Last Day, Hooray!

This morning came very very VERY early. We had to get up at 2am so that we could get in line at 3am for the 6am ferry (who makes up these rules anyway, an insomniac?).

Here is the sign where we had to line up. We actually were the 8th vehicle there. And there were quite a variety of vehicles....cars, pickup trucks, small motor homes, large motor homes, large motor homes pulling pickup trucks or cars or jeeps.

So they check you vehicle for length, check for your reservation and then send you over to another line where they tell you to "pull up tight to the vehicle in front of you; go into the building and get your boarding pass; get back into your vehicle and wait until they open up for customs."

Glad we had our pillows in the car. Glad the heater worked as well because there was a frosty dew on everything. By 5 am they started getting things moving. We got through customs just fine and we drove onto the ferry down on the car deck, which is deck 3 (out of 6 decks), and right up into the bow. We gathered a few things to take up with us for the 6 hour sail to Ketchikan. Once we got onto the observation deck and settled into the leather sofas we waited for our 6am departure.......errr, our 7am departure.........hmmmm, our 830am departure. Oh, did I tell you that once on the Alaska Ferry we were now on Alaska time? That means we gained an extra hour. In other words, we had to do another hour all over again!! They didn't tell us what the delay was. Oh well..........

Finally we were on our way. The weather was just perfect, no rain, very little wind, and a very smooth sail. Again we were fortunate in the wildlife department. We saw dolphins, Orca whales, and a couple of times we saw Humpbacks. One even came very close to the ship. Dan filmed them on the video camera, so you will have to see them when we get back to the lower 48.

Here we are coming into the Port of Ketchikan

We finally got into Ketchikan at 130pm Alaska time. Alaska time is 3 hours behind Central time.

Looking at the ship Columbia

The picture on the left is of the Ferry Columbia from the bow of our ship, the Matanuska.

When we got off the ship we stopped for a bit of lunch and then took off running - we had so much to do. I'll tell you all about that in the next blog.

N.