Tuesday, June 13 - Juneau

We are pulling in around 7:00 a.m. this morning cruising past snow covered peaks along the passageway. Heavily overcast but no rain.

There are four other cruise ships here with 3 to 5,000 people each. The Viking ship that we are on is the smallest at about 900 people. We are anchored in the harbor and will tender back and forth to the shore.

In the morning we went to the glacier gardens rainforest which is a temperate rainforest. The man who owns this has created beautiful gardens and a steep road up the mountain. One of the features is upside down trees - he has taken dead trees and stuck the base in the ground upside down with beautiful plantings on top. 
We then went to the state museum which has many artifacts of the history of Alaska. 
After lunch back at the ship we went back into Juneau just to wander around. Unlike many of the other Alaskan towns that were just staging points for the Gold Rush Juno actually had very large quantities of gold that were found in the early 1900s. There are more jewelry stores than any other kind of store in Juneau, not sure why.
While having dinner with Scott and Jeanne we saw a whale spouting and then diving - quite exciting!

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