Juneau!

We finally arrived at our first port of call today. Juneau! The capital of Alaska. We had to get up pretty early to eat breakfast because we had booked a shore excursion. It was called “History Gold Panning Adventure.” We first had a short tour of Juneau and then stopped at Gold Creek. Somewhere near where we were is where gold was discovered ay back when. Our guide went to go get our gold panning equipment, did a quick demonstration of how to pan, showed us what we were looking for and then gave us each pans. Since you are “guaranteed to find gold” we are pretty sure the first pans were “loaded.” There were quite a few flakes of gold in the first pans. Any subsequent pans had 1, maybe 2, flakes of gold. Maybe even none! Anyway, it was interesting to learn how to pan for gold. Hard work, actually, for as little as you find!

We got back on the bus and were driven back to the ship. (sentence added on Aug. 7) We ran up to the Observation Deck to send our LOI (which we had prepared last night).  We ate lunch and then went back to shore and did some shopping. We ended up getting a couple of really nice pieces! Very beautiful!

We were docked n Juneau until 7:30 pm and then we set off for Sitka.