Juneau, and our gold claim

It seems that at least once on these travels of ours, I have an evening writing this blog after too much fun.  Tonight is the night.

Today we explored Juneau, the capital of Alaska.  There are no roads leading to Juneau. Boat or float plane is the only way to get here.

We took a tour today, gold panning and then a salmon bake.  First off the search for gold.  The tour guarantees that everyone will find gold, so the sceptic in me right away says this is a tourist trap.  Well I was wrong.

Our tour guide, a young man the size of a grizzly bear with the beard to match takes us up to this river bed.  There are two guys there digging into the river bed and sifting the dirt, stones and fine sand.  These guys were not part of the tour.  We were shown how to pan for gold and then each person was given a pan full of dirt and pebbles that our tour collected earlier from the riverbed.

After a bit of work cleaning out the larger stones, then panning the sand slowly out, all of a sudden we actually find gold.  Probably only worth $10.00 but there was gold in each pan, different amounts.  

We were shown how to extract the shiny pieces and also separate the iron sand particles using a magnet.  Barb and I will bring home what we found!

Next, off to the salmon bake. What a delicious meal!  At this outdoor location we found a group of ducks, rather large ducks in a pond.  A bus came by and scared them and they all came running towards Barb and I. 

We also took a path up to a waterfall and Barb just has to dip her toes into the icy mountain waters.

Tonight we dined as usual.  We had met people at the table beside us on the first night when we were seated at the wrong table.  One of the fellows, Patrick, said that he always finished his meal with a shooter and I never like to see anyone drink alone so we both had a slippery nipple. You can google the ingredients.

Last night we were seated at our proper table and met other very nice people but no shooter.  So tonight I spoke with Patrick and told him that I missed having the shooter, so after dinner this evening, we joined them and on the menu tonight was "duck farts".  So good that we had 2 of them.  Oh boy.

The music theme today was the 70's, and the main area in the middle of the boat was having a 70's party and Barb and I joined in with the friends we met on our land tour and our Australian friends.  So much fun and of course we kept drinking.

Finally that party ended and Dave, Cheryl, Barb and I went up to the 13th deck outside at the front of the boat.  It was not very cold and there they were, the Northern Lights.  What a great way to finish the day.

We are off to bed now, probably going to be a rough day tomorrow but we can sleep in a bit.  Tomorrow we are taking a train trip through the Whitehorse pass and into the Yukon in Canada. It should be another amazing day.