A Day or Two in Juneau

There’s always the trouble with time in Juneau. Two days isn’t quite enough 3 days is too long. Remember there are 18 hours of daylight here, so you can cover a lot in a day!

When you come to Juneau, hit the Trading Post on the main drag. It’s a fascinating eclectic store, jam packed with items ranging from $1000+ hand carved totems to $20 seal skin thimbles to $1 mountain goat hooves (essentially black, pointy, hollow toenails). It’s my favorite store here followed by the Russian House with their intricately painted stacking dolls. (Peanut has one, where the smallest doll is smaller than her pinky nail!)

You can skip every other store as long as you get a bag of Kettle Corn to munch on as you side step all the other tourists. The kids’ favorite thing to do was the Mt. Roberts Tramway. It’s irresistible as you can see it from nearly everywhere in Juneau. At the top, they have great presentations in the Visitor Center; there’s a regular showing of a movie on native Tlingit culture called Seeing Daylight and we were there just in time for a narrative story of how the Killer Whale Clan came about called "Nats???? and the Killer Whales". There are easy hiking trails and breathtaking overlooks outside the Nature Center (a nice gift shop) and Spirit, a bald eagle from the Juneau Raptor Center, who lost an eye to a bullet, poor beautiful thing.

I tried really hard to prepare Tomcat and Grandma for the dazed and confused look of most Alaskans. The service industry is lacking to say the least. The power goes out and people just shrug. The nicest hotels in town often run out of hot water or have lumpy beds. With few exceptions, restaurants are mediocre at best. My favorite exception is The Hangar! People in shops are sloooow. I once tried to buy postcard stamps only to find ONE store sold them and after that, no one seemed to be able to tell me where I could mail them. The post office had closed 10 minutes before the sign on the door said it should have and that was that. Weird stuff like that happens all the time up here. So if you expect service like you get in the Lower 48, it’s best to read the sign hanging in the historic Red Dog Saloon, “If our speed or service doesn’t meet your standards, lower your standards.”