Where We Officially End Our Land Excursion With A Flight To Juneau

And A Couple/Few Issues Crop Up

The morning was spent being transported to the airport and getting ourselves on the flight to Juneau. One of the many confusing issues – we had no information regarding the flight. We finally found out it was a commercial Alaska Air flight. Our boarding passes were already printed off, but no one asked if we had TSA pre-check. To have that added meant standing in the endless customer service line.

Fortunately, we were able to go through the priority line due to my mobility issues, and the TSA agent let us go through the screening without taking out our electronics (the major advantage of TSA pre-check).

Our group took up most of the back of the plane. Of course, our seats were pre-assigned; I ended up with a window seat, a highly unusual situation (I’m always on the aisle for easy bathroom access).

But, this gave me the opportunity to take photos of the scenery.

After we landed and picked up our luggage, we were met by American Cruise Line staff to help load the luggage onto the luggage truck.

The bus taking us to the hotel looked like a prison bus – a modified school bus that was painted black, including awkward steps to climb up. I was used to the fantastic kneeling but we had been utilizing for the past week.

We arrived at the Hotel Baranof right around lunch time. We needed to check in first, though.

I get to the check in desk, and the hotel clerk looks up our reservation, does some paperwork and brings it back for me to sign. As with all our hotel reservations nowadays, I asked if the room was an accessible room. The hotel clerk looks at me and says, “We don’t have one available right now. They are all taken”. I look back at her and say, “We requested an ADA room”. She replies, “Yes, we received the request, but we don’t have any rooms available”.

I reply, “Well, if it’s not ADA compliant, I may not be able to use the bed, because it will be too high.” She didn’t think the beds in the hotel are particularly high. So we decide that I should look at the room.

In the first room we look at, the top of the bed is at my waist. I restated that it is physically impossible for me to climb into this bed. I asked her if there a low step stool for me to use to help me climb into the bed. She makes some phone calls to discover that nowhere in this giant hotel is there a step stool I can borrow for the night.

We decide to look at a second room. Same problem.

She looks at me.

I look at her.

Finally, I say (and this is a direct quote):

“What do you expect me to do? Sleep on the floor? I cannot climb onto this bed.” {Note: sleeping on the floor has its own logistical issues. Sleeping in the lobby on a couch is starting to look attractive.}

This seems to trigger some kind of brain activity, and we go look at a third room. The bed is a couple of inches lower, and I have chance at being able to climb into it. We check in, and Andy schleps our luggage to this room. It is very small. There is no A/C (it is Juneau, after all), but it still manages to be warm and stuffy. The window is open about 5 inches. The window glass is filthy. Not good vibes.

Now it’s time for our final dinner with the whole land excursion group at Juneau’s finest restaturant.

Except – the reservation was made for the private room on the upper level, a full flight stairs above. There is no elevator, because this building was grandfathered in due to its historic value and its age. So Andy and I end up eating downstairs, alone, and not with our new friends from the last 8 days.

I express my extreme displeasure to Andrew, who kept saying, “Our goal is to provide you with the best restaurant in Juneau.” Which is lovely, except several people are in wheelchairs and walkers! Why was the upper room booked when they knew there would be people who struggle with a full flight of stairs?!? They could have booked the entire lower floor, if it was so important.

The food was indeed, fantastic. I’ll give it that. And some people did come down to visit us.

This was the desert. The white fluffy stuff was cotton candy, and the tree was pure dark chocolate. OMG. So good.

Then we had to say good-bye to Andrew. His job was over; the next day he was flying back to Anchorage.

The fun didn’t end there, though. Turns out it was extremely difficult for me to climb into this bed. I was flopping around like seal on land. We had nothing we could use as as step up – the suitcases were all too soft, squishy and unstable. Once I managed to clamber up, it took way too much work for me to arrange myself to get comfortable. Something about the sheets made me feel like I was slipping around and off the bed.

To add to this, the smoke alarm started to beep. Of course it did. Fortunately, the front desk sent someone up quickly to change the battery.

It was super stuffy in the room – there was zero air circulation. Andy opened the drapes and the window after he went to bed, which dropped the temperature considerably. There was several hours of actual darkness, but the sun came back up around 4:30, AND outside there was street cleaning trucks and garbage trucks. The noise was beyond belief. So I closed the window and the drapes.

I was able to dose off around 5:00 a.m. We were getting up at 7:00.

At 6:00 a.m. something else started beeping. It was not the smoke alarm. It was not Andy’s watch. It was certainly not my watch, because all my watch does is tell time. It was neither of our phones. We wandered around this tiny room trying to figure out where the beeping was coming from. Finally, I picked up the little alarm clock on the night stand by my side of the bed. It didn’t sound like the beeping was coming from this clock, but when I pushed down on the alarm button, the beeping stopped. Someone had set the clock for 6:00 am. and had not turned off the setting.

I think if I put all the bits and pieces together I had maybe 3 hours of sleep.

Never mind. We had to take our showers and cram all our stuff back into the suitcases, shlep them downstairs, check out and have breakfast before we boarded the buses. By the time we did all that, there was not much food left of breakfast.

{Note: before we left the room for the last time, Andy checked everywhere to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind and found: a fan. That we could have used during the night to ease the stuffiness.}

Finally, finally, we’re able to board the bus.

We are split into 3 groups to smooth out the flow of people checking in onboard.

First we went to the Alaska State Museum with exhibits on the native peoples and the history of Alaska since its purchase from Russia in 1867.

After the museum, we boarded the bus and drove over to the Brotherhood Bridge to view the Mendenhall Glacier.

At long last it was time to board the ship! Everything was seamless. Our room is huge (larger than the room at the Baranof) and this is our view from our veranda:

We go to lunch, then finally get to completely unpack. Woohoo!

Then we go to the lounge to talk to the excursion director, Scott, to ask some questions about one of the excursions. We end up talking to Ben, the cruise director. He goes through our reservations one by one and discovers some discrepancies. One he is able to fix immediately (for some reason, there is an excursion where I am signed up, but Andy is not), but there is another excursion (Fortress of the Bears) that neither one of us has a reservation, even though I know I made one. The cruise website never sent me an email showing all the excursions we booked, so other than a screen shot I took of what I was reserving before I paid it, we had nothing to show.

Turns out, this particular excursion was a “pay later” – we had no choice but to wait to pay for it once on board the ship. So we never had a paid reservation. Scott said he thinks that when the time was changed for the excursion, it kicked us out for some unknown reason. Now it is sold out and we are on a waiting list. I find myself once again expressing extreme displeasure that has no resolution.

We’re finding our experience with American Cruise Line to be a bit quirky here and there. Granted, we’re used to how Viking operates, but not sending a confirmation email listing all the excursions we reserved is just odd.

The good news: the bed is the correct height, the room is comfortable, and the food is very good.

Tomorrow: Glacier Bay