I am taking some time off and have turned the Blog over to my colleagues Bob and Nancy Dunn of Cruising Done Right. They are currently on an Alaska tour and cruise with Princess Cruises. Today, their blog is from Juneau.
JUNEAU, Alaska — Ten interesting facts we discovered or experiences we enjoyed after disembarking for a day in this Alaska capital, home of the state government even though it is landlocked and only the second- or third-largest city, behind Anchorage and in an annual dead heat with Fairbanks…
• The Coral Princess delivered 2,000 of us to spend eight hours in Juneau, but that’s just a speck of dust in the big picture. This is a regular port for all cruise ships going to Alaska and the estimate is that one million visitors get off the ships here.
• If you’re in the woods in the popular summer cruise season, insect spray is mandatory, because you can anticipate having 40 to 50 of the little pests attacking you at any given time.
• Most tourists find their way to the Mendenhall Glacier, 20 minutes from the city. Locals tell us the reason the Mendenhall is the best-known and most-popular is that it’s the only glacier you can reach by road. There are tours from both cruise lines and local vendors, or you can just hop on a bus that will take you there and back for eight bucks each way.
• According to our fellow Princess passengers who took the ride up the funicular right where the cruise ships dock, there’s no better way to get a view of the area on a sunny day, and this was one of them.
• The largest glacier in the area, reachable by float plane, is the Taku…one of the few glaciers in the area that wasn’t named by Captain George Vancouver. It’s also one of the few glaciers in Alaska that’s not receding in these times of global warming, it’s actually advancing, and our attempts 
to find out why were pretty much futile. The best reason we heard is that the Taku Glacier has a larger source of ice, emanating high in the Juneau Icefield that stretches its 15,000 square miles all the way to Skagway.
• Hop-on, hop-off buses, always a great way to see a city, cost $20.
• Of the Princess shore excursions available, you can take a float plane to the Taku Glacier Lodge that will run you $329 and here’s what comes with the experience: 1. a stunning 25-minute flight each way that gives you an opportunity to see a glacier like you’ve never seen one (see above); 2. an all-you-can-eat salmon barbecue in a lodge with a population of nine, at least one of whom (Michael Ward) is an engaging and entertaining storyteller with an engaging and entertaining story to tell; 3. perhaps being lucky enough to lunch with a black bear who comes out of the bushes to eat the drippings from the barbecue (see below)
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• The downtown area that’s easily accessible from where cruise ships dock is a clean and interesting place to walk. If shopping’s your thing, at this time of year in Juneau and all Alaskan ports, most everything is 50% off at least.
• Juneau (pop. 35,000) was originally Harrisburg until one (Richard Harris) of the two (Joe Juneau) prospectors who found gold here fell out of favour with the residents and his partner didn’t. That led to the most often-misspelled city name in Alaska…Juno, Jueno, Jeuno, Junaeu, etc.
• It is surely the only Alaskan port where a visitor can be heard to say after seeing a van brandishing a “Fred Meyer-Costco-Walmart” sign: “Oh, we could have gone to Costco!”
To read about a trip into Alaska’s Denali National Park, go to cruisingdoneright.com
