Today, Friday, we drove to a Laundromat to do our laundry. Nothing too excited there, but while our clothes where washing and drying, we went and had a breakfast bagel at a smoothie and espresso joint down the street here in Skagway. After that we drove up and down streets until we could connect to the internet on Amy’s laptop. We paid $7 for a days worth of internet connection. There we blogged and checked out Erica Quessenberry’s latest blog. We went and finished our laundry and took it back to the hotel.

With that out of the way, Amy took up a half hour of reading while Ernest walked down to the ferry dock and obtained the tickets home. We then decided to take a bike tour around some of Skagway. Our bikes took us to the Gold Rush Cemetery. We proceeded on to a trail there and found a beautiful waterfall called Reid’s Falls. Mom, those pictures are especially for Grandma Doris. We rode back into town and drove to Dyea, a ghost town 9 miles outside Skagway. All that is left of the town is ruins of a warehouse and a false front of a real estate company’s building. See the pictures in the photo album on the right.

As we were heading back down the road, we spotted a sign for Slide Cemetery. A small walk down a path found us at the cemetery where the victims of the April 3, 1898 snow slide of were buried. In all, the sign said there were 70 known victims. The cemetery held a large majority of them.

Our next adventure and history chase was the Chilkoot Trail. We only hiked up about 5 minutes one way, just to see what the trail is like. Our ultimate goal is to one day hike the entire trail, possibly even making it to Dawson City. But baby steps…

Back in town, we stopped at the first super market we came to, although we wouldn’t call it “super”. It was very small, and pretty expensive. We bought some more orange juice (stepping out of our comfort zone, we upgraded to pineapple-orange juice), milk for cereal on the ferry, and two huge ice cream sandwiches made with tollhouse cookies. No one needs to know each one was 520 calories. They were so good on such a hot, sunny day!

Our real goal in finding a market was ice. We needed two bags of ice to fill the cooler for our three day trip back to Bellingham on the ferry. But the market was out of ice, so we drove around, searching for an ice box outside of a store, but to no avail. We ended up taking advantage of the hotel’s ice machine (ssshhh… don’t tell!) and filled our cooler. We then walked around town and shopped for Christmas gifts. As we thought about dinner, we realized that the ice cream cookie sandwich would probably hold us over until morning. It was decided not to search for food.

Let us just say the mountains are spectacular over here in Skagway area! We highly recommend if anyone wants a great place to relax and have some fun with picture taking, this is the place to do just that! Another on our list of recommendations would be the Seward area. Same kind of spectacular scenery and some fun with history exploration. The hiking is abundant as well.
We leave on Saturday morning on the ferry for Bellingham. We’ll be at sea for three days, and dock on Tuesday morning. Our next blog will most likely be at home on Tuesday. We have very much enjoyed our trip, and consider it the most fantastic trip we have ever been on. We do plan on coming back soon (can’t say how soon) as there is still much more to see and do. Next time we hope there will be many others coming with us! Have a great weekend everyone!