ERIN!!

I wrote a bit about our day with Erin on my last post, but she’s important enough to deserve an entire posting herself. Erin looks great - very happy and confident. She knows her way around Juneau quite well, and she spends a lot of time walking places (with a city of 30,000, it’s easy to walk most places or hop on the bus)

After spending the morning at Glacier Gardens with her, appreciating the upside-down tree planters, eagles, and the views of the neighboring islands and mountains, we went to lunch at Hangar on the Wharf, which is now a restaurant but was previously where Alaska Airlines was founded (before they grew and monopolized Alaska travel). The fish was straight from the sea outside our window, and I learned that if you deep fry halibut, it’s not that bad! (of course, you can deep fry almost anything, and it’s not that bad - except deep fried twinkies - those do not taste good).

We had our first sprinkles of the trip after lunch, but it never rained particularly hard. We wandered around town, and we noticed many signs in store windows promoting that they were Alaska/locally owned. More about that in a future post. While many of the stores had the same tourist chotchkies as Ketchikan, there were many more unique artisan stores with interesting and cool local products. We mostly resisted purchasing anything, since we knew we’d be back in a few weeks and would avoid carrying our purchases around Alaska. Dad decided he wanted a totem pole to go along with the giraffe he bought in South Africa, but the $6,000 price tag scared him off.

We stopped in for some Alaska Brewery Ale (brewed right down the street in Juneau) at a local bar that had a live blue grass singer, and we walked out to him singing “Folsom Prison Blues.” Erin headed off to her softball game, and we headed back to the Millennium. Home sweet home.