric's "backyard" was "puny" compared to the man's "backyard"--all of Alaska. He then rattled off statistics on how big Alaska's parks are. Eric smiled and agreed. Then the man said, "If you want war, I can get 18,000 Tlin gits," and then named a few other tribes. I never heard any of this. When the guy walked past me, he yelled, "Tourists! Why do they have to mess in my yard??"

I waited for what seemed like forever for that darn pay phone. The guy using it was a cruise ship tourist who was making many phone calls to confirm his reservations for all his upcoming tours. Finally I gave up and walked a few blocks to the taxi station to inquire about fares for us and two bike boxes to the air cargo place.

We got a taxi to the air cargo place and got a pleasant surprise. Instead of being charged more than the phone quote for bike handling, we were charged less-by half. They had quoted us a price of $128 for the two bikes, but the fee was actually only $64. That covered flying the bikes to LA's airport, and then storing them there for a few days until we were ready to pick them up go to Costa Rica.

With the bikes out of the way, we felt a lot freer. That evening Kathy took us out for pizza, and had us stay at her apartment. She had just bought a guest bed. We were totally honored. We got to meet her three cats again: Hillary, her favorite, and Haley, and Higgins, the only boy cat and the definite trouble maker of the bunch.

Kathy normally gets up at 4:30 a.m. (Hey Hugh, lord of the morn, how could you possibly be related?) to take a five-mile walk, but in honor of our presence, she didn't. We still got up pretty early for us though, and got a ride into town with her.

She dropped us off at an awesome bagel place called the Silver Bow. Since nothing much else was open, we sat there for hours. There I succumbed to my desire to read news--the morbid murders of Andrew Cunanan etc. I even read the weeks-old news of the Microsoft-Apple deal, which I had scrupulously avoided before then, because it reminded me of work.

Around 8:30, we headed over to the docks to get a boat tour to Tracey Arm. Now at the time, getting on the tour was a bit of a heart breaker. Back in Haines, we had been scheming and looking forward to canoeing in Tracey Arm, a fjord near Juneau with an actively calving glacier, in Tom's canoe. We were totally psyched to do it. We had our rubber boots and everything.

We had heard plenty of warnings. First, there wasn't much camping. Second, the sides were very steep, so there wouldn't be many places to climb ashore in case of emergency. That meant if our boat toppled in the near-freezing water, we might not be able to get warm anytime soon. Also, Eric had picked up a pamphlet which warned small boats of iceberg dangers: some of the pieces of ice that break off from the glacier are supposedly as large as three story buildings! (the ones we saw were more like the size of large cars) and can cause huge waves. Also, the ice sometimes breaks off below the surface, and then comes shooting up to the surface--hopefully not under your canoe.

Somehow, despite all these warnings, Eric and I still wanted to canoe Tracey Arm. Possibly it had something to do with Eric's childhood fondness for the book "Danger, Icebergs Ahead," which he did a book review on five times for the same teacher. (He says he reread it each time, and he would have reviewed other iceberg books, but he couldn't find any in his school library).

We found a tour boat that would drop us off and then pick us up a few days later for $220. We had scouted it out before we went to Haines.

But as soon as we got back to Juneau, we called and found out the tour boat was busy with a charter and could not take us out to Tracey Arm until two days before our flite out--too late for us. We were totally bummed. But we still wanted to see Tracey Arm (it's supposed to be as beautiful as the famed Glacier Bay, and a lot cheaper to get to--the same canoe trip in Glacier Bay would have cost us more than $600). So we decided to suck in our guts and pay for a boat tour. It was $99 per person--almost as much as the drop off service. We felt a little sick.

The tour started out on a down note. It was so foggy we could barely see the shore just a few tens of feet away. But soon it cleared and we saw... a humpback whale! At first we saw a few spouts, and then, we saw it breach. We spent more than 20 minutes just hanging around, watching that whale jump around in the water. It was worth the whole price of the tour, and we hadn't even seen the glacier yet.

The glacier itself was amazing too. As we got close, we saw huge chunks of blue, blue ice, floating in the water. Seals lounged on them, like they were laying on inflatable rafts in a pool, waiting for the waiter to bring a drink. Then--CRASH! And some massive piece of ice would come roaring into the water, making a major splash. The glacier calved every several minutes.

Seeing this made us both realize that we were glad we hadn't come in a canoe. We were freezing just standing there on the top, open deck of the boat. Every 15 minutes or so, I had to run below and warm myself with hot chocolate. We wouldn't have been able to do that in a canoe. Someone told us that it's about a six or seven hour paddle from the glacier to first camping site.

That nite we went back to Kathy's and had dinner with her and her upstairs neighbor. We had a great time talking late into the night about the Henderson clans.

Next: We learn just how cold Alaska can get.

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