Thursday morning saw our departure from Anchorage. Our next stop would be Sitka, an island in Southeast Alaska, the same region as Juneau and Skagway. Sitka was the capital of the Alaska Territory until 1906, when it was moved to Juneau. Today, it’s a cruise stop like Skagway, but it’s a bigger, more functional town. Not as cute, though.

During the flight, I was astounded by the views. We soared over enormous, snowy peaks, which jutted through the clouds. Impossibly vast glaciers sprawled in every direction, abruptly ending in waterways fed by their own melted ice. Large masses of ice that had fallen away from the glacier floated in the water like ice cubes in a punch bowl. The view from thousands of feet up was incredible. On the way into Sitka itself, I had gotten my camera out and snapped some pictures. The climate there is different from Anchorage – it’s in Tongass National Forest, a temperate rain forest — and the plane descended among lush, green islands. I felt like I was going to Jurassic Park.

Shortly after we landed, we drove our Avis rental — a blue Chevy Malibu — to the downtown, touristy area, and ate at Bayview Restaurant. Unbeknownst to us, that was Bayview’s last day in business. This means that, while in Alaska, Mike and I shut down two restaurants. The difference is that Winter Thyme in Anchorage was awesome, but Sitka’s Bayview pretty much sucked. Oh, well. And hey, we were in Sitka for the very last day cruise ships were in! Seeing the elderly tourists meandering through the streets with cameras and shopping bags, seeing the seasonal workers at the ends of their ropes…it felt like I was back in Skagway, Late September, 2005 again.

We had a show that afternoon at a school whose name I can neither pronounce nor spell! It went well, but it was fifth-graders, which is a little young for our subject matter.

After the show was over, we had several hours to kill until our next show, which would actually be two shows: 7 & 8 PM at Mt Edgecumbe High School. Mike and I went out to the Whale Park and saw some Humpback Whales breaching off in the distance. I got some nice photos, but we can thank Walgreens for that fact that I don’t have them here. In addition to the whales, a sea lion swam by right in front of us, but we weren’t fast enough to take a picture, and never saw another one.

A couple hours later, we still had time to kill, so we decided to drive up Blue Lake Rd. The road goes up a mountainside, has hiking trails and scenic overlooks, and eventually terminates at the Blue Lake Reservoir, which provides water for Sitka. If we had any idea what would happen to us next, we would have gone straight back into town and stayed there…

To be continued…