Life Through My Eyes: May 15, 2010

Today is Day #6 of our 2010 Alaska Cruise vacation we are going to be in Ketchikan. Like most of the other ports of call that we have been to this year, we decided to fore go any excursion and just explore the city. Boy did we have a good time and we discovered a lot of cool things.

Scenery before getting to Ketchikan

The homes on each side as you enter Ketchikan, all have such unique character to the along with the boats and sea planes

Sights from the city

One business had a bunch of these fancy golf carts to rent. Most had California plates on them...go figure.

The stores on the main street were dwarfed by the size of our cruise ship

There were lots of boats docked in the harbor area

Just on the other side of this bridge was Creek Street...which mainly is comprised of many small shops

Here is one of several views of Creek Street

This house used to be a brothel back in the day

Veronica standing in front of Creek Street

All of the shops on Creek Street are built on stilts. On the day we were there, the water was calm and it was kind of overcast which gave Creek Street a real nice look for those reflection photos and photos in general

I am still trying to figure out who Veronica paid to have them put this sign our upon our arrival in the shop. Actually this was in a really cool gold shop. I am not talking about gold jewelery necessarily, although they had some but gold nuggets of all sizes and various items made from natural gold...not the gold that has been melted down and "refined" like in a gold ring

This place has tons of gold nuggets of all shapes and sizes. They sold them by the nugget, embedded in jewelery, on chains...just gold nuggets everywhere

This is a natural gold nugget that weighed over 3 ozs. Other than being cleaned up a bit, this gold nugget was as it was found when it was originally pulled out of a mine. I got to hold this beauty and buy did it ever look like it was made for me to attach it to a chain and hang from around my neck..now that's Alaska jewelery at its best. I was told that this piece would fetch approximately $7,000, a lot more than 3 refined ounces of gold. I was told that it was worth more in its original condition than if it was melted down.

This is the creek that feeds into Creek Street

Here we have carriage rides for the tourist

And here we have the more modern version of the carriage ride...the duck tour ride. This sure was one weird looking contraption.

We stopped by one of the many stores that we frequented that day and came upon the beautiful dog...friendly as could be.

I sure hope that the park ranger doesn't catch Veronica riding the wild animals

And speaking of wild animals......

I was hoping to earn a little extra money by getting people to pay to have their picture taken with this wild thing...for some reason no one approached me..actually most people headed in the other direction

Views of the homes and scenery as we were leaving Ketchikan

Below we have the Aleutian Ballad. This boat used to be one of the serveral boats fetured on the television show Deadliest Catch. Now they run an excursion out of Ketchikan called the Bering Sea Crab Fishermen's Tour. For more information about the history of the Aleutian Ballad and about their tour, please click here... History of the Aleutian Ballad

and here... Aleutian Ballads Bering Sea Crab Fishermans Tour
I have read quite a number of great thing about this tour