Although Skagway was my least favorite of all the places we stopped, it’s definitely worth a quick trip. Skagway is a town that was built up mainly due to the massive gold rush in Alaska in the late 1800s, and the town definitely has an old Wild-West kind of feel to it (complete with old saloons and everything).
As for us, we enjoyed getting pictures on the old train models and buying souvenirs. Skagway was the best place for shopping because it had tourist shops that went on as far as the eye could see, it seemed.
The picture on the bottom left there shows what kind of face I make when I don’t know when Matt is going to be taking a picture. The one on the right is actually of one of the snow plows they used to hook up to the front of the trains in winter.
We went on another (shorter) hike while in Skagway, where we found the magical mushrooms that looked just like bagels (don’t they??) and a random couple by the river who obviously wanted their privacy. Don’t worry–we just took pictures around them, ha ha.
The last city we visited in Alaska was Ketchikan, which, as you can see below, is the salmon capital of the world. I wish we could have spent a lot more time here (we only spent about 5 hours) because the town had a quaint, small-town feel to it, along with lots of awesome photography opportunities.
It was here that we went kayaking for about 2.5 hours, which was my favorite excursion of the whole trip. We went in the early morning, when the lighting upon the water could not have been more beautiful. We saw starfish and seals and more salmon, and we still did not see a bear.
Dang it.
Just fyi, most of the kayaking pictures are stolen from Matt’s mom, Sherry.
Oh, and have you ever been kayaking? I thought I had, but then I realized when we started that maybe I really hadn’t. The paddling was a little tricky at first (and I got a little wet from my splashing), but after a couple hours on the water, Matt and I were fairly positive that we could have beat the other three kayaks in a [very short] race.
We should enter the Olympics next time.