When we woke up at 7:00, the ship was docked in Skagway. We booked an excursion that took us up one of the mountains to a suspension bridge. We walked across the bridge, which was much shorter and not nearly as high as I expected it to be. Under the bridge was a rushing river that would have been great for white water rafting! I stopped in the middle of the bridge and captured a few amazing photos of the river with a mountain in the distance. On the way back across the bridge, I pretended to take Alana’s picture with my iPad. Instead, I had it on video and recorded her being goofy – until she found out what I was doing! That video will be posted next week on my facebook page.

After the bridge, we went to Liarsville for a salmon bake. The salmon was awesome! Liarsville is a small settlement from the gold rush days where the newspaper reporters settled. The reported on the activity surrounding the gold rush and we were told that quite a bit of it was exaggerated, thus the name.

Our next stop was in the one-street town (tourist trap) of Skagway. If you are in the market for jewelry or t-shirts, this is the place for you! Alana wanted to go through a few gift shops and I wanted to hit up this pub I saw from the bus on our way to the bridge. I enjoyed a locally brewed IPA, pale ale, and a Scottish Wee Heavy (9.2%).  Little did I know that I was just getting started!

While walking with Alana back toward the ship, I found another bar that looked like it had ESPN on their TVs. On the ship, we have limited channels. This was the first bar I saw that had a TV in it! So I wanted to stop,  but Alana wanted to go back to the ship. Being the great couple that we are, we agreed to make each other happy and go our separate ways at that point.

I sat down and ordered a beer. I happened to sit next to a crew member from the ship I was on! He was having a beer, so I asked him if he was driving the ship. We talked for a few minutes and then I noticed this rowdy crowd to my right. They were three women singing along to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” I picked up my iPad and started filming them. Their ringleader said, “This better not end up on some weird website!” She appeared to be in her 40s, so I said, “I’m putting this on cougerlover.com!” Her husband thought that was hilarious and we both decided that it was probably a real website.

We spent the next hour or so taking group photos with the iPad (also soon to appear on facebook). When I sat back down after all that, the bartender (who was in many of the pictures) told me that my next beer has already been paid for! I thought it was either the party girls or the bartender who paid for it, but it was an older couple sitting at the end of the bar who bought it. I went to sit next to them and found out that the husband was 52 years old and he has a guitar signed by the four original members of Pink Floyd! I had one more beer (that he paid for as well) and decided it was time to stumble back to the boat. Before I left, everyone in the pictures wrote down their e-mail addresses so I could send them the pictures we took!

A good friend of mine once said to me, “you have never met a stranger, have you?” I thought I understood what that meant until today, when I truly experienced what that means.