Day Two

The first thing in the morning I rolled over and looked out the window, and there was the ocean.  

We got up and went out to the street to catch "The Bus."  Turns out the bus goes through all the neighborhoods on the way to downtown, so it took us a long time to get downtown to try to find the location for our sea kayaking tour. We made it.

It was a pretty big deal to just get into the kayaks and receive our beginners instruction to kayaking but we made it out of the harbor and up Creek Street where we saw seals playing in the water and they would come very close to our sea kayak.  There were four kayaks in our group and we went across the ocean to a little island, up along the coastline.  There were two people in each kayak and I was the captain and did the steering for our kayak. We did a lot of zigging and zagging.

We saw a magnificent bald eagle up in a tree, schools of herring right under our kayak, and a mother deer and her two fawn. 

We were pretty tired after the kayaking, so we went to the Tongass Museum in downtown Ketchikan.  It was near Creek street which was an area of Ketchikan that was the red light district in 1903.  The city Council ordered the bordellos to move across the creek from the townsite.  Now there are a lot of unique shops.  

We went to the Burger Queen fast food place for a halibut sandwich, the best thing we've eaten on the trip so far.

We went to the Discovery Center, operated by the forest service that was informative about Tongass National Forest, its wildlife and geography.

The great Alaskan lumberjack show was an outdoor show with lumberjacks throwing axes and using chainsaws to entertain the audience.

The local movie theater was showing Despicable Me 2, so we went to that.  A great discovery that saved us a lot of time was the free Walmart shuttle that took us from the docks where the cruise ships were back to our hotel which is near Walmart.